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poultry, and other supplies. By early December when Webb and Shepherdson left, they had built a long corrugated
iron store shed, in one end of which the Chaselings were to live for the first two years.
Chaseling established and maintained relations of friendship and mutual respect with the Aboriginal people
that came to visit the mission station. Among them was Wonggu from the Caledon/Blue Mud Bay area, who came
in December and was still at Yirrkala in August 1936 when Donald Thomson brought Wonggu’s three sons back
from Fannie Bay, where they had served two years of their 20 year sentences for the killing of the Japanese at
Caledon Bay. Chaseling made several journeys on foot and by boat to visit groups living away from the mission,
sometimes in response to reports of fighting. He declared the mission area to be a ‘zone of peace’ and did all he
could to encourage the men to give up their feuding. As well as preaching the Christian Gospel he worked to teach
the people skills of building and gardening, but otherwise the policy was to respect their culture and interfere as
little as possible with their traditional way of life. He worked at mastering the local language and made detailed
notes of what he saw and heard, which later provided the basis for his booklet Children of Arnhem Land (1951)
and his account of the life and customs of the people of north-east Arnhem Land, Yulengor, Nomads of Arnhem
Land (1957).
After two years the Chaselings went on leave and in 1938 Harold Thornell who took over responsibility for the
development of the garden and farm work, expanding the cultivated area to more than four hectares, joined them
at Yirrkala. Lilian Chaseling began to teach the children at Yirrkala and in 1939 had 76 in school. When called
upon, Chaseling did what he could to treat illness and injuries, but he also made a study of traditional treatments.
He had his own problems, being taken by air to Darwin with appendicitis in 1939, and a year later suffering burns
and nearly drowning after a fire broke out on the motor launch on the way to Cape Arnhem.
The Chaselings left Yirrkala on furlough in September 1941. After war broke out in the Pacific and families were
being evacuated from the Arnhem Land missions, Chaseling submitted his resignation from the North Australia
District. By then the Chaselings had two young children, both born in Darwin hospital.
Chaseling was posted to Raymond Terrace, New South Wales, but after two years he returned to Darwin as an
army chaplain. He was there when the war moved northward and the military bases in Arnhem Land were being
abandoned and was instrumental in persuading the authorities to make surplus stores and equipment available to
the mission communities at minimal cost.
After the war Chaseling was appointed to the Bankstown Circuit and served there for three years before moving
to Queensland as State Secretary for Overseas Missions. He travelled throughout the state, making a yearly visit
to each circuit in a successful effort to win increased support for the work of the missions. In 1957 he moved to
Sydney to work with Cecil Gribble as Secretary for Promotion and Literature and over the next eight years wrote
tirelessly for the periodicals Missionary Review and Friends, the Children’s Missionary Paper. In 1963 he was
appointed to the Hornsby Circuit and was Financial Secretary of Sydney North District, until posted to Tamworth
as Chairman of the Northern Inland District (1965). After two years there, Chaseling returned to Sydney and
served at the Eastwood Circuit until he retired in 1970.
The Chaselings then moved to Mooney Mooney on the Hawkesbury, where Wilbur, as energetic as ever,
continued to exercise his skills as a carpenter and handyman, and for some years worked as a toll collector on
the Pacific Highway. In 1970 he was called upon to give evidence in the Gove Land Rights Case, being (in the
words of Mr Justice Blackburn), probably ‘the first white man to make a systematic attempt to record the clan
linkages with particular land, by direct communication, made on the subject land itself, with aboriginals actually
living there’ and having still in his possession the notebooks in which he made his field notes. After Lilian died in
May 1980, Chaseling moved to the Northaven Retirement complex at Turramurra, where he died suddenly of heart
failure on 10 July 1989, survived by his daughter and son.
W Chaseling, Yulengor, 1957; H Kirby and I Chaseling, family information; H Thornell, A Bridge over Time, 1966; M Mackenzie, Mission to
Arnhem land, 1976.
JEREMY LONG, Vol 3.
CHEWINGS, CHARLES (1859–1937), geologist and anthropologist, was born on 16 April 1859 at Woorkongoree
Station, near Burra, South Australia, third son of John Chewings, pastoralist and his wife Sarah, nee Wall. Educated
by tutor and at Prince Alfred College, Chewings also received a thorough practical training from his father who had
begun life as a teamster in South Australia in 1840 and ultimately owned three sheep stations. His father’s death
in 1879 left his family well to do.
In 1881 Chewings set out alone from Beltana with two camels to explore the possibility of establishing
a cattle-run in the western MacDonnell Ranges. Next year he toured England, Europe and America. In 1883
he travelled from Murat Bay to the Warburton Range to assess the area’s pastoral possibilities. Impressed with
the efficiency of camels in the interior, in 1884 Chewings sailed to India from where he an his partners shipped
nearly 300 of them to Port Augusta to open a camel transport service based on Hergott Springs (Marree), by then
the rail-head.
Chewings spent most of 1885 further exploring by camel the western MacDonnell and associated ranges and
the tributaries of the Finke River, travelling in all more than 8 000 kilometres and mapping the country he traversed.
Accounts of his three inland journeys appeared in the Adelaide Observer and that of the third was published in
1886 as a booklet, The Sources of the Finke River, with a large map. Among the features that he mapped and
named were the Chapple Range and Mount Chapple, after his old headmaster F Chapple, and the Walker River, on
which he and his partners established Tempe Downs cattle station in 1885. Convinced of the interior’s excellent
pastoral prospects, Chewings became a strong advocate for a railway to facilitate settlement. On 8 February 1887