Pretty Little Lines – Jimmie Barker Sound Pioneer

In 1909, aged nine Jimmie Barker found himself at ‘Milroy,’ a sheep station with a rich history of Aboriginal cultural contact. Jimmie and his younger brother Billy had moved across from Mundiwa, an Aboriginal reservation on the Culgoa River, after their mother Maggie found employment here.

The move was part of a broader movement of Aboriginal people in northwest NSW which lasted from 1907 to the 1930s. In Jimmie’s unpublished autobiography Days Night and Day, he recalls this whirlpool of displacement, describing how people moved from “town to town” like never before.

As their time at Mundiwa drew to a close, Jimmie and Billy marked trees with a Dhowin (tomahawk) and buried personal artefacts beneath them in “old style pickle bottles”.

Jimmie describes his dread at the prospect of moving away from Mundiwa – a dread born of the deep sense of family and community he’d experienced at the reservation and his fear of separation from the “old people”.

Jimmie speaks of seeking out, from a very young age, the company and mentorship of the “old people” – a pre-contact Muruwari generation born decades prior to settlement of the area. Through these elders, Jimmie immersed himself in Muruwari cultural practices he refers to as the “old ways” – first at Mundiwa, then at Milroy Station and later at Brewarrina Mission Station.

Mundiwa eventually dissolved. This was due to cultural factors rather than colonial or settler pressures; the death of community leader Jimmy Kerrigan meant those remaining at the reservation must leave.

Despite his misgivings about the move to Milroy, Jimmie was resilient and eventually came to enjoy life at the station. In fact, he described 1909 as “a wonderful year”.

Official records paint the experience of Aboriginal staff at Milroy as one of typical servitude. But Indigenous history reveals Milroy as a cultural hub.

The station is also the purported birthplace of Muruwari woman Emily Horneville, another great source of Muruwari language and cultural knowledge.

Jimmie took pleasure in some domestic duties at Milroy, particularly maintaining the garden of Mrs Armstrong, the mistress of the station. But by his account he and Billy enjoyed a level of freedom, which gave rise to an intense period of technological experimentation.

Jimmie’s first recorded experiment took place at Mundiwa; it involved half-filling a Holbrook sauce bottle with water and placing it on a fire. In Days Night and Day he describes the explosion and the beating that he received from his mother.

Undeterred, Jimmie established what he called his “laboratory,” a workshop of sorts. Key to this was his friendship with the station’s resident blacksmith Tommy, and perhaps more importantly a rubbish dump from which he drew components for his mechanical experiments.

Jimmie Barker’s early life coincided with some of the most rapid technological development in human history. The world was being transformed by the internal combustion engine, electricity and telecommunications.

Simultaneously, Jimmie began devising some of the same technologies being developed elsewhere, including sound recording and steam power. His inventions and discoveries were derived independently – as Jimmie states, “these were my ideas”.

Jimmie Barker’s genius lies not just in his experiments and inventions, but in his ability to integrate traditional Indigenous knowledge when engaging with new technologies.

For example, Jimmie details the roll-out of telephone and telegraph infrastructure to Northwest NSW. He meticulously describes mile upon mile of wiring extending from post offices to station homesteads, shearing sheds and other station buildings. These incisive descriptions sit alongside expositions of traditional Muruwari modes of telepathic communication such as Goorungu, a Muruwari word meaning “like (or by) string”.

Jimmie recalls camping trips with the “old people” where a member of the party, would know a visitor was about to arrive, without having been forewarned. In another instance, he tells how one of the “old people” had a premonition of trouble at home. The camping trip was cut short and the group returned to find that an old woman at Brewarrina Mission, known to everyone as “Granny”, had died. “Granny” is also mentioned by Jimmie, in relation to his first experience of tobacco smoking at Mundiwa.

An old disused water tank lying on its side was a playhouse for Jimmie and Billy in their early days at Milroy station. Jimmie explains how an experience with song and vibration in this tank with his brother Billy set off a line of experiments that would culminate in Jimmie inventing, independent of any exterior knowledge, a form of sound recording using the same principle as wax cylinder technology.

This was arguably the most significant of Jimmie Barker’s innovations, and a sense of play is clearly at work in the epiphany that gives rise to it. 

Jimmie notices that his brother’s singing excites the iron base of the tank (now positioned vertically) into vibration. He also notices the displacement of particles in reaction to this excitation. In the experiments that follow, Jimmie explores the link between vibration, displacement and inscription and sets about, in the words of Professor Samantha Bennett, “writing sound.”

A second experiment involves a scaled-down version of the water tank: a kerosene tin. In this smaller resonating chamber, mud is introduced as the medium for inscription, fulfilling a similar function to the wax paper used in in Edison and Victor recorders of that era.

In the next phase of experimentation, Jimmie adds a spindle from an old clock and thus begins to mechanise his design. A cake tin lid is then added to the spindle and filled with wax by melting down his mother’s candles. In this third iteration, a coffee tin replaces the kerosene tin and the “pretty marks” are registered in wax rather than mud. As Samantha Bennett describes it, Jimmie Barker “wants to see if he can see sound and he wants to see if he can record it somehow … and capture it”.

In the fourth experiment, Jimmie introduces weights and string to the cake tin lid to stabilise it and successfully record sound.

Jimmie’s machine differs from the Edison and Victor recorders in that the recording medium is a disc or diaphragm rather than a cylinder. But both designs operate on the same principle. Samantha Bennett identifies this divergence as confirmation that Jimmie hadn’t seen these recorders and was operating independently. Why produce a design like this when it would have been far easier to try replicating a cylindrical design using a branch or a post?

All other available evidence confirms Jimmie’s claim to have been operating independently. Roy Barker noted recently “you can’t make this stuff up? You had to have done it.” These experiments to produce a means of recording sound fit the pattern of his other experiments (steam, electricity, munitions etc.), which nearly all seek to harness energy in some way. Jimmie explores an idea from first principles, often in response to an observation or encounter with natural phenomena.

In the next discussion on the same recording, Jimmie Barker tells another story of technological prophecy. On a hot day late in 1909, Jimmie was gathering pine gum (rosin) from beneath the trees. He describes resting in the heat under a beautiful tree and drifting off to sleep.

He recalls dreaming of being in a green field in a “different land.” The field was strewn with the smouldering ruins of unfamiliar machinery and a “cigar shaped” flying machine with two propellers approached from a great distance. The description, right down to the undercarriage in which two men were standing, is unmistakably a zeppelin-like aircraft.

Jimmie recalls discussing the dream with his mother Maggie who, as always, was concerned for his safety. She warned him about being abducted by spirits in remote places.

Jimmie set about building a miniature model of the aircraft from his dream, complete with propellers, and getting it to fly in a circle “on its own.” He and Billy rigged up an apparatus to propel the craft along an aerial wire attached to a fence. It was an enduring source of fun, particularly for Billy. They buried it there at Milroy just prior to leaving for Brewarrina Mission in 1912.

Jimmie encounters the image from his “queer dream” seven years later, in an edition of the Sydney Mail. Under the headline “Zeppelin Raid on England: Numerous Casualties” a photograph of a zeppelin over an airfield accompanies a report of a German air raid on the north of England.

Maybe all Jimmie Barker’s childhood inventions and innovations were technological prophecies of a sort – either after or before the fact. As Jimmie states, “In my early days when I was very small I could see things that were coming. I had different views to the others.”

How do we attempt to track the evolution in Jimmie Barker’s fascination with light and electricity? Maybe it begins with the Guwiyn guwi or “mysterious lights”. Jimmie describes in detail his encounters with these “spirit lights,” a phenomenon common to many traditional Aboriginal cultures. These luminescent, otherworldly lights appeared to Jimmie variously in a dry lagoon, rising up out of rabbit burrows and on a lonely track during a puncture repair on a postal run from Goodooga to Weilmoringle. On one occasion, armed with a shotgun and a 32-calibre rifle, Jimmie considered opening fire on the light. In all cases the lights maintained a more-or-less constant distance from him, eluding his approaches. Jimmie describes them as orb-like, about as big as a football and notes they didn’t cast shadows.

Jimmie Barker’s account of the Guwiyn guwi, like that of the Guranggu is phenomenological. In these and other discussions of the spirit realm, as it was manifest in Muruwari traditional culture, Jimmie is measured, forensic and analytical. Jimmie’s grandson Roy Barker explains that such phenomena would have existed in the surface of everyday life for the Muruwari people. Perhaps it’s for this reason that Jimmie’s childhood accounts for such a large proportion of his life story, as reflected in Days Night and Day and The Two Worlds of Jimmie Barker. The direct line with the generation of “pre-contact” Muruwari provided a window into this lived reality.

The Guwiyn guwi were well known in Muruwari culture. Jimmie likely learnt of them from the “old people,” years before his first sighting in 1910 from the floor of a horse-drawn buggy where he was stretched out at the feet of the “three men” he was travelling with by night.

Jimmie describes how, in his little house on the mission, a room was given over to the entertainment and education of children. Jimmie had a projector for “a bit of a picture show,” a blackboard for literacy and numeracy and a large school clock for time-telling. Jimmie also had a phonograph which, in keeping with the Edison and Victor machines of the day, could record sound directly onto wax cylinders. In this room, Jimmie began recording residents of the Mission singing traditional songs and language. Among them were a generation of Muruwari and Ngemba people, then aged in their 80’s, who would have known pre-settlement life in the area. Clyde Marshall – King Clyde of the Barwon Blacks – was among them. He was a Muruwari man who had been given King Plate status.