Forgotten Country: A Short History of Central Australia [1 ed.] 9781922669766, 9781925588835

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Alan Powell is Emeritus Professor of History at Charles Darwin University, Darwin. He has taught, researched and written extensively on north Australian and World War II History. His book Northern Voyagers won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for History in 2011 and was awarded the Northern Territory Chief Minister’s Book of the Year Award in the following year.

Australian Scholarly

© Alan Powell 2018 First published 2018 by Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd 7 Lt Lothian St Nth, North Melbourne, Vic 3051 Tel: 03 9329 6963 / Fax: 03 9329 5452 [email protected] / www.scholarly.info ISBN 978-1-925588-83-5 All Rights Reserved Cover design: Wayne Saunders Cover photo: Haasts Bluff from Mukarti, Jennifer McFarland

Contents

Maps vi Preface ix Abbreviations xi 1: In the Beginning 1 2: Entrepreneurs and Explorers 9 3: Recession and Rebuilding: 1880s–1910 40 4: War and Peace and the Commonwealth 59 5: World War II: The Military and the Administration 86 6: World War II and the Aborigines 111 7: Post-war Progress 126 Conclusion: Quo Vadis? 145 Notes 150 Bibliography 170 Index 176

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South Australia, 1863–1911, Alan Powell

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Aboriginal tribal boundaries in Centralia, N.B. Tindale, AIATSIS, common usage, redrawn by CDU Uniprint

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Central Australia: modern settlements and transport links, Alan Powell

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Preface

Long ago, when I published the first edition of my short history of the Northern Territory, I called it Far Country, not because of its geographical distance from the main centres of Australian population but because it was so far removed from their consciousness. It was the back of beyond, to be spared an occasional recognition of its presence, but not to think of living there. Yet over the last forty years of reading, teaching, researching and writing Northern Territory history I have realised that this section of Australia consists of two distinct geographical and cultural parts: on the one hand, the ‘far country’ of the riverine northwest, the Barkly Tableland and the coastal plains surrounding the capital city, Darwin; and, on the other, the bold ranges, the deserts and semi-deserts on all sides of Alice Springs, fifteen hundred kilometres away – ‘Forgotten Country’; again, not in distance, but since South Australia relinquished it to the Commonwealth in 1911, the land even further from the thoughts of governments based in Darwin and far-off Canberra. Its whole history during this time bears witness to distant – and often well-meant but uncomprehending – control. But Central Australia’s history is colourful indeed, filled with explorers, miners, cattlemen, telegraph builders and operators and outright dreamers – and some of the most studied Aboriginal tribes in Australia. The literature about them, mainly in the form of Territory ‘yarns’ and earnest Anthropology tomes is immense; and in a short history such as this the main question has been, not what to include, but what to leave out; and that means most of it. I trust I have included enough to emphasise the critical factors underlying its historical

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evolution; and to make it clear that it is the last frontier in the continuing saga of black/white relations in Australia; the last chance probably to preserve the living structures of traditional Aboriginal culture in partnership with whites. Yet it seems that the crushing weight of our neo-liberal democratic culture in slowly grinding down the Dreaming will continue relentlessly, as it has in other parts of Australia. In that regard, Central Australia will again be Australia’s ‘forgotten’ country. As always, I am deeply grateful for the skilled and patient attention afforded me by the staffs of the State Library of South Australia, the National Archives of Australia (Darwin and Canberra branches), Emily Pritchard and her colleagues at the Northern Territory Archives, Northern Territory Library and Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory; and to the Library and Uniprint at Charles Darwin University. I particularly appreciate the work of my wife, Jan as transcriber and perceptive critic, the expert Centralian photography of Jennifer McFarland and the eternal sangfroid of Nick Walker as publisher. There are many ways of spelling Aboriginal tribal names. Those used in this book are extracted from the maps of Norman B Tindale and AIATSIS – and sometimes from common usage, e.g. ‘Alyawarr’ as a noun and ‘Alyawarra’ as an adjective.

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Abbreviations

7MD Seventh Military District ABC Australian Broadcasting Company AIATSIS Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies AIM Australian Inland Mission AMP Australian Mutual Provident [Society] ANU Australian National University ARP Air Raids Precautions ASP Australian Scholarly Publishing AWAS Australian Women’s Army Service AWC Allied Works Council AWM Australian War Memorial BCPC Barrow’s Creek Pastoral Company CAC Civil Alien Corps CAMT Central Australian Motor Transport Column CATA Central Australian Tourist Association CAYLUS Central Australian Youth Link Up Service CCC Civil Construction Corps CDU Charles Darwin University CLC Central Land Council CPD Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates DMR Department of Main Roads [NSW] DOMF Darwin Overland Maintenance Force ELSA Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Australia GSO General Staff Officer HSNT Historical Society of the Northern Territory IAD Institute of Aboriginal Development

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LHQ MAGNT MMA MUP NAA NAP NAR NARU NAV NAWU NCO NSW NT NTAS NTDB NTDL NTL NTPLA NTRS NTU OT PLIC RAAF RSL SA SAPP SLSA TAA UK UNE UQP USAFIA UWA WLPA

Land Headquarters Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory MacRobertson Miller Airlines Melbourne University Press National Archives of Australia North Australia Party North Australia Railway North Australia Research Unit [of ANU] National Archives Victoria North Australian Workers’ Union Non-commissioned Officer New South Wales Northern Territory Northern Territory Archives Service Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography Northern Territory Development League Northern Territory Library Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees Association Northern Territory Records Service Northern Territory University Overland Telegraph Pastoral Leases Investigation Committee Royal Australian Air Force Returned Services league South Australia South Australian Parliamentary Papers State Library of South Australia Trans Australia Airlines United Kingdom University of New England University of Queensland Press United States Army Forces in Australia University of Western Australia Willowrie Land and Pastoral Association

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Chapter 1

In the Beginning

How can I define the boundaries of Central Australia? Not by desert alone. The arid lands of the continent stretch far beyond the political boundaries of the ‘Red Centre’, the southern part of the Northern Territory. But these boundaries encompass the wild beauty of the MacDonnell Ranges and the town of Alice Springs set squarely into its heart; and to widen the scope of this story beyond the bounds of the Northern Territory would complicate immensely its known history after the coming of the white man. So the political boundaries it shall be; but they, as I have said elsewhere were ‘the last and least logical of the land divisions imposed by nineteenth-century Britons – and British – Australians, a land left over when they had taken what they wanted of Australia.’1 From 1825, New South Wales had its western boundary arbitrarily placed at 129 degrees E longitude, which within four years became the Western Australia/ NSW border. Until 1834 the whole of the Australian mainland remained divided between those two colonies until the British Parliament legislated to create the colony of South Australia. South Australia’s eastern boundary was judicially placed at 141 degrees E longitude between Adelaide and the new settlement of Port Phillip. Oddly, South Australia’s western boundary was placed, not at the Western Australian border but 3 degrees of longitude east of it and not until 1861 did the South Australians succeed in persuading the Imperial Government to close that gap. The northern boundary was simply placed in the middle of the continent, along 1

the parallel of 26 degrees S latitude – and this line was later to form the southern boundary of Central Australia. As I have remarked ‘no white man had ever seen any part of that boundary and whether it ran over mountains, or plains or the fabled inland sea, no-one knew. It was the most arbitrary of all arbitrary borderlines’.2 In 1862, the new colony of Queensland took advantage of British Colonial Office uncertainty to obtain a new western border at 138 degrees E longitude which took in the supposedly rich Plains of Promise and Sweer’s Island, site of a projected deep-water port in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Thus, the east, west and south limits of Central Australia were formed. But where lies the boundary between Central Australia and the northern part of the Northern Territory? Here there are two arbitrary political decisions to be considered. Neither is completely satisfactory. In January 1926 the Commonwealth Parliament divided the Northern Territory into two parts, Central Australia and Northern Australia, each with a Government Resident and elected advisory council. The boundary between them was placed at the parallel of 20 degrees S latitude. This line though, runs a few kilometres south of Tennant Creek, a town that did not exist at this time; and, since its inception a few years later it has always been considered part of Central Australia; and its influence on stations developed in the Central Australian vicinity right up to Lake Nash on the Queensland border is well seen (as will be noted). The history of Tennant Creek has to be included in this work. Conversely, while it is within the area formally allocated more recently to the domain of the Central Land Council, not that of the northern body, the north-western area of Wave Hill is not geographically part of Central Australia. It relates to the watershed of the (northern) Victoria River area and so is considered to be beyond the scope of this history: Perhaps Barrow Creek, also part of the Central Land Council’s area,3 is a better boundary for the purpose because its historical links are to the south far more than the north. The long Stuart Highway, which passes through both towns gives only gradual indication of vegetational change; just a move from the sclerophyll forest of the tropical

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north, slowly thinning into the fearsome scrub of Dunmarra until the far western influence of the Barkly Tableland grasslands is felt in the widening vistas as the mesas of Barrow Creek approach, followed by the granite boulders of the Devil’s Marbles and the thick mulga scrub nearing Alice Springs. So the parallel of 20 degrees S plus a bump to the north covering Tennant Creek defines the Central Australia of this book; and perhaps Central Australia itself can be encompassed by the shorter term ‘Centralia’. This area is huge; almost half of the Northern Territory’s 1.35 million square kilometres lie within its borders. Most of it is part of the great shield zone of western Australia, one of the world’s most ancient and stable areas. Many of the older cherts, quartzites and sandstones of the Centre have been relatively undisturbed for five hundred million years. Much of the old surface drowned beneath ancient seas, to rise again capped with the hardened sediments, sandstones, shales, conglomerates. The raw force of molten magma from the earth’s interior thrust upwards through weaknesses in the surface rock, scouring, metamorphosing to form deposits of gold, silver, lead, copper, zinc, in a great arc southwest into the deserts, then curving east through Centralia and petering out near the Queensland border. Nearby is the mineralised outlier of Tennant Creek, and in the southwest corner of the Territory lie deposits of a different kind – oil and gas – trapped in the thick strata of the Amadeus basin. All these resources were unknown to and unwanted by the first Australians, but there was another resource, known to them and all later-comers, which all sojourners and travellers in this region needed for survival. The Great Artesian Basin of western Queensland underlies the south-eastern corner of Centralia and adjoining aquifers extend west and northwest through the dry interior of the continent. Where this ground water reached the surface or came close enough to be dug for in the sand of dry river beds, it sustained human beings. For this land is a desert, by the usual definition i.e. an annual rainfall of less than 25 mm. But, as Charles Laseron has remarked:

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… accepted rules must go by the board in this strange world. The country … has a rich flora … Nor is it uninhabited; for there are many varieties of birds and other animals … There are even cattle stations in these parts where there are permanent waterholes.4 The South Australia/Queensland/Northern Territory border (called ‘Poeppel’s Corner’ after the South Australian Surveyor General, Augustus Poeppel, who first marked it in 1880) is dry indeed, being squarely within the Simpson Desert, which stretches its long series of southeast to northwest sand dunes beyond this point and into the far southeast corner of Centralia; and the similar line of dunes near the Lake Eyre Basin on the border of South Australia/ Western Australia/Northern Territory (known as ‘Surveyor-Generals’ Corner’ in recognition of the three state surveyors-general who met there and marked the point in 1968)5 is even drier.6 Yet vegetation flourishes in the valleys between the dunes and moving dunes are rare. There are some, like the high dunes to be crossed by 4WD vehicles on the way to Chambers Pillar, the priapic rock formation in the extreme south of Central Australia: You rush madly up the steep dune slope and flip over the top, desperately hoping nothing is trying to do the same from the other side of the one-way track. That’s why seasoned travellers carry a long aerial! But, amazingly, almost the whole area is vegetated. The great majority of the dunes, formed by constant winds, are being stabilised by mulga, saltbush, bluebush, cottonbush, native fuschias and other arid zone Acacias, Eromophila and Angiosperm plants, growing densely in the valleys and creeping upwards towards the dune summits. Some of the most infertile lands, including the Tanami Desert that blocks the way from Centralia to Western Australia, are colonised by spinifex hummock-forming grass; softly grey and lovely to look at, hell to walk through because of the needle-like stems that repel intruders and quite impossible to camp upon. Open grasslands, dense mulga scrub and along the creek beds, ghost gums, snappy gum and acacia species are prominent. The

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whole impression is that of life rather than bare desert sands – and after the rare rains that swoop in from the Southern Ocean or from spent cyclones in the north, there’s a riot of wildflowers and grasses, verdant beyond measure. All this vegetation shelters multiple species of native wildlife; kangaroos, wallabies, rodent species, bats, quolls and a wide variety of small reptiles, plus up to 200 kinds of birds.7 This allowed the presence of human hunter-gatherers; the Aborigines. All this is contained in an environment of vast, sweeping plains; but the glory of Centralia lies in its uplands; the sandstone mass of Uluru, the curious domes of the Olgas and the high mesa of Mt Connor in the southwest; the complex series of ranges, Petermann, MacDonnell, Krichauff, Waterhouse, Chewings and others which stand above the plains; five thousand feet high in the case of Mt Liebig at the western end of the MacDonnells and only slightly less for Mt Sonder nearby; a hard scramble along a steep gradient ridge of shattered rock brings you to the top at 4417 feet; and when you stand there, or walk the summit ridges of the Larapinta Track under the limitless blue sky of a winter morning, you can feel that you are treading on the spine of Australia. Conventional wisdom is that the ancestors of the Aborigines entered the continent during the known period of polar ice sheets’ advancement about 60,000 years ago across the land bridge that connected Australia with New Guinea – and that the rising seas of the succeeding interglacial period then isolated them from outside human contact until recent years.8 The Aborigines themselves might dispute this, since there is no indication of time in the oral tradition; the Dreamtime legends have a tinge of timelessness about them that Europeans, prisoners of time, find hard to accept; and arguments about the route of entry and the spread of the people across the whole of the Australian continent continue, as do those relating to ‘firestick farming’ as a land management process.9 These and other major questions about Aboriginal occupation of the Australian continent are never likely to be resolved since they belong to the field of prehistory. There

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are no written records for all the vast period before European incursion. But one thing is certain: The Aborigines found a way of survival, of living with the land, that continued for far, far longer than any other known society on earth. It is logical to assume that the coastal areas of the continent, being the most accessible and friendly to human life, were the first lands to be settled; and this is borne out by thermoluminescence data published in 1990 for the east Arnhem Land site of Malakunanja and the nearby Nauwalabila site; they show an occupation date of 50–60,000 years ago.10 These dates have caused controversy. If correct, there is, as Josephine Flood has said, ‘every reason to believe that these two rock shelters contain evidence of the earliest human occupation yet found in Australia’.11 Yet, as Flood also notes, the first indication that Centralia was inhabited came with Michael Smith’s discovery of 22,000-year-old occupation in the Puritjarra rock shelter in the Northern Territory, 320 km west of Alice Springs. Discoveries at nearby Thomson Reservoir may, if substantiated, push this date back to 30,000 years.12 This colonisation seems to have been intermittent and no doubt dependant on climate which gradually became more arid, on the permanent springs, rock reservoirs and dry riverbed soakages of the nearby ranges. We have no idea of how and why the modern pattern of tribal distribution came about; nor of numbers, though it is likely that they were much lower than those of the north coast, so richly packed with Aboriginal food sources and fresh water. Hiatt estimated that the Gidjingali of Arnhem Land carried a population close to one person per square kilometre, whereas Meggitt calculated the Walpiri of the Tanami Desert to occupy one person per 90 square kilometres. And the size of their tribal domain differed drastically too; a few hundred square kilometres for the Gidjingali; nearly 140,000 square kilometres for the Walpiri.13 They needed all of it. In the grim words of John Mulvaney, ‘in a nomadic society, it is the leanest season which is the true gauge of the capacity of the country to sustain a population’.14 Central Australia is a land of many lean seasons.

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Cruel, brutal, starkly beautiful in the bright light of early morning and the soft evening light, Centralia was home for the tribespeople of the arid lands, yet all of it provided for a harsh existence, except possibly the Simpson Desert in the far southeast corner. It was to be even more cruel to the white invaders who came to make a living from it and it was the last region of Australia to feel the full impact of European civilisation on the First Australians of the region; dispossession, massacre, despair, death. But for several reasons, the impact of this cycle was not so severe as in densely settled parts of Australia. One reason was the lateness of that impact, which carried over into times when southern conscience began to influence northern events. Another cogent reason was mutual dependence of Centralian cattlemen and the Aborigines as a labour force – a very unequal relationship to be sure, but one that enabled these people to stay on their lands and hold together the cohesive tribal traditions. They were never drowned by the tide of Europeans who flowed over them. Again, they were never numerous and their lands were vast, unlike the densely settled tribespeople of the north and east coasts. Centralia is probably the most intense area in Australia for the ongoing interaction of black and white. Much of the rest of Australia hardly knows real interaction exists. Anthropologist Jennifer McFarland of CAYLUS defines 24 language groups amongst Centralian Aborigines.15 These can be reduced to Aranda (Arrente and sub-groups), Luritja, Walpiri, Alyawarra, Warramungu, Amnatjerre and Kaytitja, with some impact from the mostly South Australian Pitjantjara of the Petermann Ranges and the Gurindji of the north. These are the major language groups according to AIATSIS16 (see Map). And, as Norman Tindale pointed out after ten years spent studying the desert tribes of Central Australia: There are seeming incoherencies imposed on tribal aggregation by the long and frequent dispersal of hordes and single families over a wide area. This dispersal alternates with irregularly occurring

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temporary contacts with other units of the tribe brought about by the necessity for finding succor at common watering places wherever the drying up of wells, etc, forces small parties to diverge from their normal beats. On the border of tribal areas there may be a temporary mingling of tribes. This occasional necessity for making common cause with others in obtaining water and food supplies tends to develop or keep alive the widespread community of language, modes of living and customs among the Desert tribes.17 Such was the pattern of life before the coming of the white man; and all the long, long centuries that came before from Aboriginal times are known only from archaeology and myth.

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Chapter 2

Entrepreneurs and Explorers

Since its founding in 1836 South Australia had been a haven for the dissatisfied artisans and middle classes of England. Some came to seek civic and religious freedom, some came to seek wealth, more by speculation in town and country lands than by hard toil. During the early 1850s sales of South Australian lands rose steeply as a result of immigration and investment by gold – diggers returning from the fields of New South Wales and Victoria. Adelaide lands soon soared in price; better value was to be had in agricultural lands. In 1851, 21,000 hectares of South Australian land were under cultivation for wheat. Five years later, 65,000 hectares were sown and the colony had become the granary of Australia, a position it held for the rest of the century; but this agricultural expansion forced the greatest speculators, pastoralists, further and further out into the unknown north of their colony. South Australian governments, like others in Australia, were composed of factions, independent followers of charismatic leaders such as New South Wales premiers Charles Cowper, John Robertson and Henry Parkes. These three tended to dominate government from 1856 (the year of independence for both NSW and South Australia) till almost the end of the century. All three were eventually impoverished by their political roles. This didn’t happen in South Australia.

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Many of the political class were self-made business men and speculators and they ran their colony in the same way that they ran their personal interests. They treated their political and business interests alike as matters of convenience. This led to a high turnover of ministries – South Australia had forty-two of them in forty-three years (1857–1900) but a lesser turnover in ministers and thus more continuity in policy matters than might have seemed possible at first sight. Henry Ayers, Premier in 1863 when South Australia acquired the Northern Territory came from England on a free passage in 1841, made a fortune out of Burra coppermining shares, speculated in land and became a director of two banks, chairman of the SA AMP Society and the Gas Company and Treasurer of the University of Adelaide. He also headed seven governments between 1863 and 1873 and served as a minister under E.S. Dutton (1863 and 1865). Arthur Blyth (1864–65) and John Colter (1876–77). Arthur Blyth, another of the most notable leaders during the early years of Centralian discovery and development, had a similar career. British-born, he came to Adelaide as a boy in 1839, prospered as an ironmonger, invested heavily in land and became a director of the Burra mines and the National Bank. He led ministries in 1864–65, 1871–72 and 1873–75 and served as a minister under six other leaders. John Hart, another Englishman, did well as a captain in the coastal shipping trade and retired to Adelaide in 1846 to become a large landholder, investor in mines and banks and owner of the biggest flour mill in South Australia. He led governments in 1865–66, 1868 and 1870–71 and served under five other men, including both Ayers and Blyth. Why did most of these men want the Northern Territory? By 1860 the northward expansion of South Australian pastoralists had almost ceased and great tracts of the colony were not taken up till the 1870s. In 1862 the South Australian government received a number of enquiries for land in the future Northern Territory, yet only one of these came from the colony. But the dream of a great Asian market for agricultural products, particularly the sale of horses to the Indian Army, did not die with the British. Between 1824 and 1849, their military had set up and

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abandoned three outposts on the northern Australian coast with that stated aim as well as to realise their ambition to own all of Australia.1 As Jack Cross has noted: Linked to the dream of an unlimited Asian Market was the second dream: of extending South Australia’s northern boundary right across the continent to form what later came to be known as ‘The Great Central State’.2 This concept was put forward to the British Government in 1832 and 1834 and, having no faith in expensive new states, they promptly reduced the northern boundary of South Australia to the 26th parallel of latitude. No European had the least idea of what lay in that unknown country. When, in 1855–56, Augustus Gregory’s party explored the Victoria River country and moved eastward through the western lands of northern Australia to Brisbane, he wrote of the Victoria River country: this part of Australia for the purposes of settlement is far superior to Western Australia in every essential except climate, which is somewhat warm, though as far as one is able to judge, by no means unhealthy.3 His particular praise to the pastoral lands of the Victoria River region immediately caught the attention of South Australian squatters/pastoralists. Dreams of the Great Central State, added to the promise of vast land speculation fuelled by Gregory’s assessments of country, sprang up in Adelaide. But first, the country that lay between their southern holdings and the fabled Victoria River had to be explored. This raised a problem. Edward John Eyre, an enterprising New South

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Welshman, made two successful sheep and cattle drives from Sydney to Adelaide in 1838 and 1839 and explored north of Spencer’s Gulf as far as Lake Torrens in the latter year. During 1840, subsidised by the South Australian administration, he set out to reach the Tropic of Capricorn by riding up the eastern side of Lake Torrens, turned east at Mt Hopeless and concluded that Lake Torrens stretched from the present salt lake of that name through to the present Lake Frome ‘in a mighty “horseshoe” which neither man nor beast could cross’.4 He retreated and made his spectacular journey around the Great Australian Bight to Albany instead; but his subsequent pessimistic report to his Adelaide backers ‘that no man could reach the Centre by going north or north-westward’5 was taken at face value. This view was reinforced by Charles Sturt’s attempt to go around the eastern side of Eyre’s ‘horseshoe’ in 1844–46. He reached the northern limits of South Australia far to the east, but found there nothing but desert sands and stone; and when Ludwig Leichhardt, in the same period, vanished without trace in attempting to cross Central Australia from east to west, exploration of the Centre came to a halt. When the Colony of South Australia gained selfgovernment in 1856, the new Assembly sent out a few surveyors to explore the country south of Lake Torrens; B.H. Babbage to explore the Flinders Ranges in 1856; G.W. Goyder, the Deputy Surveyor General in 1857, who found Lake Torrens after heavy rain, to be full of water; his boss, Captain A.H. Freeling, with a boat to explore the lake, immediately after. Alas, the lake was dry again. None of this satisfied James Chambers. Cartage and mail contractor, land speculator, businessman, reputed to begin his accounts and a bottle of whisky at 6 am and to finish both before breakfast, Chambers was amongst those who came to South Australia with a little capital and turned it into a fortune. Together with his brother John and William Finke, another land speculator, he sent out John McDouall Stuart to find new pastoral lands – and to become one of the greatest Australian explorers. Born in 1815, young Stuart left Scotland for South Australia in 1838. He

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spent several months with Sturt’s central deserts exploration party of 1844–46, and later practised as a surveyor. But Stuart had the driven curiosity of a true explorer and when, in 1858, William Finke offered to subsidise him to find the legendary Aboriginal Wingillpin, a well-watered pastoral paradise, it seemed, he jumped at the chance and led out a small party to South Australia’s barren northwest. Neither he nor Babbage and Major Peter Warburton who followed, ever discovered Wingillpin; and Stuart’s party didn’t reach the colony’s northern border; but he did prove that Eyre’s ‘horseshoe’ barrier did not exist and, significantly, that he could find enough feed and water for his horses in that stark salt-lake country. On his second journey, financed by Finke and James Chambers, he pushed further north to a chain of what he judged to be permanent springs near the site of the present town of Oodnadatta. He had not yet reached Centralia – but he had shown a feasible way of reaching it with horses. His third expedition in early 1860, got no further but did discover more springs in the Oodnadatta area.6 His 4th push northwards from March to September 1860 discovered Centralia. Stuart had only two companions: Daniel Kekwick, who had been with him on the previous trip, earning an accolade from the reserved Stuart such as he gave to no other man: ‘Kekwick is everything I could wish a man to be …’7 And so he proved to be on all of the 4th, 5th and 6th expeditions. Ben Head was a very different proposition. Head was a big man, over six feet in height, only 18 years old and with the appetite of a teenager, which caused the light-travelling Stuart great problems at times; but Head stuck it out to the end – and if Stuart did not appreciate his qualities, Head had no doubt about those of his leader. In later life he said of Stuart: … he had the instincts of a bushman. However foolish he may have been in town, there is not a man in Australia can say a word against him as a leader in the bush.8

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Stuart’s expeditions to the Centre certainly proved the latter. His party of three crossed the unknown South Australia/Territory border in March 1860, encountering the mighty Finke River system that drains the western mountains during pluvial times, and driving on across grassy valleys and spinifex-clad dunes to the great sandstone pillar he named for James Chambers, thence across similar country, to the James Range. From its heights he discovered the blue ridges of the high range he called after Governor MacDonnell of South Australia and, followed a Finke River tributary, the Hugh, through the Waterhouse Range (named for South Australian Chief Secretary, G.M. Waterhouse) to Brinkley Bluff, passing close to this massif through one of the gaps (the exact one is disputed) of the antecedent Finke River tributaries that slash through the eastwest line of the MacDonnells. Then the well-watered route ended. They pushed on through waterless scrub to the Reynolds Range and its highest point, Mt Freeling. Here they found water and went on through thick mulga scrub to the hill that Stuart had calculated was near the centre of Australia. He called it Mt Sturt and climbed to its top with Kekwick to plant there the British flag and a small bottle which contained a message and ‘we gave three cheers for the Flag the emblem of civil and religious liberty and may it be a sign to the natives that the dawn of liberty, civilisation and Christianity is about to break upon them’.9 Irony indeed! But Stuart’s view was more redolent of Colonial Office policy than frontier reality and there were no Aborigines in sight to receive these sentiments. In fact, his little party had not seen much sign of them during the expedition and the very few that they had seen had usually decamped as hastily as they could; but there is no doubt that the Aborigines kept them under observation. As one old Aranda man told T.G.H. Strehlow of Stuart’s passing many years later: We were terrified by their footprints. The boot tracks looked as though they had been made by human-beings, but what kind of

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creatures could men be who had broad, flat toeless feet and a heel that was a hard lump, sharply edged from the main part of the foot? As for the horses’ tracks, we could tell that they must have been made by huge four-legged creatures, larger than we had ever seen before. These creatures, too, had no toes, and their heavy feet had cut their way even into hard dry ground, and left their scars on the rock plates. Surely, we thought, both these kinds of creatures must be evil man-eating monsters! Perhaps they were some of those man-eating monsters that prowled around at night and normally attacked men without leaving any tracks behind.10 Small wonder that Stuart saw few Aborigines and constantly breached their strict rules for crossing others’ country and sacred sites as he forced his way through desert sand and scrub that tore at the explorers and their horses, often starving, thirsty and beset by the incredible hordes of flies that Centralia harbours. Strehlow estimated that at least 800–1000 people lived on the waterholes of the Finke River valley alone, at this time.11 Stuart saw none of them. But when his small party forced its way through seventy kilometres beyond the creek he called ‘after John Tennant Esq’ of Port Lincoln’,12 he encountered large numbers of Warramungu warriors determined to keep his little party from the waterhole they camped by. They could easily have killed the white men; they chose to warn them off through hostile demonstrations. Stuart valued his reputation for peaceful penetration of Aboriginal lands; but, he wrote: They paid no regard to all the signs of friendship I kept constantly making … I then gave orders to fire … we had to take steady aim, to make an impression.13

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Stuart said no more. That was the dawn of Christian civilisation for the Warramungu; and Stuart, harried by their opposition, alarmed at his dwindling supplies and the fear of drying water sources on the trail behind him, turned back. Exhausted and scurvy-ridden, his party staggered back to civilisation. With casual arrogance James Chambers seized his journals, kept them from the press and overrode many of Stuart’s name recommendations at will – but, it appears, did have the grace to rename Sturt’s Hill as Central Mt Stuart; and so it has been ever since. Within a few weeks, Stuart tried again. He travelled mainly his old track through the MacDonnell Ranges, diverting briefly only to follow a creek westward from them to the Tanami Desert, passed through the Warramungu country without opposition and was turned back by the waterless wastes of Sturt’s Plains, north of Newcastle Waters. His party, well-armed by the government, apparently did not need to use its firepower against the Aborigines; yet the parliamentary debates that followed Stuart’s 4th expedition were ominous. One speaker announced: The question was one of the progress of civilisation; a conflict with the native tribes sooner or later must come, and if it must come, let it come now.14 ‘If civilisation were possible’, stated another, ‘the lives of a few savages were not to be considered’. 15 And when R.D. Hanson argued that an exploring expedition was not entitled to fight its way through a hostile tribe, he was howled down.16 Remarkably, Stuart was on his way north again within three months of his 5th expedition. The impatience of Chambers and Finke, coupled with that of the government to open a route to the north coast – and to beat the Burke and Wills party then moving slowly from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria – followed Stuart and his larger well – armed party all the way: But it was Stuart’s iron will

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that forced them on, across his previous route through Central Australia, over the Warramungu country again without opposition to the north coast and back, to a triumphant Adelaide welcome in December 1862. This was a great feat; but it added very little to knowledge of Centralia. Stuart died, contemptuously dismissed by South Australians, in 1866; and the attitudes of their politicians were well expressed by William Harcus in 1876, in an English book backed by government and designed to lure immigrants to South Australia: It is a small matter to supplant the Aboriginal inhabitants of a barbarous country and to secure possession of their land … The feebler race bends before the stronger, as the reeds bend to the sweep of the winds. The difficulties of successful colonisation arise from very different causes than the mere conquest of native races. It is [in] battling with nature … that the real triumphs of … a new land are seen … These are the qualities which distinguish the British people, and which have made them the most successful colonisers the world has ever seen.17 Thus the age-old cry of the victors was reflected: Winner take all. But Harcus was certainly right in anticipating a ‘battle with nature’ for colonists in central Australia; and that ironically would be a key to the survival of the original inhabitants. First, though, came the Overland Telegraph and its related exploration. Though South Australian governments officially used Stuart’s work as a reason to persuade the Imperial government that they should be granted the Northern Territory in 1863, they turned their backs on his achievement and elected to establish a modified version of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s ‘sufficient price’ scheme that had been used to establish South Australia. Thus South Australian

17

pastoralists, the first to seek the new lands, were the last to receive them; they might have fourteen-year leases of up to 780 square kilometres, provided that they found and stocked the land first, but their leases would not be issued until the north coast land sales were completed,18 and they fumed while the government tried unsuccessfully to establish a town-and-country based settlement at Escape Cliffs;19 and while they seethed in the south, the Queenslanders came into Central Australia from the east. From the beginning of Queensland settlement, racial conflict had been endemic and, after 1859 when the state separated from the mother colony of New South Wales, it reached an unprecedented scale and degree of ruthlessness. As Ross Fitzgerald has noted, ‘with squatters contributing 70 percent of the revenue and 94 percent of the exports, pastoralism was Queensland’s only productive interest’.20 The Queensland parliament knew it and was stacked with pastoralists and their supporters. Their 1860 Land Act contained such liberal landholding laws that it turned the tide of land-hungry men escaping the new restrictions in NSW and Victoria into a flood. By 1866, pastoral settlement had reached the base of Cape York and spread westward across the Albert River to and beyond the Northern Territory border. This followed the discoveries of the Barkly Tableland and the northeastern parts of Centralia by William Landsborough in 1861 and 1862. He shipped his men and horses to the Albert River and, after a threatening encounter with the Wakaya people on the ‘Herbert’ (later changed to ‘Georgina’) River, attempted to push westward into waterless country, returned to the river and followed it south to waterholes he named ‘Mary Lake’ and ‘Lake Frances’.21 His enthusiasm for the Barkly Tableland led to rapid pastoral expansion into that area: His reports on the drier, less well-grassed areas south of it had the opposite effect. But in 1864, John Sutherland arrived at Landsborough’s Lake Mary with 7,000 sheep, built a homestead and called his run ‘Rocklands’. Soon after, Gregg and F.E. Nash brought another flock to ‘Stoney Downs’, centred on a waterhole south of Rocklands. Both the waterhole and surrounding run

18

later became known as Lake Nash. In 1865–66, William Lyne and Oskar von Steiglitz brought another flock to the country south of Stoney Downs. Thus they founded the first pastoral runs in what was to be the northeast of Centralia – and with sheep, not cattle. But disease, economic problems and severe drought forced them all out within three or four years, bringing a temporary end to Queensland’s western expansion. These runs had been mainly within the country of the Pwelany people.22 Pwelany lands, according to Tindale, were: At Urandangie, Bathurst (Downs), Headingly, south to Lake Nash and Barkly Downs, east towards Mt Isa, Qld, west to near Mount Hogarth and Argadargada.23 So they were a border tribe. The early Queensland ethnologist, Walter Roth, noted that they traded extensively with tribes to the north, south and east of them and he outlined the extensive commonality among these peoples in hunting methods, sports, games and ceremonial;24 but his research before 1897 stopped at the Queensland border. It is apparent that they had similar contacts with the Alyawarr tribe to the west; yet we know very little of it in this early period of settlement. There is only one known direct reference to the Lake Nash people (presumably the Pwelany) at the time of the sheepmen’s invasion of the 1860s: ‘J.L.D.’, writing to the Sydney Bulletin in 1897, recalled: Our party took the first 10,000 sheep from the ‘Downs’ down the Flinders to the camp called Burketown, thence up the Gregory to the Herbert [Georgina] as far as the point on the map marked Lake Nash. We settled there early in ’65. I have seen something of this black business. We never feared these interior aboriginals so long as we knew no white had preceded us … On a grand six-mile-long

19

lagoon in the Herbert, we found camped over 200 blacks, a fine tribe, with whom we established friendly relations, giving presents, etc., and keeping away from them. With the old chief I would have gone anywhere, confident in his protection. He was simply a fine type of man.25 First contact, it seems, was peaceful through mutual respect and apparently continued until the sheepmen withdrew. But ‘J.L.D.’ drew on later experience to warn: The leaders of a party cannot ensure good conduct on the part of all the men. The native women are interfered with, and the next travelling stock party comes along. The blacks do not discriminate between one party of white men and another. Retaliation. Then the native police are summoned and go on the job. ‘Dispersing’ the blacks it is called … One of … [the native police] showed me the nicks in his Terry rifle. I counted 48. ‘That fella myall’, he remarked and so he kept his tally.26 So ‘J.L.D.’ revealed some of the basis of further conflict; misuse of Aboriginal women, the Aboriginal custom of retaliating against the group rather than an individual miscreant and the white men’s propensity for using the feared native police for indiscriminate murder. But the real basis lay in white attitudes, apparent in the South Australian parliament and, most bluntly, on the Queensland frontier. As the Cooktown Herald put it in 1874: When savages are pitted against civilisation, they must go to the wall. It is the fate of their race. Much as we deplore the necessity for such a state of things it is absolutely necessary in order that the onward march of civilisation may not be arrested. 27

20

The Queensland squatters were to return to the northeast of Central Australia; but first came the South Australians. They came because of the Overland Telegraph. Telegraphy was new and undersea cable technology newer still; but it held great promise, changing the slow communication of months between Australia and Europe to a matter of hours – and it was ideally suited for instant communication between the Australian colonies. Victoria opened the Melbourne – Williamstown telegraph in February 1854 and nine years later lines had reached the borders with New South Wales and South Australia. By 1861, all the eastern colonies had followed Victoria’s lead: Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane were all linked by overland telegraph (OT) lines. In 1855 the English astronomer Charles Todd came to superintend the building and operation of South Australia’s lines. ‘He was a small man’, said Peter Taylor, author of the best single account of the building of the OT line from Darwin to Port Augusta, ‘without a great deal of presence but there was something about him that encouraged the men to keep going.’ 28 That something certainly included dynamic energy and absolute belief in his mission slightly offset by his love of awful jokes. The story of this magnificent effort, one of the greatest feats in Australian engineering, has been told many times; Taylor summarises their accomplishment (which took the amazingly short time of one year and eleven months.) ‘In that time’, he says, they had built a telegraph line more than three thousand kilometres long, through country that had only been crossed once … They had cut and prepared over 36,000 poles … They had … driven several thousand sheep and cattle over 2,000 kilometres from Port Augusta … They had built a 22-room stone station at Port Darwin and other stone stations of seven or eight rooms at the Peake, Charlotte Waters, Alice Springs and Barrow Creek. They had built wooden stations at Tennant Creek, Powell Springs, Daly Waters and at the Katherine’.29

21

In his 1955 book, Frank Clune described it as the ‘climax of Australian inland exploration’30, and indeed, the work of John Ross, W.W. Mills and others in finding a pathway through the MacDonnell Ranges and subsequent exploration based on the white men’s presence at the line stations did result, as Clune says, in ‘letting daylight in to a vast region that was previously almost unknown’.

31

That was a white man’s viewpoint. As Jack Cross remarked more

than half a century later, ‘what the indigenous people made of all this frenzy will never be known’.32 In Centralia, the telegraph paved the way for the cattlemen; and conflict. John Ross, immigrant Scot and hardy bushman, was recruited by Todd to lead the parties searching for a path through the MacDonnells that would take the heavy equipment of the poling groups: Stuart’s route via the Hugh River and Brinkley Bluff was never a suitable option. Eager young Alfred Giles asked to join him. ‘Are you sound in mind and limb? Can you live on bandicoot and goanna?’ asked Ross. Giles said he had already done so. ‘Then you’ll do’.33 Others joined them, including surveyor William Harvey, and the party explored the ranges from Brinkley Bluff to the vicinity of Arltunga and north to Central Mt Stuart and Barrow Creek, discovering much that was new to the whites in Centralia; but they had not found a suitable pass through the MacDonnells. Gilbert McMinn and W.W. Mills solved the problem. On 18 February 1872, McMinn sighted Simpson’s Gap; he suspected that a way through the range lay near to the east. Mills was directed to this area and on 11 March 1872, he passed through Temple Bar and discovered the Todd River, ‘with numerous waterholes and springs’, he wrote, ‘the principal of which is the Alice Spring which I had the honour of naming after Mrs Todd’.34 So Alice Todd, faithful wife, was immortalised and when, soon after, the line was moved to cross the range at Heavitree Gap instead of Temple Bar, her husband was doubly remembered, in the Todd River and in having his middle name – Heavitree – bestowed on this dramatic slash in the MacDonnells.

22

The building of the OT line gave impetus to the first movement of stock into this remote area of Australia. In September 1870 Ralph Millner left the Peake station in the central north of South Australia with his brother, John, some other Europeans and three Aborigines to drive 7,000 sheep across the continent. Floods on the Finke River delayed them. Eventually the sheep were driven to swim the channel and turned north through the wild central swamps along the route surveyed for the telegraph line to Central Mt Stuart. Then Millner struck out for the Roper River. Poison bush near the granite boulders of the Devil’s Marbles killed the sheep in hundreds. John Millner, ‘very easy going and always kind to the natives’, according to the stockman Arthur Ashwin,35 died at Attack Creek, his skull smashed by a Warramungu club. Unseen, the Aborigines followed as the sheep moved north; but Ralph Millner’s staghounds, slipped from the leash in the country of the Djingili, tore out the throat of a warrior and drove the rest away. Stuart’s diary led them through to the Roper in December 1871 and there Millner sold his surviving sheep, about half those which had left South Australia more than a year before, to the telegraph construction parties. Millner’s droving epic, made possible by good seasons and the work of the telegraph surveyors, showed that Stuart’s route was passable for stock. On 18 January 1872, the enterprising young entrepreneur John Lewis, with his brother Jim and four stockmen, left Adelaide with forty horses to travel overland to Darwin and Cobourg peninsula where they hoped to start a stud on land bought in Lewis’s name. By May they had reached Barrow Creek; just in time, by pure coincidence, to be hired to run a ‘pony express’ between the gap in the overdue line from Tennant Creek to Daly Waters in the Top End, more than 400 kilometres away. This trek illustrated most aspects of South Australian attitudes towards discoveries in Central Australia at that time: The lure of open lands, the vitality and optimism, the sheer exuberance, that drove every endeavour, from the building of the OT line to the bold stock ventures of Millner and Lewis. The latter’s recollections also included the problems, which

23

they tended to see as obstacles to be overcome; the patchiness of good stock country, interspersed with scrub, stone and spinifex, the unreliable water supply, the hazards of horse-powered supply, of black flies and myriad mosquitoes – and the total ignorance of the rights of the traditional owners of the land. Lewis recalled, almost casually, an affray with them at Attack Creek: The grass was very high, and the natives set fire to it simultaneously, and only with great difficulty did we escape from being burnt. The Attack Creek natives were of good physique and determined and hostile … One party was camped near … During the afternoon … two natives walked towards them and threw their spears at the party. They were covered immediately and one of them was wounded. The other, instead of running away, dragged his comrade into the high grass and got him away under cover of the thick vegetation, apparently without the slightest concern.36 This incident underlined the aggressive reputation of the Warramungu, but, though there were exceptions, most Centralian Aborigines steered clear of telegraph parties and travellers. It was no great problem for them to avoid these newcomers who, obviously, did not intend (apart from the few occupants of telegraph stations) to stay in their country. Others followed. In 1873 and 1874–75 Alfred Giles, with enterprise fully equal to Millner’s, successfully sold sheep he drove to telegraph stations all the way north to Yam Creek in the Top End goldfields, and between 1876 and 1879 he came north again from South Australia through the Centre with sheep to Dr W.J. Browne’s Springvale run on the Katherine River. On the way he overtook his brother John, moving north with cattle walked all the way from the Darling River for Browne’s Top End runs. The Stuart-telegraph route was proven, yet it was a hard one, only passable in good seasons. Except for Dr Browne’s runs, nearly all sheep and

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cattle came to the Top End by the Gulf coast route, well-watered but poorly grassed, from Western Queensland; and to the northeast of Central Australia by Landsborough’s route south of the Barkly Tableland. But the core of Centralia, the south-central range country, was to be taken up with little fanfare by South Australian pastoralists. James Chambers had died of an infected boil in August 1862, months before Stuart returned triumphantly from the north coast, but there was no shortage of men of the same stamp; landholders and squatters of great wealth and even greater ambitions. Most of these men went into Top End ventures; but in 1872, Edward Meade Bagot, entrepreneur, of Adelaide, using his experience as a successful builder of the southern section of the OT line, decided to send his son Ned north to take up pastoral country in the MacDonnell Ranges near the Alice Springs telegraph station. His friend, Joseph Gilbert, also applied for two adjacent blocks in the MacDonnells. Bagot’s son, Ned and Gilbert’s son, William, in June 1872, drove 1,000 cattle from South Australia to stock these runs. Both properties, totalling 6,000 square kilometres, were declared fully stocked and first leases were issued in 1876. These runs, Undoolya and Owen Springs, have the distinction of being the oldest continuously-occupied stations in the Northern Territory.37 As Jack Cross notes, the first cattle from Bagot’s run, Undoolya, left for Port Darwin butcher Abbott in June 1875; 75 head, driven by drover Tom (or Tim) Nelson.38 Owen Springs became a Nature Reserve in 2000. Undoolya is still a working property. At the same time, exploration continued into the vast unknown to the east and west of the telegraph line in Central Australia. In August 1872 Ernest Giles, notable bushman and visionary, left Charlotte Waters telegraph station for the western lands. He wrote: The Great Designer of the Universe in the long past periods of creation, permitted a fiat to be recorded, that the beings it was his pleasure in the first instance to place amongst these lovely scenes

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(in the Musgrave Ranges of Central Australia) must eventually be swept from the face of the earth by others more intellectual, more dearly beloved and gifted than they. Progressive improvement is undoubtedly the order of creation, and we perhaps in our turn, may be as ruthlessly driven from the earth by another race of yet unknown beings of an order infinitely higher – infinitely more beloved than we.39 His mixture of Christianity and Darwinism may have been unusual, but his first basic premise, that the Aborigines were doomed to perish, was shared by virtually all his contemporaries. His second premise, that his people might follow, hasn’t happened – yet. But he shared in full their optimism. Of his adventures into the wild unknown, he said: There was room for snowy mountains, an inland sea … for races of new kinds of men – for fields of gold and golcondas of gems … and, above all else, there was room for me.40 He found the Krichauff Range and across the impassable salt bed of Lake Amadeus he saw Mt Olga. Before he could return a second time, late in 1873, the South Australian surveyor, W.C. Gosse, leaving Alice Springs telegraph station for the west coast in April of that year, had reached the Olgas and discovered the monolith he called Ayers Rock, now superseded by its Aboriginal name, Uluru. Giles moved southwest through the Petermann Ranges into Western Australia, awestruck by the beauty and the cruelty of the lands he traversed. He nearly died, like his companion, Gibson, in the desert that bears the latter’s name, before he retreated to the telegraph line. His work made known the southwest corner of the Northern Territory. When he reached Melbourne he heard that John Forrest, crossing from the west, had safely traversed the terrible sandridges of the Gibson

26

Desert and reached the telegraph line. In 1873, P.E. Warburton, tough old exsoldier of the Indian Army, endured an awful journey in the opposite direction, north-westward from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean. Neither of these expeditions added much to the knowledge of the Northern Territory beyond showing the vast extent of the pitiless desert. By the mid-1870s, the Queenslanders again began to thrust westward over the Northern Territory border into the northeast of Centralia. By then, the droughts and financial problems that had caused the withdrawal of the sheepmen in the 1860s were gone and a new Queensland pastoral boom had brought settlement to Cloncurry and Boulia. Pastoralists with cattle, rather than sheep, began to look westward for expansion prospects to the nearby Northern Territory border and the unexplored country that lay between that area and the telegraph line. In 1878 the Prout brothers crossed the border, thrusting westward in search of pastoral land. Before they could return, the waterholes behind them dried up and they died of thirst in the country south of the Barkly Tableland. Nat Buchanan was luckier. In the same year he struck out from the Rankine River across the tablelands, ending his trek at the Tennant Creek telegraph station. Frank Scarr, repelled by the desert conditions that killed the Prout brothers, moved northward until he struck Buchanan’s route and followed it to Tennant Creek. Still in 1878, Ernest Favenc explored the Barkly Tableland and the Queensland cattlemen soon followed to settle it: But the Centralian lands across the Wakaya Desert, once reached by the sheepmen, the country of the Pwelany and the Alyawarr, was as yet beyond their reach; but not for long. Greater knowledge of the country stemmed from South Australia. In 1877 Surveyor-General George Goyder selected surveyor Henry Vere Barclay to lead a government party in a survey of the region between the Alice Springs telegraph station and the Herbert (Georgina) River ‘so that a tolerably accurate map may be prepared as a guide to intending settlers’.41 Barclay, his assistant Charles Winnecke and five other party members surveyed in the vicinity of Alice Springs

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until February 1878, when the leader and three of his men traversed east along the north side of Hart’s Range, discovered and followed the Plenty and Marshall Rivers and, from the latter, sent two men eastward to the Toko Range, almost on the Queensland border. On their return they discovered and named the Jervois Range. Two days later, Barclay struck and named Lucy Creek. Barclay’s track eastward had closely paralleled the boundaries of Alyawarra and Eastern Aranda country, where he saw numerous campsites but few tribespeople, who fled at his approach. Some may have been Aranda, but in crossing the Jervois Range and Lucy Creek, he moved into Alyawarra lands. As Barclay implied of those he did meet, they had trading relationships with their eastern neighbours and no experience whatever of white men.42 Barclay returned to Alice Springs, turned over the leadership of the party to Charles Winnecke and left for Adelaide, before going on to further ventures in New Zealand; but the Northern Territory had not seen the last of him.43 Barclay’s comment on Charles Winnecke that he was ‘subsequently [to himself] the best explorer South Australia possessed’,44 probably says more about Barclay than Winnecke; but he was certainly a determined man. For the next three years he criss-crossed the Sandover River – Lake Nash country on dogged explorative forays, one of which turned up one of the enduring mysteries of the Outback. In 1878, Winnecke found and followed for 120 kilometres, a dray track that ran right through the Ooratippra area. Near it was a small piece of perished leather. He found the track again, scarcely altered, in 1880. ‘I have endeavoured to find old camps and marked trees without success’, he wrote. ‘I have further made enquiries of all the old residents on the Herbert River as well as the O. T. line, and they all assure me that no party has left either place accompanied by a dray’.

45

In that dry country, that track could have been formed many years

before. Who were the adventurous souls who ventured where no white man had ever gone? And what was their fate? We still don’t know. Four years after Winnecke’s departure from Alyawarra lands, South

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Australian surveyor David Lindsay travelled with camels through Hart’s Range, where he found garnets he thought to be rubies and turned east to the Marshall River and Lake Nash. Of the Aborigines he met he reported that ‘there seemed to be but few in the country’.46 In fact, Lindsay’s evidence, added to that of Barclay and Winnecke, showed that the arid lands of the Alyawarr and their immediate neighbours carried quite a high density of Aboriginal population before white influence changed the pattern. Overall, this pattern began to alter as the Aborigines of Centralia became used to the constant travellers through their lands and in many cases, initial fear and suspicion gave way to curiosity and familiarity. Some became adept at thieving from white camps. This in turn led to the use of threat and armed force by the whites to keep them away. As Arthur Ashwin wrote: I was used to bad natives and was always on my guard, and whenever I came upon them I always kept them in their proper place, never made free with them and never let them into the camp.47 Other tribesmen borrowed wire from the telegraph line or smashed insulators to use as cutting tools or spearheads, leading in 1878 to Todd ordering his men to supply the local Aborigines with these commodities.48 Still others, though, such as the Pitjantjara of the Petermann Ranges, long remained hostile to all European intrusion. Permanent settlement of the lands with cattle changed the equation again. This colonisation began even while the early explorers and OT gangs were still in the country. As noted earlier, this phase took place first in the south of Central Australia. On the Queensland side, Ben Crosswaite and Nat Buchanan overlanded cattle from near Longreach to the borderland station Rocklands in 1876. This station, in the far northeast of Centralia, was first held by Crosswaite with a

29

partner Tetley and in 1893 Rocklands Pty Ltd, a syndicate of five Victorian pastoral families, took it over. This company, with minor changes, controlled the station until it was sold to the Stanbroke Pastoral Co Pty Ltd in 1968. By the late 1870s most of the Queensland border stations had been taken up,49 as had the major stations of the Northern Territory’s Barkly Tableland. Lake Nash, to the south, fell to surveyor Frank Scarr, probably in 1878; but he did not stock it and in 1879 he sold the lease to Queensland cattleman John Costello. Costello rode from his east coast station Cawarral with a herd of breeding heifers and installed Tom Holmes as manager. In June 1880, Charles Winnecke called there, noting that, under Holmes’ control, the station ‘was just being formed’.50 Holmes soon handed over to Jack Farrar who became the long-term manager of Lake Nash. Buoyant times for Australia in the 1870s and early 1880s drove a Territory pastoral boom. In 1881 South Australia drastically reduced its pastoral land rents. Costs of claiming land became negligible until it had to be stocked and this led Adelaide speculators, sight unseen in most cases, to apply for vast areas of Central Australia. Most of it was quickly abandoned without any attempt to stock – or even inspect – it. John Costello used the halcyon days to consolidate and extend his Lake Nash leases. But in the MacDonnell Ranges, both Bagot and Gilbert ran into difficulties they could not surmount. Principally this was the problem of marketing. Costello and others who had set up in the Queensland border area could walk their cattle to markets or fattening stations in Queensland. But Undoolya and Owen Springs had no obvious markets. The Abbott contract proved to be a one-off event. Darwin was just too far away and the small market there was more easily satisfied by the Victoria River stations. Adelaide, too, was distant and the droving trek to the settled districts of South Australia was horrific. When added to the recurrent onset of devastating droughts, often low prices and stock losses to Aboriginal depredations and poor pastoral country, the pioneers of MacDonnell Range grazing suffered severely. Ned Bagot lost an estimated 30,000 pounds in four years at Undoolya and sold it in 1876; the

30

station changed hands three times more within the next thirty years, each time at a loss. After the death of his father, William Gilbert too sold out in 1876 – to Sir Thomas Elder, who also suffered severe losses and had to sell in 1894. Most of those who followed them to Centralia in the boom period of the early 1880s ended up on a similar trajectory: Glen Helen, Barrow Creek, Tempe Downs, Bond Springs and Crown Point all got their start at that time. A.M. Woolbridge lost 30,000 pounds at Barrow Creek, at Tempe Downs the South Australian lessees spent 32,000 pounds in eight years and sold to their manager for 2,500 pounds. He later abandoned the property. In 1889 Willoughby, Gordon and Youl sold Barrow Creek to James Cowan at a heavy loss. Cowan hung on through bad times because he was rich, shrewd and thrifty, ‘the worst employer in the country’, according to John Ross;51 but by the end of South Australian rule in 1911, the men who had stayed and lived hard controlled most stations in the Centre. It has been called a small man’s country ever since. Lake Nash station seems not to have encroached on Alyawarra lands; it was in Pwelany country; but which colony was it in? M.J. Costello, grandson and biographer of the founder noted that the station was so close to the boundaries of the Northern Territory and Queensland that no one knew which colony owned its lands. To protect his interests, John Costello paid land rents to both.52 This question was settled in 1985 when a South Australian survey party, led by John Carruthers and L.A. Wells, reached the area and determined that Rocklands was fairly evenly split between the two colonies and Lake Nash lay mainly in the Northern Territory, with 587 square miles in Queensland.53 Lake Nash remained in splendid isolation in northeast Centralia until 1888 when wealthy South Australian businessman and pastoralist J.M. Angas sent 1800 cattle to stock Frew River and Elkedra stations, southeast of Tennant Creek. William Coulthard operated both stations as one unit for the grandly-named Willowie Land and Pastoral Association. At about the same time, another organisation, the Barrow’s Creek Pastoral Company formed nearby Murray Downs. In 1890,

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the WLPA bought out the BCPC and a year later, was grazing at least 7,000 cattle on its lands. These stations encroached on Kaititja, Wakaya and Alyawarra lands and were established without regard to the traditional owners. This situation soon led to trouble; and police action to control it was totally inadequate. Theoretically, the Centre lay within the jurisdiction of the Northern Territory Police Force at Port Darwin; but when it was thought necessary to station a trooper at Charlotte Waters and another at Barrow Creek, they were sent from the Far Northern Division of the South Australian police, established in 1873 and headquartered from 1874 at Port Augusta. Ominously, the original appointee at Barrow Creek, in Kaititja country, had barely arrived when, on 22 February 1874, a body of Kaititja warriors surprised him and the unarmed staff of the telegraph station, attacking and killing the station master, J.L. Stapleton and John Franks before the others could reach their weapons. The Kaititja and their northern neighbours the Warramungu had shown consistent resentment of white intrusion into their lands, but to Europeans the attack seemed to be treachery, for Stapleton had shown some confidence in the Kaititja and had supplied their aged and infirm with food. Pressed by Charles Todd and the Adelaide newspapers, the Blyth ministry authorized a punitive expedition led by Samuel Gason. ‘We hope Trooper Gason is not hampered by too many instructions’, commented the editor of the Adelaide Advertiser. ‘…Retribution, to be useful, must be sharp, swift and severe.’54 And so it was. For two months Gason’s parties scoured the bush, shooting down Aborigines, eleven in all according to Gason, at least fifty according to later sources. White fury was great: No questions were asked. This affray was only the worst of many in the 1870s and 1880s. Most of the other clashes of this time involved the cattle stations that multiplied during this period, taking over the precious water sources that the Aboriginal tribesmen depended on, grazing down the luxuriant grasses, cotton and salt bush that sustained their food supply, trampling sacred sites with careless trespass and sharp-hooved animals. During these years, the seasons were reasonably good,

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despite periodic droughts and, as well as Lake Nash, Elkedra, Frew River, Barrow Creek and Murray Downs in the northeast, most of the central-south range country and extensions into the surrounding plains was taken up. As noted, Aboriginal resistance became widespread. This resistance usually took the form of guerilla action, rather than the formidable clash of numerous warrior clans with groups of Europeans and their Native Police allies characteristic of Queensland, climaxing in September 1884 when the powerful Kalkadunga tribe of northwestern Queensland, neighbours of the cross-border Pwelany, stood 600 warriors against a mixed European/ Native Police force at a site called Battle Mountain. Spears were no match for rifles. They were slaughtered and their power broken for ever.55 There is no evidence that the Pwelany took any part in their neighbour’s wars or that they ever violently opposed the white invasion; and this may be a reason for the scarcity of white comment about them. Troublesome Aboriginal tribes generated discourse and correspondence; peaceful ones did not. ‘J.L.D.’s reference to the harmonious relations of the Lake Nash tribe with the white sheepherders was not reinforced by further comment except for the brief remark of Michael Costello that ‘the blacks … were never troublesome on Lake Nash’.56 This seems to indicate that the Pwelany had learnt from Kalkadunga experience and quickly passed to the stage of interrelationships with the whites that Hartwig termed ‘intelligent exploitation’; as he said, ‘probably essentially a voluntary exploitation of the new food and material resources afforded by Europeans and thus a logical extension of tentative approach’.57 Moreover, they apparently became an essential part of the station workforce. Pastoral Inspector D.C. Thompson’s 1891 report on Lake Nash stated that they had ‘only … Manager … two stockmen, storekeeper and Blacks on the station as the ordinary workforce.58 This bears out Hartwig’s assertion that successful resistance to white settlement was only possible when tribes were strong and the terrain difficult. Lake Nash is about as flat as land can be and there’s a distinct lack of tree cover, except on its riverbanks; it is grassland

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where a mounted European with a rifle could be king of all he surveyed. Aborigines living in the country near the telegraph line, for the most part, had passed through the fear and tentative approach stage by 1875 and were thoroughly accustomed to the white man and his ways by the time these stations were formed. According to Hartwig, this applied to Crown Point, Idracowra, Mt Burrell, Henbury, all in the territory of the southern Aranda, Owen Springs (central Aranda), Undoolya (eastern Aranda), Bond Springs (southern Aranda), Anna’s Reservoir (Anmatjira) and Stirling (western Kaititja and mid-Anmatjira); but, he says, Hermannsburg mission, Glen Helen, Erldunda, Tempe Downs, as well as Frew River, had not.59 This seems to have been a major factor in the relative peace of the first group. Yet the peace was indeed relative. On Undoolya, Owen Springs, Glen Helen and Anna’s Reservoir, cattle killing resulted in the formation of parties of blacktrackers, station hands and police to track down the perpetrators. At the same time, a group of Anmatjira warriors attacked and set fire to Anna’s Reservoir homestead. This time, the psychopathic MC Willshire of Alice Springs took a party in pursuit. Both parties found and killed Aborigines. As happened so often, the frontier code of silence ensured that the number of dead and their identity remains unknown. Another Alice Springs party under MC. Daer probably carried out the Mt Riddock station massacre known to this day as ‘Blackfellas’ Bones’.60 However, by 1886, most Aranda and Anmatjira had virtually ceased to kill cattle though, as Hartwig points out, this corresponded with a violent phase on Tempe Downs and Glen Helen stations which provided rugged-country havens for marauding warriors. Willshire and six native troopers patrolled Tempe Downs, putting a temporary end to cattle killing there by 1893. Two other police parties under MC Daer and MC Wurmbrand put a permanent end to it by 1894. According to Hartwig, most of the culprits were caught alive and gaoled;61 a remarkable event indeed; but the slaughter went on until the cattle-killing epidemic died out in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and Aboriginal camps were established at most cattle stations.

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The centre of Aboriginal resistance shifted to the north. As noted, Frew River, Barrow Creek and Elkedra runs were set up on the lands of the Kaititja, Wakaya and Alyawarr. Much of this was rugged country; escape country. In July 1891 Inspector Bisley at Port Augusta reported that sixty natives had surrounded Frew River homestead ‘fully armed with the intent of murdering [the inhabitants]; the dogs and Lubra gave timely warning’.62 The attackers retreated to the nearby hills and turned to cattle killing. Mounted Constables Bennett and his tracker at Barrow Creek and Tom Daer, with five trackers from Alice Springs, joined them to sweep the country for two months. There is no record of what the police party did at Frew River, but when J.T. Beckett, first Commonwealth Chief Inspector of Aborigines, visited the area in 1914 he noted: ‘According to the old men of the tribe with whom I have talked, and white men who are in the country, the tribe suffered terribly for their mistakes’.63 Terribly enough to enable a Port Augusta Dispatch correspondent to assert in 1898 that the Frew River tribe consisted of ‘45 bucks and 460 gins’.64 Yet the cattle killing increased, aided by drought which forced the cattle into the ranges in search of pasture and water. In 1893 tribesmen killed over 300 in three weeks and, two years later, Coulthard reported the spearing of over 600 in a few months.65 Assailed by a combination of these losses, lack of markets, continued severe drought and the Australiawide economic depression of the 1890s which forced down the price of cattle to abysmal levels, the WLPA abandoned all three of its stations by 1896, without even bothering to muster their cattle. J.H. Angas, still its principal shareholder, was reported to have lost the [then] astronomical sum of 40,000 pounds.66 Probably full details of ‘dispersals’ (i.e. killings) in the region will never be known. But one of these terrible tragedies came to light in 1991, when Judith Robinson, daughter of K.M. Hall who took up the Ooratippra block after World War II, recalled that Ooratippra Creek formed part of the boundary between her father’s station and Huckitta, taken up by William Coulthard in 1898 and held by him until 1919. Judith Robinson recalled:

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And strewn everywhere [on the creek flats] were dozens and dozens of Aboriginal skeletons. The story was that they had all died of some sort of flu or pneumonia … But we knew that this couldn’t have been true because one had a very deep hole in his skull … I’ve just heard from the Coulthard family that the aborigines shot something like five hundred horses of Coulthard’s … I mentioned the skeletons on the place … and the reply was that they believed … that they were shot.67 This equates with Frank Gillen’s 1901 comment that Coulthard had been ‘nearly ruined by the drought and niggers. Out of 500 head of cattle he has only seventy left and the niggers have killed and eaten 52 of his best horses’.68 How many ‘dispersals’ were there that we know nothing about? Coulthard’s case illustrates uncomfortable points about both black and white societies Bisley’s mention of ‘lubra warning’ which enabled him to fend off the attack by tribesmen at Frew River station reminds us that there were Aboriginal women who judged themselves to be better off in white society than their own; and MC Daer’s Aboriginal trackers could be used against other tribes because there was no universal concept in Aboriginal thought and belief. The Native Police were a perfect illustration of this. When taken beyond the area of their personal and tribal lands, they killed indiscriminately at the white man’s bidding. The mass slaughter on Huckitta is not mentioned by any known sources of the time. This seems to be directly connected to the growing strain of humanitarianism which saw the upper middle class of Adelaide, having disposed of their own Aboriginal problems by the usual methods of massacre, disease and grog, decide to try protection of the more remote tribes, including those of the Northern Territory. The newspapers, the Aborigines Friends Association and some Members of Parliament all demanded enquiry into stories of massacre.69 This agitation didn’t appear to diminish the carnage; just made it better concealed.

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Barrow Creek Telegraph Station, 1875 SLSA, 36127

Track of the Horn Expedition, redrawn by CDU Uniprint

Central Australian Aborigines watch Stuart’s party Sketch from Stuart’s published journal, NTL and Powell, Far Country, No. 22

The 1869 telegraph expedition; Three Wells Camp. Goyder is second from the left, NLA and Powell, Far Country, No. 24

John Costello’s homestead, Lake Nash, 1890s Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 34–5

Map: location map, Sandover River area Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 54–5

Left

Strehlow’s family, c.1902, CTH Strehlow is the baby, sitting on his mother’s (Johanna’s) lap. SLSA, B42412 Below

Hermannsburg Mission, c.1900, SLSA, B42418

The one and only positive move for Aboriginal protection came from the Evangelical Lutheran Synod (ELSA). In 1875 it obtained a government grant of 200 square miles (soon extended to 900 square miles) of land on the Finke River and commissioned pastors A.H. Kempe and W.F. Schwarz to found the Hermannsburg Mission there under the Directorship of pastor Theodore Harms, head of the German Missionary Society of Hermannsburg. Harms was a grimly earnest man, as the account of the initial mission by the relevant parties makes clear.70 The mission was founded ‘so that they should set their hope in God’ 71 (in Lutheran terms, of course); but the Aborigines had their own ideas; and while they packed the Mission – and the church – in times of drought and cattle-killing reprisal, otherwise they left only the elderly and infirm behind to be rationed by the South Australian government through the Hermannsburg missionaries while they moved out to roam their own country. Local cattlemen and white officials were furious that the missionaries would not let them pursue and kill on church lands and that the missionaries reported police visits in 1883 that arrested four Aboriginal men and were supposed to have shot down three of them in their chains. This hatred led to a South Australian Parliamentary enquiry, whose report was presented to Parliament in September 1890. Charges of indiscriminate shooting and forcible abduction of Aboriginal women could not be proven in the absence of witnesses, conveniently for the police and cattlemen; but they failed to shut down the mission. The missionaries were required to improve facilities for their Aboriginal charges and mission funding was continued for two further years.72 The claim of Everard Leske, Lutheran publicist that ‘The presence of the missionaries after 1877 undoubtedly saved the Aborigines of Central Australia from extermination’73 is exaggerated, but not too greatly so for Hermannsburg’s surrounding tribes including, ironically, the Aranda and Luritja peoples on whose lands the mission sat. By 1883, mission personnel had reached twenty-three in number, three of them – Kempe, Schwarz and Schultze – being pastors and the others laymen, wives and seven children; but drought, conflict with cattlemen,

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poor diet, the sheer hardship of building and supplying a mission in such a remote spot and, above all, failure to make Lutherans out of the Aborigines, wore them down and, between 1889 and 1891, all the missionaries left for the south. In 1893 the ELSA synod decided to withdraw from the mission. A year later, the Immanuel Synod purchased the Hermannsburg mission: Thus began the long reign of C.F.T. Strehlow (from 1894 to 1922). Perhaps the last significant development of the 1880s in Centralia was the founding of the Alice Springs township; and this owed its creation mainly to the opening of mineral fields at Arltunga, some 100 kilometres east of Heavitree Gap. Here David Lindsay, as noted earlier, had discovered stones he hoped were rubies; and in 1887, sent broke by a South Australian bank crash, he returned to the field in an attempt to retrieve his fortunes – only to find that other men had taken up his early discoveries before his return. The red stones turned out to be the semi-precious garnets rather than the much more valuable rubies and an initial mild ‘rush’ to the area collapsed; but in 1887 Joseph Hill and Bruce Smith found alluvial gold nearby; and men who had come to the Centre for rubies stayed to prospect for gold. Living conditions in the ore fields were gruelling.; baking hot in summer, freezing cold in winter; difficult and expensive supply and a drastic shortage of water affected life there severely: But life was hard everywhere and men trekked there in hope and in sufficient numbers for the South Australian government to decide that a townsite should be developed at the most convenient place in the MacDonnell Range; which happened to be alluvial flats to the north of Heavitree Gap, not far from the Alice Springs telegraph station. As Peter Donovan says: While not immediately apparent, the rush to exploit the rubies and gold of the eastern MacDonnells was the decisive element in the development of the town that was to become Alice Springs.74

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So, in July 1888, the South Australian government commissioned David Lindsay to lay out a townsite, and he did so in the later months of that year. The new town was proclaimed in November 1889 under the name ‘Stuart’ a name it retained (officially) for 44 years; yet it remained ‘Alice Springs’ to most who knew of its existence. In 1889 Billy Benstead built the Stuart Arms pub, probably the first notable building in the township; and certainly, appropriate for a thirsty site in the middle of Australia. The town was launched in the role of principal urban centre of the mighty inland, a position it has held ever since.

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Chapter 3

Recession and Rebuilding: 1880s–1910

If the 1880s were at least variable for the Centralian pastoralists and disastrous for big investors, the 1890s proved to be worse. In eastern Australia officers and men walked off their ships on 16 August 1890, precipitating the most bitter industrial strife in Antipodean history. In 1891 the long speculative boom of the 1880s collapsed. Banks, businessmen and pastoralists were all caught up in the maelstrom which reached the furthest corners of Australia. The Centre suffered severely too, from the perennial problem of drought, which lasted from 1889 to 1894, according to Hartwig, and a severe reduction in cattle prices. By the end of 1894, nearly every station in the Centre except Erldunda, Frew River and Elkedra, had been abandoned or had passed into the hands of newer, usually hardy and impecunious bushmen; Frew River and Elkedra were abandoned in 1895; and cattle numbers in Central Australia had dropped from an 1890 high of 52,300 to an 1894 low of 36,400. Sheep and horse numbers fared even worse; from 10,000 in 1887 to 4,400 in 1894. 1

Exploration of new country dropped sharply: In April 1889, W.H. Tietkins

led a small expedition from Alice Springs through the Kintore Range to Lake MacDonald in the southwestern corner of the Northern Territory, thence eastward to (equally dry) Lake Amadeus and Erldunda. He collected 94 geological

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specimens, which greatly excited the South Australian Surveyor General but, as Hartwig remarked, ‘Tietkens was obliged to report all the country he had discovered [was] worthless’.2 No new discoveries of good cattle country were to be made thereafter – and the drought made it nigh on impossible to move stock to markets or agistment in the south. Government well-sinking on the route via Charlotte Waters allowed nearly 8,000 stock to move south in 1893 and 15,000 in 1894, with considerable loss en route and extremely low market prices.3 The disastrous conditions led to the resurrection of arguments about the worth of the Northern Territory to South Australia and particularly to the contention, first raised before that colony acquired the northern lands, that the boundary of South Australia should be moved north of the most useful country, the MacDonnell Range, and the rest of the Territory should be handed back to Britain. Such arguments led the South Australian government to solicit the help of the eastern Australian colonies for manning a scientific party to investigate the resources and Aborigines of the MacDonnells and led them to appoint a Royal Commission to advise on the future of the Northern Territory. The first of these, the Horn Scientific Expedition of 1894, took its name from W.A. Horn, failed pastoralist and wealthy investor of South Australia, who provided most of the funds and organisation for the venture; and his summary introduction to the book that recorded the expedition’s results expressed concisely the general opinion of his contemporaries on the Aborigines of Australia. He wrote: The Australian Aborigine is the living representative of a stone age … His origins and history are lost in the mists of the past. He has no written records and few oral traditions. In appearance, he is a naked, hirsute savage … He is by nature light-hearted, merry and prone to laughter, supple-jointed, with an unerring hand that works in perfect unison with his eye, which is as keen as an eagle. He has never been known to wash. He has no private ownership

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of land, except that which is not over carefully concealed about his person … He can travel from point to point for hundreds of miles through the pathless bush with unerring precision and can track an animal over rocks and stones where a European eye would be unable to distinguish a mark. He is a keen observer and knows the habits and changes of form of every variety of animal or vegetable life in his country. Religious belief he has none, but is excessively superstitious … He has no gratitude … and is as treacherous as Judas… Yet withal he is a philosopher who accepts feast or famine without a murmur … I say without hesitation that he is absolutely untameable … thanks to the untiring efforts of the missionary and the stockman he is being rapidly ‘civilised’ off the face of the earth, and in another hundred years the sole remaining evidence of his existence will be the fragments of flint he has fashioned so rudely. It was for this reason that I thought it desirable to get more reliable information, supplemented by photography, of this race while there were any of them remaining in their primitive condition.4 Thus did Horn emphasise the unbridgeable gap between the world views of Aborigines and Europeans, plus reluctant admiration of their natural abilities and the rock-solid belief of all Europeans of the time that they were doomed to extinction. The Horn expedition gathered at Oodnadatta, then the northern terminus of the proposed trans-continental railway, in May 1894, some 700 kilometres north of Port Augusta. This line had reached Oodnadatta in fits and starts in 1890, after many years of argument among South Australian politicians over who should build it, government or private enterprise on the land grant system; and while the government had extended the line each time a burst of optimism about their northern lands struck the ruling ministry – and South Australia had forty-two ministries in forty-three years (1857–1900) – the argument still raged and no one

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anticipated that the line would get no further for thirty-nine years. Oodnadatta was flat, dry and hot; and if you were headed for the MacDonnells you had to take camel teams to see you through the 500 kilometres of stark sandhill, rock and stone country that barred the way. Charles Winnecke handled the Expedition’s logistics with the competence born of experience. Professor Ralph Tate of Adelaide University, a ‘natural scientist’ (botanist), Dr Edward Stirling, ethnologist of the South Australian Museum and his assistant, mineralogy graduate J.A. Watt, made up the expedition membership – with Baldwin Spencer, professor of biology at Melbourne University. An 1891 scientific expedition organized by Sir Thomas Elder had fallen apart in dissension;5 but, as Mulvaney and Calaby say: By contrast, the Horn expedition of only some fourteen weeks and 2,000 camel miles was an outstanding success … Biology profited by the record [of] … 171 new species, mainly beetles, spiders, reptiles and molluscs. The botanical record added 8 new species … and 112 previously unknown in arid Australia.6 Edward Stirling wrote the anthropology report, which dealt mostly with the Aranda (‘Arunta’) and Luritja (‘Luritcha’) tribes,7 on the information supplied by Frank Gillen, the Alice Springs postmaster and keen observer of the Aborigines; but Baldwin Spencer edited virtually the whole report with great skill and patience and, as Morton and Mulvaney remark: The Horn Expedition had a profound impact on Aborigines generally and, in particular, of those in Central Australia. Because Baldwin Spencer met Frank Gillen and formed an influential scholarly relationship, the Horn Expedition aided the growth of the social sciences as partners in the development of missions, pastoralism and the reserve system.8

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The partnership between Spencer and Gillen certainly proved its worth in the years following the Horn Expedition. The two books they produced together, largely created from Gillen’s extensive personal knowledge of the Centralian Aboriginal tribes and Spencer’s editorial and organizational abilities, proved to be seminal: The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) illuminated the social organisation, ceremonial life, customs and traditions of (principally) the Aranda with some light shed on neighbouring tribes;9 and The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904) followed triumphantly with similar details of, particularly, the Warrumungu (‘Warramunga’) tribe and their neighbours,10 and Spencer’s vivid and extensive photography captured exquisite moments in Centralian Aboriginal life.11 As Gordon Briscoe makes clear: Spencer and Gillen established themselves at the head of Autstralian ethnology and anthropology … Their influence was inherited in turn by [A.R.] Radcliffe-Brown, A.P. Elkin, W.E.H. Stanner, T.G.H. Strehlow, R.M. Berndt and D.I. Barwick.12 This listing may have outlined the future key list of Australian authors and advisers to government on Australian policy towards Aborigines; but, as usual with every clash of Indigenous culture and expansionist westerners, its effects on the actual frontier, where races and conflicting theologies collided, were that the often brutal reality never matched the theory. So it was in Centralia; nor did the Aranda and their neighbours derive any immediate advantage from their new fame; for while it established that they were the possessors of a complex culture, these books did not displace the almost universal European view of them as a lower form of life. What did Baldwin Spencer really think of them? In 1895 Mounted Constable C.E. Cowle of Illamurta, one of Spencer’s most constant correspondents on the Centralian Aborigines wrote to him, remarking on Gillen’s recent appointment as Sub-Protector of Aborigines: ‘As you say, it is nice

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to be Protector of Aborigines when one is interested in the Animals’;13 revealing, perhaps, the attitudes of both Cowle and Spencer – and there’s no doubt that both thought with most white Australians that the Aborigines were on a path to inevitable extinction; but it appeared that Gillen, from long experience of the Centralian tribes, took a more kindly, though similar, view. As Mulvaney and Calaby say: … even the diary of his [Gillen’s] initial journey to Alice Springs indicates some interest in and no fear of Aborigines. The fact that both he and Spencer usually termed Aborigines ‘niggers’ is of no particular concern, for the essentially derogatory or racist connotation belongs to a later and more sensitive generation. It is more relevant that Gillen used his sub-protectorship in the best paternalistic traditions of the British Raj to shield Aborigines from white bullets, to urge a policy of arrest and trial on reluctant police whose common practice was to shoot captives, to obtain the transfer of Willshire, the ‘pacifier’, and to establish friendly understanding with tribal elders. Significantly, Gillen did not carry a revolver.14 Significantly, too, his friendship with elders was attained largely from charging MC Willshire with an Aboriginal murder in 1891; and though this courageous act was eventually negated by a blatantly unfair acquittal verdict at Willshire’s trial and a wall of white hostility on the frontier where Gillen lived, it assured him of Aboriginal esteem. He believed that strengthened powers for Aboriginal Sub-Protectors could lead to a situation whereby cattlemen and Aborigines could co-exist on Centralian leases – to ‘make the path to extinction – which we all agree is inevitable and rapidly approaching – as pleasant as possible.’15

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Sub-Protectors were not given greater powers, either on the stations or in the nascent town of Alice Springs. In 1894 the town boasted three stores, a hotel, a saddler, a butcher’s shop and several private dwellings. Two years later, when J.J. Murif, the first person to cross the continent from north to south on a bicycle, peddled into Alice Springs, he found two clusters of buildings both snugly ensconced, hidden among the very numerous gum trees with which the whole flat was dotted: All shade and silence and tranquility! It seemed as I came upon it to be the veritable ‘Sleepy Hollow’ of romance.16 But, when Thomas Bradshaw who succeeded Gillen as both postmaster and Sub-Protector of Aborigines from 1899–1908, tried to protect Aboriginal women from white men by prohibiting white entry to Aboriginal camps between sunset and sunrise, he was told by his Adelaide masters that he had no such powers. In fact, the Sub-Protector had no powers whatsoever except those of protest and publicity. The point was made clear to J.R. Mackay, appointed in 1909, who was told: In the absence of any special legislation for the protection and control of the natives, the power granted to you is of a discretionary character, and you should be guided by the circumstances surrounding any case of a special nature brought under notice.17 Moreover, when Mackay wanted to travel his district to see conditions for himself the deputy Postmaster General would allow him only leave without pay. As I’ve remarked elsewhere18 this meant that the police had free rein and there was never any doubt of where their sympathies lay; they were the spearhead of the white frontier.

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Yet it can be said that the Centralian frontier gave to its native peoples a less brutal introduction to the influx of Europeans than almost any other in the waves of invasion that flooded Australia in the nineteenth century. This owed much to its timing, towards the very end of this era. By then, governments everywhere in the Australian colonies were being forced by growing humanitarianism among their urban populations to take action to stem abuses of their Aboriginals, even in the most pastoral of all colonies, Queensland. In 1897 the Queensland parliament passed into law ‘An Act to make Provision for the better Protection and Care of the Aboriginal and Half-Caste Inhabitants of the Colony …’19 Mission reserves had existed in Queensland for many years. The Act provided for government reserves as well, and for a system of local Protectors. Protectors had unlimited power to send their charges to reserves and keep them there. Aborigines were denied all access to liquor and opium. Their employment had to be regulated under permit by a Protector. Labour contracts were mandatory and had to specify wages and conditions, all subject to a Protector’s approval. As a modern critic has said: ‘While the legislators may have seen this Act as a solution to a short-term problem, the administrators had a different idea; from the beginning they used it as a device for social engineering and control’.20 At least, as C.D. Rowley argued, having at last adopted a policy, Queensland made very strong efforts to carry it out;21 and, as he also notes, the Act was to provided a basic model for other states of the new Australian federation, and even, eventually, for the Northern Territory;22 but not immediately. It affected only the Queensland/Territory border tribes and stations, with a new stabilising of black/white relations. By the time of Federation in 1900, the forces of conflict had moved north to the Gulf country23 and Arnhem Land and probably reached their savage peak in the first years of the 20th century, when the Eastern and African Cold Storage Supply Company took up 32,000 square kilometres of Arnhem Land for cattle and employed two groups of ten to fourteen blacks led by a white man or half-caste, to shoot down the local Aborigines on sight.24

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With the recognition by Centralian Aborigines that they could not force out the white men came adaptation for survival; the ‘intelligent exploitation’ system. Centralian conditions guided it. Firstly, the country was huge, dry, harsh and Aboriginal occupation naturally thin; white numbers were thinner still, particularly in the depth of drought and dispossession of the mid-1990s – and there were very few white women apart from the wives of the Hermannsburg missionaries. One notable exception was the Hayes family. In the 1880s Irishman William Hayes, with a wife, four sons and two daughters, took up stations in Centralia and, as Hartwig says, ‘by 1910 he was by far the biggest landholder in the Centre well on the way to being a wealthy man’.25 In 1983, his grandson Ted Hayes, of Undoolya, recalled the early days: In spite of what you sometimes read and hear about the Aborigines and the early white settlers of that period, there was always good relations each requiring assistance from the other. … They were very faithful workers, very rarely leaving the properties, only for their occasional walkabout, mostly after the seasonal rains. The Aborigines I am speaking about were the first generation from the tribal blacks who in one generation had learnt to accept the white man’s food and customs, and the groups of Aborigines that lived around the stations were people that belonged to that particular area. The native women were very fond of the white children, and taught them many of their skills. Aborigines generally accepted white children born on the stations as members of the tribe.26 This is a pastoralist’s view; but there is truth in it: In return for labour, the tribespeople were able to stay in their own country, continue their ceremonial practices (adapted, probably, to the white man’s time) and the Aboriginal women were an indispensable help to their white counterparts; while the station owners

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gained a consistent workforce, cheap (but not, as Hayes said, ‘unskilled’), in a land where white labour was almost impossible to get and horrendously expensive. Yet the system depended on forebearance and understanding on both sides. For instance, R.F. Thornton, lessee of Tempe Downs, informed Edward Stirling that the Aborigines were, at one time, killing up to 100 cattle a month, ‘a loss that no station could long endure’, as Stirling remarked.27 Thornton, however, continued to provide the local tribe with meat and refused to retaliate against the black stock killers. He duly went broke and had to abandon the station, more because of the lack of markets and poor prices of the 90’s than through stock loss; but he had killed no Aborigines. Perhaps the clearest example of accommodation by both sides occurred when Tom Hanlon and James Wickham took up the abandoned lease of Frew River in 1914. ‘The natives met them with friendliness’, reported J.T. Beckett. A perfect understanding was arrived at by which both sides undertook to respect one another’s rights. Mr Hanlon told me that the natives had frequently rendered him great assistance by informing him of the wandering of his stock into the desert, where they would have perished for the want of water and that not once had any of his stock been hunted or interfered with in any way. The men had helped him build huts and yards, and always had shown themselves to be eager to work and assist as required. In return the grazier gives them a liberal supply of meat and rations when they work.28 But nevertheless old attitudes die hard, as the subsequent history of Centralia shows. More typical of the time was an article that appeared in the Adelaide Chronicle in August 1907, reflecting approvingly on Mounted Constable Erwin Wurmbrand.

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Those were the days when rifles and revolvers were much in evidence and men talked as straight as they could shoot. The only man who seldom talked was the above-mentioned trooper … He left the talking to others and looked after the shooting.29 What of the missions and many stations without white women? As one lonely station manager put it: Where the tall gum trees whisper And the desert oaks moan Must I, like the wild dog Be forever alone.30 Or, as that consummate bushman, Bill Harney, was to put it many years later: Walk around the budding belles in a fit of sexual repression, when all the while they laugh at the ‘good one’ as a stupid fool. Not on your life! The pioneer makes the country by using the gifts within it to his needs.31 As Harney implied, there were accepted ways to ‘borrow’ Aboriginal women and some of the white men were not averse to using them; a station manager’s paramour, for instance, could achieve considerable influence within her tribal group through the control of white food and goods. But the taking of women carried with it reciprocal obligations to the tribe, and her relatives – and there were always too many white men who, through greed or contempt, would use force to acquire the women. This was behind many acts of harassment and revenge by tribespeople – and the problems so caused were worsened by the

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inevitable increase in the number of half-caste children born. Often they fell between two worlds. Sometimes accepted by Aborigines as kinsfolk, they were often disowned by their fathers and were fiercely resented by many Europeans, perhaps because of guilt feelings. In 1896 William Willshire wrote of them: the mongrel half-caste … inherits only the vices of civilisation. If it is a male he is born for the gallows or to be shot; if a female, she becomes a wanton devoid of shame. … I hold out no hope for such a repulsive brood.32 One white response was to deny the problem existed. As a government report on Hermannsburg asserted in 1900: ‘We did not ascertain the existence of a dozen in the district’ 33. Yet ex Sub-Protector Bradshaw of Alice Springs disagreed strongly34 and his successor, McKay campaigned vigorously for halfcaste separation from their parents.35 What did the South Australian government do? Nothing; and they did precious little for full-bloods either. They allocated no Sub-Protectors to the Centre until Gillen’s appointment in 1891, with, as Austin says, ‘the princely sum of twenty pounds a year administering a district that extended from Charlotte Waters to Attack Creek to a limit of 80 kilometres east and west of the telegraph line.’36 In 1888 the South Australian government agreed to establish the 400-square kilometre Warramungu Reserve at Tennant Creek, first of six Reserves established by 1892, all pitifully small and badly placed; and they handed out, parsimoniously, inferior flour, tea, sugar, tobacco – and blankets – from telegraph stations and selected cattle stations, thus adding poor diet to the long list of Aboriginal woes. In 1882 the South Australian government had asked for an irrevocable title to the Northern Territory. The British declined to alter the terms of the 1863 Letters Patent and thereafter South Australians, disgruntled at the continued failure of Territory enterprises, began to suggest that at least the part north of

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the MacDonnell Range be handed back to the Imperial Government. At the same time, common concerns for colonial trade, defence and a White Australia began to turn the thoughts of politicians towards the idea of federation. In 1883 a Sydney conference founded the Federal Council of Australia. South Australia joined this body in 1888 and sent two of its leading politicians, premier John Cockburn and Thomas Playford to Melbourne in February 1890 for the intercolonial conference which proved to be the first of those that led directly to the founding of the Commonwealth. Thereafter South Australian politicians played a full part in the protracted negotiations of the 1890s. This involved the future fate of the Northern Territory. In 1895 the South Australian government created a seven-member Royal Commission to enquire into the Northern Territory which, according to the Adelaide Register, was losing South Australian taxpayers’ money at the rate of 60,000 pounds per year.37 The Commission’s findings were inconclusive to say the least and no less than five members of it dissented from at least some of them. Five members visited north Queensland to investigate mainly sugar cane farming – and Kanaka labour – but no one bothered to visit the Territory. Most of the thirty-five meetings the Commission held were in Sydney or Melbourne where, their report said, ‘the Commission obtained valuable evidence from persons engaged extensively on pastoral pursuits in the Northern Territory and who had practical acquaintance with the conditions existing there’.38 This farce complained at length about ‘bad management, extravagance and incompetency’39 – nearly all in the far north of the Territory – and spent far too much time on agonizing over sugar cane production, which had already failed in the Top End. Very few of the Commission’s further recommendations concerned Central Australia. They did recommend the completion of the transcontinental railway on the land grant system, that pastoral holdings laws be eased and that the government sink wells in dry country and give assistance to mining. Apart from desultory well-sinking, the government ignored them all, perhaps because attention was then focused on

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federation – and the possibilities that it might bring. Yet for some, the Territory satisfied a need beyond the prosaic matters of men, money and markets. ‘It has been an unlucky country, much abused and misrepresented’, wrote John Costello to the Commissioners, but I have this faith, that a time of glowing prosperity is in store for it, that the future will bring with it a measure of success counterbalancing its many failures and its long series of disasters in the past … The manhood of Australia has not decayed, the same bold enterprising spirit that marked the old pioneer will be found in the young generation – heroic endeavour, great heart, whole valour, restless energy, firmness, hardihood, and everlasting hope.40 Costello, once lessee of Lake Nash station, of a string of properties five hundred kilometres wide between the MacArthur and the Roper rivers and of five thousand square kilometres in the Centre, had gradually lost everything to drought, disease, poor markets and Aboriginal cattle spearing – and by 1895 even his well-tended home station at Lake Nash had fallen into the hands of his mortgagers, the Queensland National Bank. He was ruined; yet he could still see the Territory as Ernest Giles had seen Centralia twenty years earlier, as a land where ‘there was room for … fields of gold and … room for me’: the vision that drove so many of the miners and pastoralists of the region. As we have seen, the 1895 Royal Commission told the South Australian Government nothing it did not already know; the last years of their Northern Territory rule tended to be a period of relative stagnation, particularly in Central Australia. The pastoral industry benefited from rising cattle prices after about 1900, but expansion of that industry was almost entirely confined to the belt of the Territory’s best cattle country, Victoria River and the Barkly Tableland. Pastoralists in these regions had access, increasingly, to the Western Australian

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and Queensland markets and to overseas shipping opportunities in Asia. But Centralian pastoralists had only the Adelaide market; and while Centralian cattle did not suffer from redwater, a tick-borne disease that decimated northern herds in the 1880s and 1890s, and more wells had been bored on the southern route to the railhead at Oodnadatta, that road journey was still long, hard and expensive. The great hope was that of a major gold discovery, as had happened in NSW and Victoria. As Alice Bradshaw, the postmaster’s daughter at Alice Springs wrote: In 1902 a rush began in earnest, when gold was found at Winnecke’s Depot, fifty miles south of the telegraph station … but then, miraculously, the invasion began. There were men in buggies, drays, wagons and sulkies and on horseback. There were men humping their blueys, there were even men who pushed handcarts carrying their belongings all the way from Oodnadatta – and if that wasn’t the ultimate in doing it the hard way I’d like to know what was … Alice Springs was transformed overnight … Whereas we usually saw a new face once a month, sometimes only one in three months, we now had more than we could readily identify.41 A shanty town sprang up at Winnecke’s Depot; within four years the gold ran out, the town disappeared and Alice again became a sleepy village. This happened again and again. Yet, in that age before the advent of governmentbacked social security, the desperate hope of finding wealth in gold drove men on; and the hope of finding large gold deposits near the ranges, rather than Centralian pastoralism, drove the politicians of South Australia when they tried hard to incorporate the MacDonnell’s country into their own colony and give the rest to anyone who would take it; and that, increasingly, after 1911, became

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the new Federal Government of Australia. The Federal Parliament didn’t want to take control of the ‘white elephant’ of the north, nor did it wish to inherit, let alone expand, the Port Augusta – Oodnadatta railway, the line that ran to nowhere. But South Australian politicians, divided as they were on most issues connected with the railway, though mainly on the question of whether to make it a government line or build it on the land grant system, were united in one respect; they were determined that the transcontinental railway should be built directly from Darwin to Adelaide, without major deviation to either Western Australia or Queensland. Any possible benefits from the line must flow to Adelaide! The transfer of the Territory to the Federal Government was held over while the parties within both state and federal parliaments bickered; and in the circumstances it is not surprising that South Australia did nothing to extend the transcontinental railway any further than Oodnadatta. This situation allowed the camel trains to continue and expand. These beasts were an absolute necessity in the open waterless country of Centralia and the ‘Afghans’ who drove them – usually Muslims from Afghanistan and surrounding Asian lands – were to become famous in folklore and in the naming of the northern railway train, (the ‘Ghan’); but probably Afghans such as the man known as ‘Charlie Sadadeen’ and his 120–130 camels42 were matched by Europeans such as Christopher Bagot who serviced the central telegraph station in the 1890s and Frank Wallis, the ‘Camel King’, whose massive operations spanned most of the Northern Territory.43 In 1898 all Australian colonies held a referendum on the question of Federation. All voted for it by large majorities except NSW which produced a ‘yes’ vote by only a slim margin – and the citizens of the Northern Territory endorsed Federation by a huge majority – 148 for ‘yes’, 14 for ‘no’. Even for the small communities of the Territory this was a shockingly low turnout, possibly because of a combination of apathy and the itinerant status of most Europeans. For the central region the figures were appalling: 31 ‘yes’, 9 ‘no’.44 At least that

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dismal result gave a cloak of legitimacy to the continuing argument over a Federal takeover – and to South Australia’s belated interest in protecting the Aborigines of the Northern Territory. Probably J.L. Parsons, Minister in charge of the Northern Territory in the early 1880s, later a long-term Administrator based in Darwin, and later still (1890–1893) one of the first two members to represent the Northern Territory in the South Australian House of Assembly, expressed the majority view in writing: the intrusion of the white man is a declaration of war and the result is simply the survival of the fittest.45 War, whereby the winner takes all and the loser adapts to the victor’s demands or dies; war, against a people doomed in any case to extinction under inexorable natural law. For men imbued with these convictions, there was no limit to the means they could use, in the vivid Aboriginal phrase, for ‘making people quiet’ and, despite the vaguely humanitarian instructions they gave to their Protectors of Aborigines, South Australian governments were permeated with the same ideas. C.J. Dashwood found this when he tried to give legislative protection to Aborigines in 1899. He had come to Darwin in 1892 as Government Resident and resident judge. At first he showed little concern for Aborigines. In a three-day sitting of the Palmerston Circuit Court he sentenced ten of them to death for murder, ignoring the protest of the Northern Territory Times – usually no friend to the blacks – that most of the accused did not seem to know what the trials were about. But, as he learnt more of race relations in the Territory, Dashwood became increasingly worried about the exploitation of the Aborigines. In 1899 he sent to Adelaide a detailed report on these matters. Premier, C.C. Kingston read it, noted that ‘this chapter of errors is a blot on our colonisation’, and invited Dashwood to draft a bill for dealing with the evils he had listed.46 The Bill tightened the Protection system, regulated employment, imposed heavy

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penalties on the abductors of Aboriginal women and prohibited the supply of alcohol to all Aborigines. The pastoralists were against it. They had no great influence with the Kingston government, but they had enough parliamentary sympathy to sink the Bill in a Select Committee of the Legislative Council – mainly, says an eminent modern Territory jurist, the Hon Justice Dean Mildren, because of strong opposition from Centralian pastoralists who argued ‘that the reforms were impractical’.47 The Bill was lost; but Commonwealth-State squabbling over transfer details continued. In general, the more conservative politicians tended to favour continued South Australian control of the Territory, or at least the retention of Centralia and a land grant railway. The Liberals and Labor tended to prefer total Federal control of the whole Territory and with a government-built transcontinental railway. In May 1909, Alfred Deakin, the complex, brilliant leader of the Liberals, under the banner of the ‘Fusion’ party, concluded an agreement along the latter lines. Andrew Fisher’s Labor party took up the baton when it became the government in 1910.48 At that time, the South Australian politicians appear to have suddenly realised that they had a problem, not helped by their vice regal representative Sir George le Hunte, who passed through the Territory in 1905, was royally entertained by the pastoralists and reported soothingly, ‘I am satisfied … that there is no general ill treatment of the Aborigines in our Northern Territory.49 Their state alone had never passed any legislation specifically related to the Aborigines in their northern division; and they hastened to present a Bill based heavily on the Queensland model of 1897. In the last days of 1910, the South Australian legislature passed this Bill into law. This Act provided for the appointment of a Chief Protector and sub-Protectors. All employment of Aborigines was subject to their control. Asians were not permitted to employ Aborigines at all. The Administrator had the power to exclude his black subjects from any area at will. The Chief Protector could prohibit whites and Asians from entering Aboriginal camps; he could take any Aborigine or half-caste into custody; and he became the legal guardian of every

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Aboriginal or part-Aboriginal child under the age of 18 years. A few weeks later, on 1 January 1911, the Commonwealth of Australia took control of the Northern Territory; and, under regulation and an Ordinance of 1911, the Commonwealth adopted and adapted the Act. No one thought to consult the people most concerned; but weren’t they just expecting to smooth the pillow of a dying race?

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Cattle Droving in the Northern Territory, NTL and Powell, Far Country, No. 37

Frontier Conflict: A posed photograph of MCs Wurmbrand (left) and Willshire (second from right) with Aboriginal trackers and prisoner, NTL and Powell, Far Country, No. 36

Baldwin Spencer (back seat), Cowper and Dr Gilruth in Gilruth’s car, c.1912, NTAS and Powell, Far Country, No. 41

Chapter 4

War and Peace and the Commonwealth

The core areas of Central Australia – the MacDonnell and surrounding ranges, plus Alice Springs – have no natural contacts to anywhere else in Australia: they are surrounded by vast tracts of desert and semi-desert whichever way you turn. Their cultural, economic and personal links from the earliest days of European settlement were to the south – Adelaide and Port Augusta – and not to Darwin and the Victoria River/Barkly Tablelands of the north; and so it has remained to the present day. The sole exception to this pattern was Lake Nash and nearby stations bordering Queensland in the northeast of Centralia. They looked east, to the men and markets of that state. This subservience of Centralia to outsiders began under South Australia, with its focus on settling Darwin and reacting to the primacy of northern purposes and interests; and the coming of the Commonwealth, with its Administrator and his bureaucracy in Darwin, underlined this situation. From the settlers’ point of view, Central Australia would have done well to remain part of South Australia. Not only did they lose all their electoral rights when the Commonwealth took control – since the federal politicians, most of whom knew nothing of the Territory, solved the problem of franchising the few European settlers of the area by simply disenfranchising the lot of them; but the sense of belonging naturally

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to South Australia had cropped up again and again in discussions about the Territory’s future since the initial considerations of the late 1850s. In fact, as Bob Reece shows1 the transfer of political power from South Australia to the Commonwealth was almost sunk at the last minute by southern legislators who demanded that the MacDonnells remain as part of South Australia. In the end though, they reluctantly ceded Centralia to the federal Northern Territory in return for the Commonwealth’s undertaking to build the transcontinental railway directly from Darwin to Port Augusta without deviation either to Queensland or Western Australia. The canny Federal politicians, particularly Alfred Deakin who made this agreement, put no time limit upon this provision and the South Australians, presuming that the Commonwealth would have to build the line shortly to develop the Territory, did not insist on a timetable for the job. Neither side anticipated that Darwin would not get its transcontinental railway for nearly a century; but pressure, usually from South Australian politicians and businessmen did cause the southern line extension from Oodnadatta to Alice Springs by 1929; and that, as will be seen, was about the only useful thing the Commonwealth did directly for Centralia’s benefit. For the rest they concentrated upon the north, just as past South Australian parliaments before them and virtually all the results of these policies had, at best, only a trickle-down effect on Centralia. Lack of a railway and lack of population (in 1911, Donovan notes, ‘the total European population of central Australia numbers 272, with only 138 being resident in the Alice Springs census region’2) didn’t prevent the Melbourne-based Young Australia National Party from rhapsodising about: the most central, safest and the ideal site in all Australia … Providence evidently intended the MacDonnell Ranges, adjacent to Alice Springs, for the Central Capital City of a mighty nation.3

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This great vision didn’t resonate with Australia’s politicians. Maybe they didn’t like the thought of riding a camel for two weeks in order to get there. Like the Young Australia National Party itself, that vision of Centralia’s future sank without trace. And Centralians exchanged their rulers, tied by blood and business, for a remote Melbourne (later Canberra) – based, federal parliament. This made little immediate difference beyond the loss of political rights; but it began a long period of secondary status for Centralia under Commonwealth control. This became apparent soon after the federal parliament took over. The only link between Alice Springs and Darwin 1500 kilometres away was the telegraph, which was used only for through traffic from overseas to Adelaide. Mr Justice Mitchell, the Acting Administrator of the Northern Territory, complained: Considerable difficulty has been experienced by the police and this department in consequence of the absence of a direct mail between Alice Springs and Darwin. It is practically impossible to properly administer the Southern Portion of the Northern Territory from Darwin, without a through mail. The isolation of the MacDonnell Ranges is a great bar to its progress.4 He meant isolation from Port Darwin and the sea, still at that time (as it always had been) the only logical route for Territory development; and Federal concerns for the defence and development of their new colony were concentrated on the north. This showed clearly when the Commonwealth sent five scientists to assess the potential of the area. Walter Campbell, a retired agriculturalist, came to Darwin – by sea – in May 1911 and selected sites for three experimental farms: All were in the Top End. Then, later in 1911, came four more investigators: Anton Breinl, director of the Australian Institute for Tropical Medicine, who reported the north climatically suitable for white settlement; geologist W.G.

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Woolnough, who investigated northern mineral resources on a trip from Darwin to Camooweal; Baldwin Spencer, then Professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne, who reported on Aboriginal people – in the north only; and John Gilruth, brilliant veterinarian of Melbourne University, charged with assessing the stock-carrying capacity of the country – which he did, but only in the north. However, Gilruth’s appointment in 1912 as the first Commonwealthappointed Administrator did lead to the extension of his most passionate interest, pastoralism, into the MacDonnell Ranges. He was probably the first real motoring enthusiast the Territory had ever known. His cars – first a Napier, then a more powerful Talbot, did amazing feats in the largely road-less Territory. As I’ve said elsewhere: With the chauffeur, Cowper, at the wheel, Gilruth beside him and various passengers sprawled over the pile of luggage, petrol and spares in the rear, that car [the Talbot] travelled most of the Territory; crashing through the bush, grinding and limping over a maze of wagon-tracks, rafted over rivers, dragged by horse power or human muscle, over countless bogs.5 Their most memorable trip started from Cloncurry, traversed the Barkly Tableland to Powell Creek and battled down the Telegraph line to Alice Springs, the MacDonnell Ranges and Hermannsburg, which he inspected. Gilruth was not greatly enthusiastic about Mission efforts, but he did recommend the continuation of their government subsidy. Tyre problems and boggy ground forced him to leave the Talbot at Barrow Creek on the return trip and complete the odyssey on horseback. A thousand kilometres in the saddle returned him to Darwin, a feat never repeated – or even challenged – by later Administrators of the Northern Territory. Gilruth has never received due credit for this bold venture into his administrative domain, probably because

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it has been overwhelmed by the strife with unions, Darwin townspeople and the failure of Vestey’s great northern meatworks that caused the government to withdraw him and his administrative cronies from the Territory in 1918– 19.6 But Gilruth’s Centralian visit was not without influence in the region. His concern about the ‘half-caste’ and ‘quadroon’ children whom he saw in Alice Springs led to a recommendation to him by Sergeant Bob Stott, Deputy Protector of Aborigines (and the uncrowned king of the town) that brought about the creation in 1914 of the ‘Bungalow’ for their care and education. In that year too, Gilruth sent his Chief Inspector of Aboriginals, J.T. Beckett, to Central Australia. Beckett was, for the times, remarkably sympathetic to Aborigines and half-castes, as his report to Gilruth showed.7 He praised the ‘Aluari’ (Alyawarra) people as ‘a really fine tribe’, described the handout government flour as ‘of an inferior quality, in most cases decidedly bad’, drew attention to massacres of Aborigines and defended half-castes against ‘cruelly false’ white denigration; but his influence was lost when Gilruth had to abolish his position in 1916 as part of wartime economies. The post went to the Government Secretary, H.E. Carey, who knew nothing of Aborigines; and the Federal government, thoroughly confused by the Aboriginal question in the Northern Territory, could do no better than amend the 1911 Ordinance in 1918 to tighten control of them still further.8 In time, the iron grip of European control was to be replaced by a power and influence beyond the reach of their Aboriginal kinfolk outside the Northern Territory. Thus, they can be seen as the ultimate main beneficiaries of Commonwealth rule; but in 1918 that era lay far in the future. At least, the Bungalow, constantly criticised though it was by most of the residents and under deplorable conditions in three iron sheds, provided some education and shelter under the strict, benign regime of the schoolmistress, Ida Standley. T.G. Oliver, Inspector of Mines in 1913 matched his boss, Gilruth, in travelling throughout almost the whole of Centralia, inspecting mine sites.

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Optimist though he was, he had to admit that Central Australian mining was moribund and could only hope for better conditions in the future;9 and he emphasised the vastness and the lack of internal communications that plagued the Territory by taking 48 days (presumably on horseback since there was no alternative) to travel from Port Darwin to Arltunga.10 As Gilruth remarked, ‘Transport remains a great and very expensive difficulty’.11 But at least the extensive travels of the Administrator and his two subordinates showed a real interest in Central Australia. In March 1913, the Commonwealth appointed a Royal Commission to report on northern development; and four months after this body’s inconclusive report of February 1914, the Minister with responsibility for the Northern Territory, Patrick Mahon Glynn, announced the government’s intention to build railways, roads and stock routes and to develop closer settlement of the Victoria River and eastern Barkly Tableland regions. All those development proposals related to northern areas of the Territory, not Centralia, which appeared to be the forgotten land.12 Then came the Great War; and these policies were scrapped. In 1914–15, total Commonwealth expenditure was 30 million pounds and 18 million pounds of that represented the cost of the war. Five years later the respective figures were 88 million pounds and 53 million pounds. Under these conditions, Federal Treasurers had only one thought for the home front – economy – and Territory development suffered accordingly.13 Peter Donovan summed up the result succinctly: By 1920, the agricultural lands were practically deserted, the experimental farms had failed, the meatworks had closed, and the administration was held in such abhorrence by powerful elements in Darwin that the Administrator was recalled, and his immediate successor and other senior officials were expelled.14

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But again all this related to the northern section of the Territory. Mass sackings of departmental heads and staff had also taken place. This did not affect Central Australia greatly – there were precious few of those gentry there; but of the Darwin-based public servants who had shown real interest in the Centre, Beckett lost his post in 1916 as noted, Oliver went too and so did the ebullient Dr H.I. Jensen. As I have said elsewhere: In 1916 he was foolish enough to charge Gilruth with forty-three offences ranging from slander to misuse of government horses and undue interference with the Mines Department. A Commissioner, A.M. Burnett of Sydney, came to investigate. He cleared Gilruth of all charges and Jensen compulsorily departed the government service, vowing vengeance.15 Thus was government interest in the Centre severely diminished, though, as will be seen, Gilruth’s own interest in pastoralism would combine with the Federal government’s own constant leanings. As Ted Ling remarks: the Commonwealth’s principal objective in its administration of Territory lands was always closer settlement.16 Closer settlement for defence and revenue return; but that objective had to be put aside for the duration of the war. That war did deplete severely the fit young European manpower of the Territory. How many Territorians – or Centralians – enlisted for war service is unknown because, until 1916, they had no provision for enlistment in their own communities; they had to move interstate to enlist, mostly to Queensland and South Australia. Moreover, a soldier’s record did not include racial details. In 1917 Gilruth reported that 75 men had left government service in the NT to enlist.17 By that time it has been

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estimated that not fewer than 200 young Territorians18 had gone to war and new research by Norm Cramp has now apparently doubled that number. Probably a sizeable component of these were Centralians and, despite not being citizens or targets for military enlistment, at least three men of Aboriginal descent are known to have served as Light Horsemen.19 But, whatever the true number of Army enlistees from Central Australia, the removal of so many of the fittest young men must have depleted the white labour force severely and forced upon employers, notably in the pastoral industry, an even greater dependence upon Aboriginal labour. As Ted Ling says: Many pastoral stations were located on Aboriginal lands, and for most of the Commonwealth era provided the industry with lowcost labour indeed to such an extent that the industry may not have survived without them.20 Centralia during the Great War was certainly one such time; and, as McLaren and Cooper note, half-castes in the Alice Springs region in 1915 were pressed into service and were considered ‘quite as efficient as any others; several held positions on the larger stations and were regarded as good cattle men’.21 Cattle prices rose and demand increased as the war went on – wars are nearly always good for business, which may help to explain why we have so many – and this materially helped Centralian cattle stations to at least survive and sometimes even turn a profit during the war years 1914–18; despite the continued obstacle of having to drive cattle south to the railhead at Oodnadatta – or, for Lake Nash, Tobermorey and other border stations, into Queensland. Centralian mining too, received a boost, mainly through the sharply greater demand for mica, a vital component of radio communication and broad use in industry. It seems that the only real sufferer on the Centralian home front during the war was the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg. Australians are as prone as any other people

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to hysterical patriotism. So it was in this case. Pastor Carl Strehlow, Australianborn-and-bred, was accused of wildly ridiculous pro-German activities by both southern fanatics and neighbouring pastoralists, envious of the mission’s lands and hostile to its Aboriginal protection policies. All were wrong and proved to be so; but, to the shame of Federal legislators, they had enough influence to cause the cancellation of the Mission’s annual government subsidy of 300 pounds. It was not restored until sanity became well established in 1923.22 By 1919 Gilruth had gone from the Northern Territory; but one of his initiatives continued. In his 1913 ramblings he had seen what he judged were good grazing lands still unoccupied in the region between Lake Nash, the Sandover River and the overland telegraph. So did J.T. Beckett in 1914; and, in 1917, Gilruth instructed that this country – the lands of the Alyawarr and their neighbours – be subdivided for station use. In July/August 1918 Director of Lands H.M. Trower accompanied Gilruth on a camel trek from Hatches Creek wolfram field in the Davenport Range to Lake Nash by way of Annitowa and Argadargada waterholes. Subdivision followed. Between December 1918 and October 1919 veteran surveyor David Lindsay did a meticulous survey in a gruelling trek that took him back and forth across the Sandover country, sketching in the outline of 49 station blocks. Unfortunately, the Commonwealth’s desire for closer settlement dominated this survey, carving out the lands in rectangular blocks without consideration of suitable cattle country or water supply. Thirty-nine blocks of Centralian land surveyed by others were added with the whole offered for lease in 1920.23 Despite the easing of stocking and improvement conditions for this occasion, only one permanent station resulted. As Constable W.G. (George) Murray wrote in 1922: ‘The only genuine settlers in this neighbourhood are Messrs [M.F.] Kennedy and [N.L.] Riley, who took up Elkedra’.24 At the end of 1922, the government withdrew all remaining leases from the market, pending a major reconstruction of the tangled web of land legislation carried over from the period of South Australian rule.

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At this time. the Territory had run out of steam. Gilruth’s successor, Staniforth Smith, was a temporary appointee, and he concentrated largely on bringing industrial peace to the north. His successor, the formidable Queensland ex-Inspector of Police, F.C. Urquhart, noted in 1921 that the ‘economic and industrial position in the Territory is one of suspended animation’.25 Just about the only new light in a dismal scene of low prices and high costs for miners and cattlemen came in 1922, when the Commonwealth government at last – and reluctantly – granted the Northern Territory a member in its House of Representatives – but one with no voting rights. Harold Nelson, notable union leader from Darwin, won the seat at the election of that year and was to hold it for twelve years; and, if he couldn’t vote, he could certainly speak – and he did. As Senator P.J. Lynch grumbled in 1930, ‘every grievance voiced by the people of the Northern Territory sounds like a foghorn in this parliament’.26 Here entered Senator George Pearce, Commonwealth Minister for Home and Territories, and formerly Minister for Defence. He took charge of the matter. In 1920, his ministerial predecessor, Senator Alexander Poynton, had opined that ‘closer settlement’ (i.e. agriculture) having failed in the Territory, the only hope of development lay ‘in the more primitive method of sticking with sheep and cattle’. 27 As Prime Minister S.M. Bruce told parliament in 1926: We are forced to realise that the great nations of the world, with teeming populations and pressing need of economic expansion, are looking more and more to Australia and enquiring to what extent we who hold this great territory are using it. In its present empty state it is the Achilles heel of Australia.28 And he echoed Poynton in declaring that ‘the pastoralist – and the big pastoralist at that – must be first’.29 This remark reflected the successful propaganda of the Northern Territory

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Pastoral Lessees Association formed in 1923, as Ted Ling says, ‘to represent the interests of pastoral expansion in the western Victoria River District and eastern Barkly Tableland’.30 The sturdy independents of the Centralian region were not directly consulted by the parliamentarians. They did, however, gain from the trickle-down effect of Pearce’s new policy, which reached its culmination in the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1924. Pearce hoped to consolidate Territory leaseholds in a single Act to replace the smorgasbord of existing conditions. Thus, lessees were offered inducements in lease simplification, compensation for improvements, fixed [low] rental rates and, as Ted Ling says, ‘effectively, they were given absolute tenure over 50 per cent of their lands’ for forty years. 31 Most stations throughout both the northern and central areas of the Territory took up the offer and committed their lessees, but not all. The ‘sting in the tail’ of the 1924 lease proposals was the provision for resumption of parts of the land in ten and twenty years’ time. So did Pearce arrange for the government’s great dream of closer settlement. In 1936, 226 Northern Territory leases were held under the 1924 regulations, but 112 remained under early Commonwealth and South Australian leases which were long-term and held no provision for resumption.32 Under the new regulations, the government again offered the Central Australian blocks for lease. Results were disappointing. After some leases were taken up, then dropped, Kennedy and Riley’s Elkedra continued to operate, and Huckitta, under manager W. Maddrill, was founded and survived, while on the Queensland border south of Lake Nash, R.G. and W.G. Anderson consolidated their hold on the 1,234 square miles of Tobermory station. To the west of Huckitta, one more station was created at this time. In one of the most remarkable feats in Australian droving, C.O. Chalmers, his wife Cora and four young children set out to drive sheep from New South Wales to new lands in the north, pursuing the ‘vision splendid’, or as the family’s biographer puts it, just the ‘quiet ones, who found their way to a new world, simply because they hoped

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it would be a better place for their children than the old’;33 through Blackall and Barcaldine to Boulia, where they saw out the hot, dry summer. Then they turned due west to the Georgina River and south along the riverbank to Walgra station and Urandangi. On Lake Nash station they crossed the Queensland/Northern Territory border and thrust southwestward towards the Sandover River region. Lake Nash stockman Arthur Groom who met them as they passed his camp on a Gordon’s Creek waterhole, was amazed at this ‘brave, insane family…’ and noted that It was not until a mirage to the westward had spread once more like dancing octopus, and engulfed them all, that we realised we did not know the man’s name.34 It is pleasing to record that Chalmers found his promised land – albeit a hard one – on Sandover country next to Huckitta, called it MacDonald Downs and established there a Centralian family dynasty that still exists and flourishes. In 1947, Groom met Chalmers in Alice Springs and heard his story;35 that, too, was a happy ending; but in that stark land, so many journeys ended only in tragedy. Such was the last journey of Pastor Carl Strehlow. For twenty – eight years Strehlow had led Hermannsburg mission with dedicated energy, coping with (to the Lutherans) his wayward Aboriginal groups, and fierce droughts and famine, pastoral hostility and wartime paranoia, and – not least – loneliness and lack of communications to the outside world; but, by 1922, Strehlow’s health had deteriorated drastically and the decision was made to transport him south for medical help that might save his life. Three pastors had recently reached the mission by car – and, seeing this as the fastest way to the distant railhead at Oodnadatta, the Hermannsburg missionaries appealed to the Mission Board in Adelaide for a car to be sent. The Board decided, according to Strehlow’s son Theodore, that they could not afford the expense,36 and advised

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him to take horse and buggy to Oodnadatta, four weeks journey away. ‘They are not going to waste any money on giving me a chance to live’, said a bitter, painwracked Strehlow.37 Was that so? The Lutheran missions, largely dependent upon private donations, had no money to spare and in those early days of motoring, success in such an objective was by no means certain; and a private car was sent north of Oodnadatta to meet the dying man. In forty agonizing days, Strehlow’s buggy reached Horseshoe Bend; and Strehlow died the next day, 19 October 1922, of pleurisy, dropsy and asthma. As C.T. Madigan wrote: They buried that devoted follower of his Master, in the country to which he gave his life in a coffin made of the only timber available, that of old whisky cases.38 T.G.H. (Theodore) Strehlow went on to become the foremost chronicler of the Aranda people he grew up amongst. The Hermannsburg mission went on from 1926 under the guidance of another great son of the Lutheran church, Pastor F.W. Albrecht. With his 1924 lands legislation in place, George Pearce decided to take advantage of the relative prosperity of Australia. Between 1921 and 1929, 323,000 immigrants came to this country. The states borrowed 200 million pounds and spent it on development schemes. British and American capital flowed in. General Motors, Ford, Dunlop, Lysaght. ICI, General Electric and other overseas companies set up branches or subsidiaries in Australia and vastly increased the range of secondary industries.39 Pearce moved what appeared to be a radical proposal: To divide the Northern Territory horizontally at the 20th parallel to try to attract people and capital to the north. Each area, Northern Australian and Central Australia, was to have its own administration and development plan. This seemed to Centralians and particularly to the people of Alice Springs, (officially ‘Stuart’ until 1933) the designated capital and seat

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of government of Central Australia to be a harbinger of real equality with the north. Instead, even in the process of setting it up, the new political structures emphasised only the previous role of Centralia as the forgotten land. Thus, when Pearce brought his plans to Cabinet they suggested that a British enquirer be appointed before the decision took place, to recommend on ports, docks and river works, all, obviously, in the north. Sir George Buchanan, duly selected, came to investigate the north only and reported to the government in July 1925.40 The bill to divide the Territory took effect on 1 February 1927. It did create two separate administrations, but also provided a North Australian Commission charged with developing plans for all forms of communication – in the north only. No equivalent was provided for the Centre; in fact, initially, nothing at all was provided for the Centre. As Northern Territory member Harold Nelson complained to the House of Representatives in 1926: The North Australia Commission will shortly be appointed, but already north Australia has a land board, a Government resident, a public works department, and other public departments with staffs adequate to carry out the necessary road and water schemes there … I point out that for the Central Australian part of the Territory, no organisation whatever has been provided.41 Nelson had a good point there; and when the new Resident for Central Australia was chosen he was not a man of Territory service like his northern counterpart R.H. Weddell, who was already in place, having been appointed to the northern post early in 1926.42 John Charles Cawood, a NSW businessman, won the post, apparently because he was favourably known to members of the Federal parliament.43 He estimated the whole European population of Central Australia at 400, of half-castes at 5,530 and ignored the Aborigines. He reported the sinking of a few wells for cattle, constructed a road of sorts (rough even

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now!), – from Lake Nash to Alice Springs and took eighteen months to build offices and living quarters for his deputy, V.G. (‘Vic’) Carrington and himself.44 Cawood also presided over the last open massacre of Aborigines in the twentieth century. Even now it seems incredible that such an event could take place in the long-settled civil society of Australia. Perhaps as Stuart Traynor suggests, it might not have happened if Sergeant Bob Stott, cautious, pragmatic and thoroughly knowledgeable of the Aboriginal world, had not been deposed by Cawood’s arrival from his long reign as ‘the benevolent, unavowed king of Central Australia’.45 But the Coniston massacre did happen; and Cawood stands condemned for his part in its perpetration and the disgraceful cover up that followed. These murders are not unique; just the culmination of what the Walpiri called the ‘wild times’ of the 1920s. M.F. Kennedy of Elkedra, Harry Henty of Frew River and ‘old Billy McDrill’ (Bill Madrill, Kidman’s Huckitta manager) have been singled out by Walpiri for particular harshness towards Aborigines; and rumours of secret massacres were rife.46 I have summarised the Coniston killings elsewhere as follows: On 7 August 1928 dingo hunter Fred Brooks was killed by Aborigines on Coniston station, 250 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs. Scorching drought lay over the land, forcing the nomadic Walpiri to move close on to the stations in search of food and water. Cattle spearing increased and few station lessees had the means or the inclination to supply the tribesmen with rations. This was the background to Brooks’ killing. The immediate reasons are disputed: the results are not. C.A. Cawood Government Resident of Central Australia sent out Mounted Constable William Murray, with trackers Paddy and Major, to find the killers. At Coniston station, Murray recruited the lessee, R.B. Stafford and three other men. On 16 August the party reached a camp of twenty-

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three Aborigines. They shot down three men and two women and rode on, killing at other camps as they encountered them. On 1 September Murray returned to Alice Springs with two prisoners, Padygar and Akirkra. He reported seventeen killings. Cawood sent him out again to avenge a murderous attack on pastoralist ‘Nugget’ Morton. This time the dead totalled fourteen – officially. Unofficial estimates average about seventy killings for both expeditions.

47

Johnny Martin Jumpijinpa was a small boy then.

He saw his father killed with other men. ‘They just draftem out like cattle – shootem all the men’. Padygar and Akirkra, tried in Darwin for the murder of Brooks, were acquitted; but the Walpiri fled their country. Many never returned. 48 According to Stuart Traynor, Bullfrog Japanangka, a Walpiri man, was the main culprit and was never arrested.

49

Certainly, Padygar and Akirkra

were innocent as the all-white jury at their trial realised: They took only fifteen minutes to let them go. But, equally innocent, it is apparent, were the Walpiri murdered by Murray and his cohort. Why did they do so? Perhaps there’s a clue in the comment that Cawood made to a Hermannsburg missionary a few weeks before the Coniston killings. He is reported to have remarked that it was ‘time the blacks were taught a lesson’;50 thus echoing the pervasive fear and suspicion that underlay the attitudes of nearly all the tiny white minority towards the black majority. This is a grim strain that runs through Centralian contact history, parallel with the bonds of comfortable co-existence. It seems that Murray and his mainly station and itinerant-worker parties were infected too. Thrown into damage control by hostile southern reaction, the Federal Government and Cawood share the blame for a contemptible performance. When word of the killings reached the south, the outcry from the Association for the Protection of Native Races, the churches and the press was enough to alarm the government

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into appointing a Board of Enquiry; Queensland police magistrate A.H. O’Kelly, South Australian police inspector P.A. Giles and Cawood, the very man who had sent out Murray to kill. Unsurprisingly, the Board’s report, made public on 29 January 1929, claimed that in all cases the shootings were justified as self-defence and that neither settlers nor police had given any provocation. Cawood’s June 1929 report even claimed: the natives killed in the various executions were all members of the Walmulla tribe from Western Australia who were on a marauding expedition, with the avowed object of wiping out the white settlers and the native boys employed on the stations.51 Public outrage at this massacre resulted in no overt government reaction,52 yet Cawood retired within five months of writing it and was succeeded by his deputy ‘Vic’ Carrington; and, two years later, as Australia crashed into the worst depression the country has ever known, the Commonwealth government used that excuse to re-amalgamate Central Australia and Northern Australia into the Northern Territory, with R.H. Weddell as the Darwin-based Administrator and Carrington as his Alice Springs-based deputy. Was this act a reaction to Cawood’s incompetence? Who knows? For the sake of Australia’s conscience it is to be hoped so. At least, the Coniston killings were never to be repeated. This episode did not end the ‘wild time’, but it did make it impossible for a government-sponsored massacre ever to occur again. What had five years of separation done for either part of the Northern Territory? In 1928, Dr Cecil Cook, the Chief Medical Officer, had set up the North Australia Medical Service (later the Northern Territory Medical Service). The northern railway was extended from Emungalin to a deserted spot called Birdum and the North Australia Commission’s grand plans for ports, railways, roads and water supplies fell before financial stringency to a series of

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topographical surveys, minor roads and bores. The Central area fared worse. In 1926, Presbyterian minister John Flynn, founder of the Australian Inland Mission, set up his third hospital (and the first one in Central Australia), Adelaide House, in Alice Springs and he backed Alfred Traegar’s successful bid to develop a cheap, effective radio for outback use; and he, above all others, was responsible for the beginning of the Aerial Medical Service (later the Royal Flying Doctor Service) in 1928.53 This Service began in the north and had to wait until 1939 for an Alice Springs base. So began a service that was to be of immeasurable benefit to Central Australians. But the greatest impact upon Alice Springs itself was the coming of the railway from the south in July 1929. This dramatically reduced the cost of living and linked the town more closely still to Adelaide by facilitating and cheapening the inflow of supplies and the outflow of exports, primarily cattle. Government Resident Carrington noted in his 1929–30 report that ‘over 15,000 head of cattle had already been sent south by rail.’54 This number steadily increased during the 1930s; F.P. Shepherd’s Lands and Surveys Report of 1937 remarked gloomily that poor grazing conditions since 1932 had meant ‘low prices and lack of markets continued in the cattle industry’;55 yet more than 23,000 cattle were sold to South Australia in that year.56 If the railway provided a lifeline for struggling pastoralists, it virtually made Alice Springs. As Donovan has remarked, the town population in 1927 was ‘about forty, a dozen of them children’.57 Yet, even more than the help given by the railway to commerce was the tremendous boost to a new industry, mass tourism. Venturesome tourists had come earlier, drawn by the ethereal beauty of the central ranges, by camel, horse and, later car over the rough track from Oodnadatta; but the railway opened the gate to a new segment of middle-class Australian; and a regular tourist industry began to take shape – and, at last, a recognisable town. Still, neither the arrival of Adelaide House nor the railway owed anything to the political creation of Central Australia. The efforts of John Flynn and his

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AIM built Adelaide House; the railway extension had been approved in 1925 and early 1926 before planning for the division of the Northern Territory took place and was intended to be part of the Commonwealth promise to build a northsouth transcontinental railway. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought an abrupt end to the plan and the remaining 1000 kilometres from Birdum to Alice Springs was not to be spanned for more than 70 years. Overall, the division of the Northern Territory merely served to drive home the point that Central Australia remained the forgotten Territory in the eyes of successive Commonwealth governments; and this point was further emphasised in subsequent government action during the 1930s. With the defeat of the Scullin Labor government in December 1931 the succeeding conservative regime of Joseph Lyons began to consider a radical – and desperate – scheme for Territory development. The Northern Territory and the northern part of Western Australia were to be separated from the area further south at the 20th parallel of latitude and offered for sale to any chartered company that would undertake to develop the region. Bargaining with vested interests went on until 1935; ultimately there were no takers58 – and the area below 20 degrees south latitude was never mentioned. The Commonwealth next turned to the time-honoured last resort, a Board of Enquiry. W.L. Payne, Chairman of the Queensland Land Administration Board and W.R. Fletcher, a Queensland grazier were the members of the Board. They travelled energetically, questioned widely and in 1937 produced a thorough report. Nearly all of their interest was in the northern half of the Territory though their recommendations for the pastoral industry might have had a trickle-down effect on Central Australia: e.g. more roads, railways, bores and security of tenure for pastoralists without worrying too much about the public interest, abolition of income tax and petrol tax for twenty years; but there were, as usual, no votes in northern development; and the Payne/Fletcher report was soon forgotten in the build-up to war.

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Centralia suffered with the rest of Australia from unemployment, low prices and desperate poverty in the Great Depression; but probably the effects were lessened by a low population base and – apart from the fortuitous arrival of the railway at Alice – private enterprise, in the form of new mineral discoveries. The legend of Harold Bell Lasseter and his lost gold reef excited considerable interest in 1930.59 Two years later C.H. Chapman discovered gold at Tanami and set off a short-lived rush. In 1934, rugged soul as he was, he was alone on the field and V.G. Carrington reported that Hatches Creek and Wauchope mica prices were so low that the fields were almost empty.60 Arltunga held on grimly, with 627 residents in 1936 and the population of Alice Springs, at 437, reflected the rise of the tourist industry.61 But the greatest development in Centralia during the 1930s was the finding of gold in the hills surrounding Tennant Creek. In 1932 an Aboriginal, known only as ‘Frank’, observed traces of gold south of Tennant Creek telegraph station, showed a sample to ‘Woody’ Woodroffe, a telegraph operator and part-time prospector, who located the site and, with local prospectors Jack Noble and Ralph Hadlock, pegged the area, establishing what became the Peter Pan and Wheal Doria mines. From this base, mining spread throughout the nearby Honeymoon Range and a town grew. As A.B. Haines wrote in 1937: Steel poppet heads and four iron buildings on a barren stony ridge; dusty spinifex and dusty, stunted mulga; a gleam of more cast iron through the spindly tree trunks; a whirring wind mill; and then a wide expanse of over-hot and shadeless white sand flanked by iron buildings, some quite large and some tiny, but all glaring in the hard and brilliant sun light; a column of dust racing up the centre of the mile-long street and distributing a thick and floury layer impartially over everything in the vicinity, on the contents of shops, and in passing, scantily-clad, brick-red pedestrians.62

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Leaving Oodnadatta for Alice Springs 1920. Two horses leading camel train, NTAS, Adamson collection

Heavitree Gap. Road and saltbush, NTAS, Adamson collection

Alice Springs from Anzac Hill, 1921, NTAS, Adamson collection

Government Road Train, Tennant Creek, 1930s, NTAS, Clezy collection

Crown Point homestead, c.1943, MAGNT and Powell, Far Country, No. 40

Subdivision, Sandover River Area, 1924, Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 54–5

Helen Springs homestead, 1933, NAA, M4435, 305

Coniston homestead, 1933, NAA, M4435,155

Horseshoe Bend homestead, 1933, NAA, M4435, 511

Old MacDonald Downs homestead, 1933, NAA, M4435, 54

Rosewood Aboriginal quarters, 1934, NAA and Powell, Far Country, No. 53

Hamilton Downs Aboriginal dwelling, 1934, NAA and Powell, Far Country, No. 54

Tennant Creek living, early 1930s. Frances and James Udal outside their camp, MAGNT and Powell, Far Country, No. 55

Queensland/Northern Territory border, 1920s Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 54–5

Jessie Chambers of MacDonald Downs using a pedal radio, 1936, MAGNT and Powell, Far Country, No. 56

That was Tennant Creek. By that time, some six hundred people lived there and the area had produced over one hundred thousand pounds worth of gold in the previous eighteen months. It was no bonanza as David Carment comments: A common theme which pervades just about every account of Tennant Creek at this time is the toughness of those who lived there and the depressed economic situation in other parts of Australia that made them come. They had to deal with a harsh climate, flies, disease and the back-breaking work of driving galleries into hills or shafts into almost impenetrable ground before breaking out the gold-bearing ore. Strict logic indicated that they should not be there at all.63 Desperation ensured that they were there. These were the days that Ted Hayes has fondly spoken of when ‘in spite of what you sometimes read and learn about the Aborigines … there were always good relations, each requiring assistance from the others’.64 Ann McGrath, in her seminal work, Born in the Cattle, puts the situation from a different perspective. Generations of Aboriginal station dwellers co-operated with the white people, but they were never truly colonised – like the land itself, their relationships with it were being transferred. They incorporated different animals, technologies, skills and kin into their cultural landscape, but it remained their country, their world … They were born in the cattle.65 And never was their labour more desperately needed by the stations of Centralia than during the years of the Great Depression. Between the years 1932 and 1935, the Commonwealth Government created and supported the work of a

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Pastoral Leases Investigation Committee in the Northern Territory. Their basic purpose was to recommend on the resumptions of properties foreshadowed in ten years from the coming of the 1924 Lands Ordinance. During the early years, the three-man Committee visited and reported on Centralian properties. Their reports show that Centralian pastoralists were nearly all ‘small’ men or families, struggling to survive hard times on relatively small properties of 1000–2000 square miles in size, nearly all understocked, subject to drought, with poor water supplies and patchy soils and vegetation.66 Even the oldest and best-situated of them, the 1300 square mile Undoolya and its neighbour Unbalara, run by the Hayes family, were understocked and subject to constant appeals by the lessees for rental reductions, which led to the blunt response: ‘If the rental value is too high in this case, then it would be advisable to close up the Northern Territory’.67 In contrast to these stations with a well-established homestead, plethora of outbuildings, cattle yards, and permanent waterholes were such properties as the 360 square mile Anningie 300 miles north of Alice Springs with no permanent water and a homestead described as ‘little more than a camp’.68 The PLIC recommended that there be no property resumptions in Centralia. This was duly heeded; but, as Ted Ling succinctly remarks: ‘The [PLIC] report was not submitted to Cabinet, nor was it presented to Parliament, and its recommendations were not implemented’.69 But it is an unrivalled source for knowledge of Territory pastoral properties during the worst of the great depression years; and it says much for the sheer hardihood and endurance of the Centralian pastoralists that most of them survived into the better years that followed. C.L.A. Abbott, travelling through Central Australia in 1937 on his way to Darwin to supersede Weddell as NT Administrator, was ‘very much impressed’ with them;70 and he noted that they had managed to send more than 23,000 cattle to South Australia in 1937/8. Yet the comparative scale of this figure with the northern effort – more than 55,000 head of cattle sent to Queensland and Wyndham in Western Australia – reveals clearly the dominance

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of the latter region. This dominance, allied with the realisation that the interests of the powerful lessees of huge northern cattle runs, controllers of the NTPLA, didn’t necessarily coincide with those of Central Australia may have contributed to the founding of the Centralian Pastoralists’ Association in 1935. Until the mid-1920s the Commonwealth showed little real interest in Northern Territory Aborigines and this was reflected in the extension of the South Australian ‘protection’ policy. Then, in 1927, Dr Cecil Cook came to Darwin in the combined roles of Chief Medical Officer and Chief Protector of Aborigines. As I remark elsewhere: A forceful, decisive man, he is remembered by old-timers with more affection than he received when he ran the health and Aboriginal services with an iron hand: Cook used the chief Protector’s powers … to regulate wages and conditions for Aboriginal employees, to attempt the separation of town blacks from alcohol and opium, of white men from black women and tribal Aborigines from all whites except officials and, reluctantly, the missions.71 In 1928, Prime Minister Bruce overrode opposition from the NTPLA to appoint the Queensland Chief Protector of Aborigines, J.W. Bleakley, to examine the state of Aborigines and half-castes in the Northern Territory. He duly toured the area, sometimes with Cook, who resented him, and produced a voluminous report in 1928/9. He recommended that the Bungalow at Alice Springs be closed and the half-caste residents be shifted to Jay Creek, north of the town, where Ida Standley and her part-Aboriginal pupils had already been moved in 1928; that Hermannsburg mission receive all half-caste children under subsidy, that the Alice Springs blacks’ camp ‘where about 60 indigent natives are regularly supplied with relief’ be moved there too.72 Cook opposed most of this and did nothing to implement the recommendations. The Aborigines Protection League

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had for some years been pushing for an Aboriginal State in the NT.73 Bleakley outlined the scheme, an apparently logical one of white tutelage leading to selfgovernment under a ‘Native Administrator’. Bleakley was not without sympathy, writing that, ‘The proposal … has the virtue of having been born of a sincere and widespread desire for the upliftment of a downtrodden race’,74 and the total white population of Centralia in 1928 was close to 400, compared with about 5,500 Aborigines.75 But, said Bleakley, the proposal ‘had been discussed by many as fantastic and impracticable’76 – including himself, Cook and the Commonwealth Government – and so, considering the state of black/white relations at the time, it probably was. At this time, between 1925 and 1935, the Pwelany tribe faded from history. There is no record of conflict with the white newcomers. Why did they die out? It seems that the other factors affecting Aboriginal life – dispossession, disease and despair – were enough. Aboriginal oral history suggests that the last of the Pwelany tribe was alive in the 1920s. As Alyawarra man Nugget Smith Apetyarr asserted: I was ‘grown up’ by old Pipakareny. He was the last Pwelany man for this country Ilperrelhelam [Lake Nash]. Pipakareny told me a lot of stories for this place; I call him my ‘arreng’ [father’s father], and I follow his line.77 Thus the Alyawarra people replaced the Pwelany by peaceful succession according to Aboriginal law, the only known example of this event in modern Centralian history. However, changing times brought a new impetus to Aboriginal policy in the 1930s. This was fuelled basically by the growing realisation that Aborigines were no longer dying out; a new policy had to be developed to accommodate the continued presence of the original people – and the Commonwealth, content

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till then to follow and tinker with the South Australian legislation, would have to guide the states in setting new policies thereafter for the Aborigines of the area over which it had direct control, the Northern Territory. So a pattern was set: The Commonwealth would lead and the states would follow. Australia was in a delicate position, with a League of Nations mandate to administer New Guinea in the interests of the native people and a subject race of its own. The government became sensitive to international pressure and its reflection in Australian society through anthropologists and, from the late 1930s, by at least thirty different organisations concerned with Aboriginal welfare. Some, like the Aborigines’ Protection League had supporters in Federal Parliament and backing from overseas. One of the first indications of change was the 1930 decision of Federal Cabinet, influenced by the growing volume of mail from welfare groups and by League of Nations policy, to decree a minimum weekly cash payment of five shillings for Aboriginal pastoral workers but Cabinet also decided that the money was to go into a Trust Account – ultimately controlled by the Chief Protector – or, in a provision much used by the pastoralists of Centralia, they stipulated that the equivalent could be paid out in rations for dependants who were to be found in camps around nearly every cattle station. The most stable of these camps was on MacDonald Downs; the Alyawarr were attracted by the relatively beneficent policies of the Chalmers family, whose living conditions in the early years scarcely bettered those of their Aboriginal workers. In 1933 the Pastoral Leases Committee noted that the Chalmers family had been living in a ‘mere makeshift’ home under ‘most primitive’ conditions for nine years and categorised their outbuildings and woolshed as of ‘the poorest possible construction and can hardly be classed as buildings’.78 Nevertheless to here came the ethnologist Norman B Tindale in 1930 with a combined University of Adelaide/ South Australian Museum expedition. There he met Alyawarra groups who came in from as far away as Lake Nash and the Plenty

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River, and he recorded customs, ceremonies and the making of artefacts. This work laid the basis for his later map defining Alyawarra boundaries. In 1932 T.G.H. Strehlow, born and brought up at Hermannsburg mission, first returned to study Aranda culture. These studies, built upon the pioneer work of Spencer and Gillen, made the Centralian tribes much better known, and helped to push the Commonwealth towards new policy. Within the great deserts that cover the border regions of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, their respective governments set up, between the years 1918 and 1940, a series of contiguous Aboriginal Reserves. The Western Australian public service booklet that outlines their formation notes: The average rainfall ranges from about 10 inches a year in the far north to less than 5 inches a year in the far south of the reserves but long periods of below average rainfall are common. Permanent surface waters are extremely few. This weather pattern limits severely the economic possibilities of the region and, together with the remoteness of the area, presents great problems for development.79 In other words, it’s useless for cattle; let the Aborigines have it. In Centralia, the South West Reserve, covering the Petermann Ranges was proclaimed in 1922. In 1940, the Haast Bluff and Areyonga settlements were created by the Commonwealth government, and the Hermannsburg mission was entrusted with the task of running the ration depots there. They soon began to grow with the drift of Aboriginal people from desert life.80 In 1938 John McEwen, Minister for the Interior, toured the northern settlements and in February 1939 announced a new Aboriginal policy aimed, in the long term, at complete abandonment of Aboriginal custom in favour of

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assimilation into white Australian society. McEwen distinguished four categories of Aborigines, as follows: 1. The fully detribalised 2. The semi-detribalised 3. The ‘myalls’ or Aboriginals in their native state 4. Half-castes81 By definition those who ‘live[d] around cattle stations’ were regarded as fully detribalised and were, in effect, left to the mercy of the pastoralists. Urban detribalised Aborigines were to be controlled through an extension of the existing compound system. ‘Myalls’ and ‘semi-detribalised’ Aborigines were to receive a much slower introduction to white society through the missions and projected new government – run settlements. This mixture of paternalism, expediency and altruism, with a system of District Officers and Patrol Officers, drew heavily on New Guinea experience – a point underlined by the appointment as Director of E.W.P. Chinnery, Head of the Department of Native Affairs in that country. Cecil Cook, shorn of his role as Chief Protector, left the Territory. The coming of war with Germany in September 1939 and the looming threat from Japan ensured that both the Payne/Fletcher Report and most elements of the ‘assimilation’ policy were shelved until the war ended. The Aborigines of Centralia went to war, basically, under the old ‘Protection’ system.

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Chapter 5

World War II: The Military and the Administration

As the shadows of the coming war began to gather over Europe, Centralia, like the rest of Australia, was slowly emerging from the grip of the long Depression. As Administrator Abbott reported in 1939: There is an optimistic feeling manifested by the pastoral lessees in Central Australia caused partly by recent good seasons, but also because many of them have extricated themselves from their acute financial difficulties and are well established.1 He cited ‘a rush of fat cattle’ to Adelaide from Centralia and quoted total cattle numbers of 87,462 for the area; but he also placed the number into a Territory-wide perspective; for ‘Darwin and the Gulf [of Carpentaria], Victoria River and Barkly Tableland’, his estimate of cattle numbers was 800,000. 2

However, he also noted that Centralia [mainly Tennant Creek] had, in the

past year, produced 98.3% of the Northern Territory’s total gold production; 116,000 pounds worth; and that wolfram yield at Hatches Creek and Wauchope

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Creek was rising, as was mica mining at Hart’s Range; that nearly all of the road between Alice Springs and Tennant Creek had been cleared and graded, that a new stock route was being developed via Napperby station, the Granites goldfield and Tanami Desert; and that D.D. Smith, Resident Engineer at Alice Springs, had, over the past year, developed a successful road train and motor truck service to provide supplies to Centralian stations.3 Alice Springs, far from all possible zones of future conflict, at first saw few changes. The town, growing slowly through the coming of the railway and the nascent tourist industry, reached a measure of stability with a population of 950.4 John Flynn’s Adelaide House, a hostel rather than a hospital, remained a muchloved local institution. When the government’s Medical Officer proposed in the mid-1930s that the hostel be transferred to the government for conversion to a hospital, the owners approved but the local population did not. A large public meeting rejected the idea emphatically. As Peter Donovan has remarked: ‘There was little the government could do but build its own hospital’.5 They did so – and the new establishment was opened in May 1939. During the inter-war period the irrepressible John Flynn as noted, had succeeded, with vital help from young electrical engineer, Alf Treagar, in creating a series of pedal wireless stations, most at remote cattle properties, that numbered no less than 150 by 1939. This had enabled him to create a ‘flying docter’ service from 1928. Alice Springs did not receive its radio base for this service until 1938. As Donovan says, The foundation of this base owed a great deal to the traditional links between Central Australia and Adelaide. It was largely the result of the initiatives of the South Australian section of the Aerial Medical Service and the South Australian Country Women’s Council.6

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By 1939, too, Guinea Airways had opened an Adelaide – Alice SpringsDarwin aerial route using American all-metal Lockheed 10 (later Electra) aircraft and energetic young flier Eddie Connellan had started an aerial mail service to the outback, using a British light aircraft, a Percival Gull. This scene of steady, rather bucolic, progress was to be interrupted by war to a greater extent than almost any other region in Australia, except the Top End of this same Northern Territory. Firstly, there was the rush to join the Services, perhaps not as much due to fervent Empire patriotism as happened during World War I; but young men see travel and glory in war, not death and destruction. So Territorians, like their contemporaries in the states, joined up in droves; but there are no early Service records for Territorians because they had to move interstate to enlist in any of the Armed Services. Also, some of those on RSL or other lists of Northern Territory Servicemen were either not born in the Territory, didn’t live there at the time of enlistment or first came to the Territory after the war.7 Darwin had its garrison called the Mobile Force, 11 officers and 220 men, raised in the south and shipped to the northern city in March 1939. An attempt to raise volunteers for a Darwin militia company, Australian Army Medical Corps, achieved moderate success with twenty men camping with this unit in April 1939; and, following the outbreak of war with Germany on 3 September 1939, the Federal government authorised the Commandant 7th Military District (basically the NT) to enlist ‘a limited number of selected types of half caste Aborigines’, for a militia unit to guard the local oil tanks. This unit, perhaps inevitably, became known as the ‘Black Watch’.8 The situation in Central Australia was much more obscure. Donovan states that seventy Territorians hastened to join the AIF for overseas service when war broke out and cites the examples of men from Finke and Tennant Creek who went to great lengths in attempting to join up.9 But he also notes:

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There were many men who volunteered at Alice Springs in the October [1939], and who were then given medical examinations, but had not been called up by the following May. As V.G. Carrington remarked to Abbott, this made for dissatisfaction and a dampening of the ardour of those who had hastened to volunteer.10 Only ‘a small number’ of volunteers came from Darwin – probably because of the plethora of well-paid civilian work to be found there in wartime.11 It can be inferred that many of the adventurous Territory souls who joined the Services during the war came from Centralia. Their exact numbers are still unclear: what is clear is that they severely reduced the able-bodied workforce in the Public Service, pastoral industry and the miners of the Centre. The question of military service by Centralian Aborigines is no clearer. R.A. Hall remarks that: The [Commonwealth] Defence Act placed no limitations upon the race of voluntary enlistees, requiring only that they be British subjects. But persons ‘not substantially of European origin or descent’ were exempt from war service [under this Act].12 Each of the Services soon passed its own Act, listing this latter provision as a prohibition of all military service to non-Europeans. Still – and mainly in the desperate days of 1942 when the Japanese had entered the war and were sweeping all before them – some 1,500 to 2,000 Australian Aborigines managed to enlist formally, according to Desmond Ball, and ‘some 2,000 to 3,000 gave intimate support to the war effort as civilian labourers. This amounts to one in 14 of the total Aboriginal population but, more significantly, perhaps one in 6 of the Aborigines in northern Australia’.13 Some of the enlistees saw hard war service in the islands to the north of

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Australia; all of them found a vital revelation in that the military took no account of race. As Tim Japangardi, a Walpiri man from Yuendumu who fought overseas, told Peter Read: Treated pretty well. Army time, no cheeky. Nobody got cheeky … You know, they never treatem wrong way. Some people never, soldier people never, treat an Aboriginal wrong way. That’s really kind. Never, And the good form always.14 We know enough of Japangardi and his fellows in Army service to realise that they served Australia in considerable numbers; probably they served it, too, far better than white Australia deserved; but, then, the characteristic Aboriginal ability to forget and forgive great wrong has always amazed and confounded other Australians. Foreign aliens fared worst at the hands of suspicious Australians. War again distorted the human imagination. As in the Great War, spy mania stripped many white Australians of compassion and common sense, and when Japan entered the war their fellow-countrymen of Japanese ancestry, even to the second generation of Australian-born children, were roughly seized by the Darwin authorities, and sent south to Tatura camp in Victoria. There were no known JapaneseAustralians in Centralia; but this was not true of the Italians who provided most of the labour force for the extraction of strategic minerals – mica and wolfram – in Central Australia as well as a significant number who worked on the lucrative Tennant Creek goldfields. In July 1940 most of these men were rounded up and sent to Tatura. From mid-1942 the war came near to closing down the Territory’s main mining activity, Tennant Creek. Only one mine, the Eldorado, survived the government’s decision that mining resources were more urgently needed for strategic minerals – and Eldorado’s operations were reduced largely to machinery

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maintenance and proving of new resources. But the Territory had wolfram, mica and tin. The main wolfram fields were at Hatches Creek and Wauchope, the mica fields at Hart’s Range, all in Central Australia; and tin was mined at Maranboy in the north. Before the war all these fields were worked by individuals and small groups of miners and production was small. In June 1940, Alice Springs District Officer, V.G. Carrington, noted that about sixty to eighty Italians were scattered over the Centralian fields.15 Some remained there until early 1942; others were probably amongst the 373 enemy aliens rationed at Alice Springs gaol in June and July 1940 before their removal to Tatura camp. With their removal a dire shortage of labour hit the wolfram and mica fields. Wolfram, needed for hardening special steels, had come principally from China and Burma in pre-war years. When Japan struck in the Pacific, supplies from both these countries diminished and eventually ceased. Impressed by the urgency of the need, John Beasley, the Minister for Supply, urged War Cabinet, in February 1942, to sanction the use of 580 Chinese miners about to be evacuated from Nauru and Ocean Island where they worked for the British Phosphate Commission. On 2 March War Cabinet approved. Most of these men were sent to Hatches Creek and Wauchope, the first arriving on 30 April 1942. The Chinese liked neither the harsh conditions of Central Australia nor their working environment. A sanitary inspection of the Chinese camps made in October 1943 revealed conditions that caused Abbott to call it ‘the worst report I have ever seen since I have been Administrator of the Northern Territory’.16 When General Douglas MacArthur, Allied Supreme Commander in Australia, showed interest in using the Nauru and Ocean Island Chinese for work in the Brisbane shipyards and in New Guinea, Beasley gladly arranged the transfer, telling Prime Minister Curtin: our experience with these Chinese miners has been a most unhappy one. They have done the minimum amount of work and have never been satisfied. The returns from the field have been negligible.17

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In November and December 1943 they left Centralia, except for thirteen men who remained in Alice Springs to finish building a transport garage for the Department of Mines. They left for Adelaide on 3 January 1944. The list of their normal occupations gives a possible reason – in addition to poor working conditions and unsympathetic treatment – for their dissatisfaction with the mining life: seven were labourers; the other six were respectively carpenter, tailor, fitter, blacksmith and two boatmen.18 Italians were returned to the mica fields in 1943 and from mid-year were used increasingly under AWC control for construction work even in forward areas of the Northern Territory. Shortage of labour forced the government’s hand. In March 1943 the army withdrew its security objections to the use of Italian internees in the Northern Territory, except for areas north of Adelaide River and near operational airfields; as E.G. Theodore, Director General of the Allied Works Council (AWC) noted in October, Italians of the Civil Alien Corps were then working as quarrymen north of Adelaide River. The problem of finding labour for the Centralian mining fields was just as great. The stark desert country, in the dry searing heat of summer and the icy bitterness of winter nights, winnowed out all but the most hardy and independent miners. In the early war years, Services enlistments and the internment of the Italians depleted their numbers severely just as the demand for wolfram, mica and tin began to soar. In September 1940 the government took control of mica marketing and, during the second quarter of 1942, moved to organise and increase production of wolfram and tin. The move was not a success. When the Chinese experiment failed on the wolfram fields, mining there was contracted out to the 140 Europeans who remained. By March 1944 the government had abandoned all direct interest in them. On the mica fields they tried harder. This mineral, then a vital one for the manufacture of radio sets and other electrical equipment, remained in short supply throughout the war. AWC control of

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the Hart’s Range field did little to increase production. Few men would long endure the harsh conditions they found there. In October 1943 the Controller of Minerals Production sought out the men whom the government had forced out of the field earlier and asked them to return, arguing that ‘Italians seem best suited to the poor living conditions in this somewhat arid and difficult country’;19 no doubt the Italians savoured the irony of the position. Twelve of thirty-seven men listed were in ‘reserved’ occupations and others were unfit. Twelve did go back at the end of 1943, to act as skilled leaders of small, independent parties – and thereafter the government abandoned its own operations. The end of the war left Centralian mining in a state to which Territorians were thoroughly accustomed – moribund. Italian and Japanese-Australians were not the only ones who suffered from Australian spy mania. Amongst the earliest victims – and the least deserving – were the staff of Hermannsburg Mission. In 1940 this Lutheran mission was staffed by persons of German ancestry: the Superintendent, Pastor F.W. Albrecht, a naturalised Australian who had lived in the country since 1926, and four others, all Australian-born of the second generation – an unlikely set of traitors and completely isolated on their desert mission. Yet in June 1940 they came under suspicion from military Intelligence at Darwin through little more than unfounded assertions by those whom the army called ‘private persons who know the Alice Springs area’.20 7 MD’s Intelligence staff worried about the radio set that the mission possessed, claiming that it had the range to contact a ship at sea off the South Australian coast 1,500 kilometres away – a considerable feat for a set powered, as it was, by pedalling and one of no conceivable use. But the fear of it was enough to cause Army Intelligence to recommend that the mission staff be removed and replaced by ‘Australians’. In the month the recommendation was made, June 1940, a 7 MD staff officer visited Hermannsburg, praised the work and character of the mission staff and asserted, accurately, that there was ‘no evidence whatsoever of disloyal

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tendencies’ amongst them.21 Nevertheless, he took away with him the mission’s short and medium-wave radio coils, leaving Albrecht only a long-wave coil with a communication radius of about 150 kilometres. Thus, abruptly, the radio medical work previously carried out by the mission staff was curtailed. On that ground and the improbability of such an out-of-the-way Mission acquiring information of military value, the army’s Director of Military Operations and Intelligence had the coils restored in August 1940, over the protests of 7 MD. The outbreak of the Japanese war ended this burst of rationality. In January 1942 Pastor Albrecht went south to Tasmania and was not permitted to return. In March, without evidence of any kind, the army again alleged ‘illicit use’ of the Hermannsburg radio. The Texas (Queensland) sub-branch of the Returned Sailors and Soldiers and Airmen’s Imperial League of Australia, asserting that Lutheran missionaries in New Guinea had helped the Japanese invaders, told Army Minister, Frank Forde, that they feared those at Hermannsburg would do likewise. The brilliance of their deductions was dimmed by their placing of the mission near Wyndham, half a continent away from its real position. The Central Australia army command recommended that all full-blood mission Aborigines be forced into the bush to fend for themselves, that half-castes from Alice Springs be moved in to take their place and that ‘all alien personnel’ be removed and replaced by ‘accredited British personnel’. The Interior Ministry halted this action by protesting that dispersal of mission Aborigines into the bush would ‘assuredly result in their death’.22 With the lessening of the Japanese threat and the rapidly increasing demands of the army for Aboriginal labour, some degree of common sense re-emerged. In September 1942 Pastor Albrecht was allowed to return – but only on his agreement that the NT Administration could install a thoroughly loyal person to keep watch over him. Rex Battarbee, artist, founder of the Centralian school of painting, and good friend to the Mission took the post and Hermannsburg became a prime recruiting ground for the army’s black labour; but the Mission lost its radio operating licence, not to be regained until 1946.

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Proximity to Asia might have been expected to heighten the perception of Territorians above those of other Australians: it did not. Military preparations surrounded them, brought them disturbance and profit, but not the reality of the war – until February 1942.The need for reinforced defence of Darwin was plain enough to the military planners. It took little imagination to see what a strong enemy established in the Netherlands East Indies might do to them. The army saw the urgent need for overland supply routes to Darwin. Two railways reached out from the main network of lines in southern and eastern Australia towards Darwin: the Queensland line from Townsville to Mt Isa and the narrow-gauge Central Australian Railway from Terowie (near Port Augusta) to Alice Springs. Both railheads fell more than 900 kilometres short of Birdum, the southern terminus of the North Australia Railway – and between lay nothing more than dirt tracks. By 1937 the Works and Services branch, Department of the Interior, gave regular maintenance to the north-south track under the supervision of the District Engineer based in Alice Springs; and in April all government works in the Territory came under the unified control of the Administrator. But when 7 MD Commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel Robertson, inspected the roads in June 1939 he told the Military Board that only one section, from Alice Springs to Tennant Creek, was in reasonable condition mainly, he said, because of mines traffic. Yet even that section was largely unmade and subject to flooding at the creek crossings. Further north, near Newcastle Waters and Birdum, the track crossed blacksoil plains which became a glutinous bog and quite impassable during the summer Wet. ‘There has been much talk of making a through all weather road from Alice Springs to Birdum and even on to Darwin’, wrote Robertson, ‘but the task is a large one and far beyond what its sponsors realise’. 23 The Military Board, already in the process of organising an army transport unit to operate the route, settled for a more modest proposal; reconstruction of the Tennant Creek-Birdum stretch, 500 kilometres, to be carried out in sections by the Main Roads Boards of Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia.

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War Cabinet approved this plan on 16 August 1940. Within a month men were .

on the job. ‘I was impressed’, noted C.L.A. Abbott when he met them along the track. ‘They appear to be very well trained … [and] of very good character’.

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In three months they lightly graveled nearly the whole length of the road and diverted most of the blacksoil sections on to the higher redsoil land, thus, as the New South Wales Road Commissioner wryly acknowledged, exchanging the mud of the Wet for the fine red dust of the Dry. But it was a notable feat of road engineering. The army moved its rail terminus from Birdum to Larrimah, six kilometres north because, they said, Birdum flooded in the Wet and the bridge over Birdum Creek might be destroyed by enemy action. The Minister for the Army approved the building of a road link from Camooweal on the Queensland border, across the Barkly Tableland, to join the north-south road twenty-five kilometres north of Tennant Creek. Men of the Queensland Main Roads Commission, already completing a road from Mt Isa to Camooweal, pushed on across the bare plains of the Barkly. The road they built, and upgraded continuously until 1944, became the Barkly Highway. The northsouth road was called the Stuart Highway but it remained ‘The Track’ to all who travelled it; and so it is today. The army, faced with the problem of supplying the road-building gangs, activated its plans for a special transport unit, the Darwin Overland Maintenance Force, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Noel Loutit. This unit moved into camp under Anzac Hill, Alice Springs, and sent out their first trucks on 8 September 1940. The first Alice Springs-Larrimah troop-carrying convoy went through in March 1941 thus starting a road-haulage operation that grew to gigantic size by 1944 and lasted well beyond the end of the war. The DOMF, reorganised as the Central Australian Motor Transport Column (CAMTC) in October 1941, operated until April 1942. Then it continued to function as three General Transport Companies – 147th, 148th and 149th. Loutit, promoted to Brigadier, commanded them all, plus a bewildering complex of other supporting

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units which developed during the war years.25 The construction gangs had hardly left before the problems of road control arose. Civilian traffic increased immediately in response to the better surface and army drivers, delayed by washouts and boggy stretches in the late Wet of 1941, resented this uncontrolled competition. The redoubtable D.D. Smith, District Engineer at Alice Springs, traversed the road in March, viewed a bogged-down gaggle of civilian trucks and fired off a telegram to the Darwin Administration advising that the road be proclaimed a military highway. His was the first shot in an energetic campaign to persuade the federal government to place the army in full control. Alice Springs District Officer, V.G. Carrington, Colonel Loutit and Brigadier W.A.B. Steele (Robertson’s replacement as 7 MD Commandant), all pressed the issue – without effect. Traffic control and road maintenance remained in the hands of the Department of the Interior; and the problem was not solved to the army’s satisfaction until after the bombing of Darwin. At least, until then, they still had full use of the sea lanes. On 2 March 1942, Administrator Abbott, forced out of Darwin by the devastating Japanese air raids of 19 February and the subsequent dislocation of the whole area north of Birdum as being under the government’s National Security Emergency Control Regulations, left for Alice Springs to begin the civil administration of the southern part of the Northern Territory. For Abbott, struggling to maintain a depleted civil Administration from Alice Springs, the Japanese were of less concern than the local army commander, Colonel Noel Loutit. The civil authorities were supposed to administer the affairs of Central Australia; but the army had control of the flow of goods and people in and out of the area – and Loutit, well-described by Abbott’s secretary, Deric Thompson, as ‘a short man with a very fiery temper and plenty of authority in his voice and everything else’,26 never hesitated to use the power this gave him to suit the army’s purposes – or his own, according to Alice Springs residents who observed his alliance with store owner Mona Minehan, and re-dubbed the

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army’s Central Australian Motor Transport Company, the ‘Colonel and Mona’s Travelling Circus’. Stories of his everlasting beer supply and all-night poker games did not help his image with the townspeople either. But he was tough, efficient and the army kept him there until the end of 1944. Loutit’s first attempt, in December 1941, to assert army control over civilian movements in the Alice Springs district was rebuffed. But the Japanese attack on Darwin changed the government’s view. From 28 February, under provisions of the National Security (Emergency Control) Regulations, Loutit had control of civilian movements in Centralia and the power to evacuate from Alice Springs any civilians he considered to be non-essential. The latter power was to be exercised in consultation with Abbott; but such was not Loutit’s nature – and the army presence, with 4,600 men based around the town in January 1943, completely overshadowed that of the 956 civilians. At first, matters went reasonably well. Abbott heartily approved when, in August 1942, Loutit summarily deported NAWU secretary ‘Mick’ Ryan as ‘unproductive … undesirable [and] … a potential troublemaker’.27 Between May 1942 and September 1943 the army compulsorily evacuated 112 people from Alice Springs. Seventeen others left voluntarily. Abbott seldom intervened; but, increasingly, he was drawn into conflict with Loutit over civilian movement in the opposite direction. Married government officers in the town wanted their wives to join them. Loutit refused to allow it, contending that the civilian population must be reduced to conserve train tonnage for essential military supplies. Abbott concurred until he discovered in October 1942 that vast quantities of liquor and seven racehorses had arrived by train since July. He also noted that the army’s policy was applied inconsistently. The Chief Clerk, Lands Branch, was permitted to have his wife with him; the Health Inspector was not. Children were not permitted to return to Alice Springs – yet police at inland stations could have their families with them. Loutit stood fast. The matter went to Northern Territory Force Commander, Major-

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General Stevens, who set up a combined army-civil administration committee. This body recommended a limited issue of re-entry permits but would not agree to Abbott’s request that the wives of government officers should have preference. Nevertheless, nearly all married government officers managed to import their spouses within the following six months and the only serious challenge to the regulations came from the army’s own: transport officer Captain G.D. Duncan and his wife Beryl. Beryl Gregory had lived with her parents in Alice Springs for ten years before she met Duncan in 1942. In February 1943 he was transferred to Melbourne. Beryl Gregory married him there in 1943 with the intention of returning to live with her family at Alice Springs. But before she could return, her husband was posted back to that town and the army, following its usual policy of refusing to allow a military wife to be with her man in areas under National Security Regulations, declined to permit her to rejoin her family. She returned without a permit. Police arrested her at her sister’s home on 25 July 1943. She collapsed and went to hospital for nearly two weeks. Major-General Allen, GOC, NT Force, then tried to persuade her to leave voluntarily, promising ‘every consideration’ to any subsequent application to return. She would not go. The police again arrested her on 24 August, locked her up for the night and sent her by air to Adelaide the next day. The Adelaide News and Melbourne Herald aired the case and the latter newspaper supported a petition for an enquiry. The Duncans took their case to the High Court, claiming damages; and the army, thoroughly embarrassed by the unfavourable publicity they had received, decided they had to defend the matter as a test case. The action was dismissed – but not before Judge Starke had slated the ‘high handed and unnecessarily harsh’ action of police and army – and he declined to award costs against the Duncans. For Abbott, the return of his own wife, Hilda, was the most delicate problem of all. She had created and run with considerable success the Darwin branch of the Australian Red Cross until the 1942 evacuation. Ordered out of Darwin after the 19 February raids, she had driven by car and army transport to Alice

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Springs, remained doing Red Cross business for three weeks, then gone south at Abbott’s request. Inevitably she expressed her desire to return; but Abbott could not – and did not – promote it while deserving public servants and police could not flout Loutit’s decree. Eventually, she returned in December 1942 as the newly-recruited president of the NT Red Cross, whipped up notable enthusiasm for branches of that organisation in Alice Springs and Tennant Creek and became a valuable hostess for Abbott at the Alice Springs residency as he coped with a constant stream of visitors ranging from the UK High Commissioner to a European Parliamentary Delegation. Against the obdurate – and unnecessary – opposition of the Army, she raised large sums of money for Red Cross work, placed medical kits far and wide in remote corners of the Territory and provided visiting nurses on a regular basis to hospitals everywhere. As her biographer has remarked, ‘Hilda had not had an easy war’28 – but it was an effective one. For officers of the civil Administration, their Alice Springs experience repeated the problems of Darwin before February 1942, worsened by poor living conditions in the overcrowded town. In May 1943 the secretary of the Public Service Mess Committee complained that up to 22 men had been crowded into two houses taken over from the police, that beds were the only furniture supplied and that public servants had to run their own mess in their spare time. Friction over the return of wives was only one indicator of the growing tension between their boss, the Administrator and Brigadier Loutit. Loutit had been angered when his plans to disperse the Hermannsburg Aborigines into the bush were opposed by Abbott. In April 1942 the Brigadier proceeded to ‘call up’ into the army most of the able-bodied men in the government service; only urgent appeal by Abbott to the Director-General of Manpower prevented drastic thinning of the public service ranks. Loutit then turned his attention to liquor supply, telling the Administrator that 30 per cent of civilian stores railed to Alice Springs between April and June 1942 comprised beer, wine and spirits, that this represented an increase of up to 750 per cent over the same months of the previous year and

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deducing, quite correctly, that the greater part of the alcoholic flood would ultimately be drunk by his own troops and the road workers of the Allied Works Council. This, he said, must be stopped. Abbott agreed, and with his support, the Department of Trade and Customs was persuaded to make drastic cuts in liquor allowances to Centralian pubs. Loutit restricted his troops to one hour’s drinking per day in Alice Springs hotels and by November 1942 he had set up Wet Canteens in all staging camps on the north road in the hope that soldiers and AWC men would confine their drinking to these establishments. He should have known better. The new regulations cut off the beer supply to the public service messes and much liquor meant for Alice Springs sold at exorbitant prices on a flourishing black market further north. What ever remained in the town, complained Abbott in November 1943, went down the throats of thirsty AWC men who ‘stormed’ the bars of the hotels as soon as they opened. Again Loutit and Abbott agreed to co-operative action, in arranging for local residents to receive regular beer supplies under a permit system. Unfortunately for the Administrator, final approval of permits rested with the Brigadier and he, exercising his prejudices, refused in early 1944 to grant a permit to the civil police. By this time Abbott and Loutit had again fallen out over what Abbott termed the Brigadier’s ‘cat and mouse’ policies: delaying the return of public service wives,29 refusing or delaying the connection of civilian premises recommended by Abbott to the army-controlled water and electricity suppliers, ordering the town’s street lights to be turned out while army camps remained brightly lit, stationing a sentry on the south road to Heavitree Gap who refused to let even the Administrator past without an army pass. The police liquor affair provoked Abbott into the loss of his official aplomb and in April 1944 he condemned, to his department Head, Loutit’s ‘arrogant and overbearing attitude’. ‘This arrogance’, he asserted, ‘is steadily increasing and … should not be tolerated any longer.’30 Loutit responded by cancelling Abbott’s long-held access privileges to army canteens. Tit for tat, Abbott used police evidence to show that Loutit acquired civilian beer supplies

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through Mona Minehan’s Centralian Cash Store to supplement his own stocks. The redoubtable Ly Underdown, licensee of the Alice Springs Hotel, weighed in on Abbott’s side, complaining that the army had granted him permission to build an aerated waters factory, then tried to take it over as soon as he had finished it. ‘I came to this country with the arse out of my trousers and a will to get on with a pair of hands and a ton of guts’, he told the officer who informed him of the army’s move, ‘and you can put me out the same as I came in, but you will never beat me’.31 The army impressed his factory nonetheless, and Abbott could not get it back. The farce ended only when Loutit was posted out at the end of November 1944 and succeeded by Colonel R.M. Sadler. Abbott did not bother to hide his delight. For him, it had been a frustrating war. The army was not responsible for all the Administrator’s problems. His staff had charge of education, supply to cattle stations and Aboriginal affairs. After the evacuation of the north, major education centres were confined to public schools at Tennant Creek and Alice Springs. In June 1942 thirty children attended the former and one hundred the latter. These schools used a mainly South Australian curriculum and most of the teachers came from that state, either on loan to the Territory Administration or employed on direct contract. The sole permanent teacher, E.A. Tambling, was then serving as an AIF officer. This system reached crisis point in March 1943 when an inexperienced pupil teacher, Miss Maloney, carried the entire burden of Tennant Creek School and two of the three teachers at Alice Springs were contract employees due to leave the Territory at the end of the year. The South Australian Education Department chose this time to implement a decision made in November 1941 that they would no longer supply staff for Northern Territory schools. Abbott advertised in Adelaide for a head teacher at Tennant Creek and secured a suitable candidate, J.B. Allen, then serving with the army in South Australia – but the army would not let him go. Abbott retrieved the Tennant Creek situation by borrowing a Queensland teacher and using the influence of his minister to secure Allen’s release. Convinced by then

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that nothing less than a permanent Northern Territory teaching service would do, the Administrator, backed by the Alice Springs School Committee, pressed hard for it. He was ahead of his time. ‘It is the very definite opinion of this Department [of the Interior]’, wrote the Secretary, ‘that it would be a retrograde step to appoint permanent teachers to the Northern Territory. In [such] a small Service there is no future for the staff and the best type of teacher would not be attracted’.32 At that stage, Abbott might well have been satisfied with any type of teacher; his moves did result in South Australia’s grudging allowance of contract extensions to the Alice Springs head teacher, L Dodd, and, from the beginning of 1945, in formal control by that state of staffing and curriculum in Territory schools. Thirty-four years later the Northern Territory received what Abbott had demanded: its own teaching service. Civil transport proved to be less of a problem. As noted earlier, the government began ‘The Co-Ordinated Road and Rail Transport Service’ in April 1939. This trucking service, designed to lower the cost of transport, moved goods from railheads to outlying settlements and cattle stations under the control of the Alice Springs Resident Engineer, D.D. Smith. From 1942, when Japanese power began to threaten the sea lanes, the Service operated mainly from Alice Springs railhead and, with the co-operation of the army, from Newcastle Waters. Sharptongued, independent of outlook and an expert in cutting corners to get things done, Smith soon fell out with Abbott, the apostle of orderly administration; but the Co-ordinated Service survived their mutual antipathy, truck and spares shortages, great distances, terrible roads and an odd assortment of drivers, to supply hotels, stores, Aboriginal depots and, in 1942, eighteen cattle stations that stretched from the Ord River of Western Australia to the Barkly Tableland. Stores at Wave Hill station and Newcastle Waters supplied food and clothing for drovers on the much-travelled route from the Victoria River district into Queensland. ‘The figures submitted by you … indicate a very satisfactory performance indeed’, wrote Interior Department Secretary, J.A. Carrodus, to

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Abbott in October 1942, passing on his minister’s commendation. ‘I also desire to add my personal appreciation of the work of Mr Smith and his drivers’.33 From the beginning of 1940 until June 1945 they travelled 926,000 kilometres and delivered nearly 9,000 tonnes of supplies. The army rationed most civilians in the Northern Territory and the gigantic scale of their transport organisation dwarfed that of Smith’s Co-Ordinated Service. Yet Smith’s men kept alive the vast cattle runs of the remote outback and well earned the minister’s praise. Civil aircraft, too, managed to operate into – and out of – the Northern Territory during the war. Guinea Airways continued to fly their services from Adelaide; and the war helped to build firm foundations for the Territory’s own airline based at Alice Springs and run by that confident young man, Edward John Connellan. On 8 August 1939 Connellan began a fortnightly freight and mail service from Alice Springs via the big cattle stations of the Victoria River region to Wyndham. He also piloted for the Aerial Medical Service. In 1942 the Commonwealth extended his Wyndham contract to the carriage of passengers and the USAFIA, recognising the extensive geographical knowledge of the Territory that Connellan had gained in three years of flying, used him as an aerial guide for their engineers. ‘I have flown this [Alice Springs – Wyndham] run unrelieved for four years as well as developing and managing the business, and doing much of the detailed and manual work in office, workshop, construction of hangar and workshops, construction of aerodromes, etc’, he wrote in 1944.34 In April of that year he put on another pilot – and never looked back – building after the war a goods and passenger service that covered the Territory. Alice Springs returned to its normal quiet pace at the end of the war; but the town had had its moment of fear and its moment of glory. The fear came in January 1942 when an ARP organisation was set up, accelerated when the Japanese bombed Darwin and, within six weeks, subsided when the Prime Minister’s office informed the ARP that Alice Springs was ‘not among the places considered particularly liable to air attack’.35 The glory was even more

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momentary and reflected a persistent Alice Springs dream; to become the capital of the Northern Territory. The Director-General of Works proposed it to the Department of the Interior in May 1942 and submitted plans for appropriate public buildings, arguing that the town’s geographical position and climate bettered those of Darwin, that it was safer from any future enemy, needed population and was favoured by ‘a number of Senior Civil Servants’. Abbott countered by contending that Alice Springs was scarcely better placed than was Darwin, that future wars were impossible to predict, that building up the population of one town by shifting it from the other was illogical and that the majority of his senior officers, after experience of both places, ‘emphatically prefer[red] Darwin’. The government considered briefly, and notified Abbott that they had ‘decided to take no action to change the location of the capital from Darwin’.36 Darwin might be as isolated in the north as Alice Springs was in the south; but Abbott judged that the future lay in the north to a greater degree than the Centre – and the Minister, if he considered the matter at all, agreed. 1942 was the year of exodus for Territory civilians – but the balance of civilian flow lay, overwhelmingly, in the opposite direction: miners, railway workers, road builders, all in support of the great military effort. The greatest concentration of effort went into the maintenance of the Stuart and Barkly highways. After the remarkable effort that built the Tennant Creek – Larrimah road in 1940, most of the road builders had returned to their home states. The state Authorities, however, continued to maintain this road until December 1941. The Works and Services Branch, Department of the Interior, then took over the task – just as the army accelerated its convoy flow in response to the beginning of the Pacific War. The road, specified in 1940 to carry 220 tonnes per day each way, took up to 2,700 tonnes soon after the war began. During the Wet of 1941–42, five weeks of torrential rain broke down long stretches of the road surface and caused up to one hundred vehicles at one time to bog down. In March 1942 Colonel Loutit inspected the road and reported it to be in ‘the worst

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condition it has ever been in for the last 18 months’, providing ‘a destructive and endurance test’ for military transport.37 Six months later, General MacArthur’s chief engineer, Brigadier-General Hugh J Casey, forcefully endorsed this view, writing to E.G. Theodore, Director-General of the Allied Works Council: Reports indicate that the Alice Springs-Birdum and Mt IsaTennant Creek Road are direly in need of additional improvement and maintenance. Vast stretches of these roads are in badly corrugated condition, seriously impeding military operations … Large numbers of tyres, difficult to procure and replace because of the critical shortage of rubber, are being worn out or destroyed. Trucks are being rapidly destroyed by crystallization and breakage of parts resulting from the severe vibration.38 The AWC had recognised the problem in February 1942 and arranged for the Country Roads Board of Victoria to strengthen the Alice Springs-Larrimah section and seal it with bitumen. By then the road surface was so shattered that the Victorians, supplemented by gangs from the South Australian Highways Department, the AWC and the army, had to rebuild almost the entire Tennant Creek-Larrimah stretch before they could begin sealing in June. Work went slowly, at the rate of little more than two kilometres a week, until the arrival of two modern Barber-Green plant mix units from the USA allowed a great increase, to an average 22–30 kilometres per week. Sealing of the Tennant Creek-Larrimah road was completed in February 1943. By mid-December of that year the bitumen joined Alice Springs to Tennant Creek. In 1941 the New South Wales Department of Main Roads gangs had rebuilt the Darwin-Adelaide River road; but, as refugees from Darwin discovered after 19 February 1942, only a hazardous track joined Adelaide River to Larrimah, 400 kilometres further south. The army had seen no need to improve it because

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the North Australia Railway provided their lifeline, but by early 1942 the great increase in traffic and the proliferation of new airstrips and camps in that area convinced them that the track must become a road. The DMR built the Adelaide River-Katherine section of this road and the bridges; South Australian Highways Department men, later joined by army units, built the rest and the job was finished by the end of the year. The mud and washouts of the Wet, the choking ‘bulldust’ and corrugations of the Dry remained. During 1943 the DMR sealed the road from Darwin to Adelaide River; later in the year the Larrimah-Mataranka stretch was sealed; and in 1944 the Victorians completed the last section, 330 kilometres from Mataranka to Adelaide River. ‘The NorthSouth Road has incalculable strategic value, and after the war will constitute a valuable asset in the development of the Northern Territory’, reported the AWC in 1943.39 They were right on both counts. The 650-kilometre road that ran across the Barkly Tableland from Mt Isa, to join the Stuart Highway 25 kilometres north of Tennant Creek, remained the responsibility of the Queensland Main Roads Commission who had built it, until the AWC took control in February 1942. Responding to American pressure, War Cabinet approved the sealing of this road late in that year. The work began in January 1943; the task was finished in May 1944. The Civil Construction Corps, a compulsory service body first authorised in March 1942 to carry out works projects of the AWC, did this work. The continually increasing workload led the AWC to appoint a Deputy DirectorGeneral of Allied Works, W.T. Haslam, to the Northern Territory and by June 1943 he had established his head office at Alice Springs, a northern area office at Adelaide River and seven sub-offices spaced out along the Stuart Highway. In February 1945, before the major exodus of CCC men from the Territory, they numbered 3,125. These men had their poets, Australian flavoured, like DMR ganger Bert Hughes who wrote:

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We were laying corduroy On bloody bulldust flats To get the bombs up to the Yanks To drop upon the Japs We took them up to Fenton’s, [airfield] Into the mud and slush And the language of those ruddy men Would make a bullock blush.40 The implied tribute to his workmates was well earned: they overcame long hours, hard toil amid great heat, blinding clouds of talcum-like bulldust or bottomless, glutinous mud, to build their roads and airstrips; hard men for hard conditions, men noted for their great thirsts and with the money to pay for booze wherever they could get it. It was they who ‘stormed’ the Alice Springs pubs, causing Police Inspector Littlejohn to complain that ‘they appear[red] to be a very low type in general’ – though he did concede that there were ‘quite decent men amongst them’. They alone had the money to invade No. 110 Fighter Sector camp after a liquor issue and to pay twenty times the normal price for beer and whisky; they alone had the determination to stay put until the guards fired over their heads to clear them out. Their money was the main lure that led to the great flow of liquor northward through Alice Springs and, according to Police Constable Leo Law, westward from Mt Isa in American trucks. A foray by this officer through the road camps from Alice Springs to Larrimah and Camooweal in October 1942 netted 84 men for ‘trafficking in military goods’ and cost them 350 pounds in fines. The ‘military goods’ were mainly tobacco, food and clothing and even the over-zealous Law conceded that the road workers bought their clothes illegally from soldiers because they had no facilities for buying their own. There were cases of organised ‘rackets’, involving Service and civilian co-operation in the pillaging of army supplies, such as that uncovered by the military police

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investigating the disappearance of 100,000 razor blades from the Mataranka army stores in August 1943. A corporal cook, four soldiers and two AWC men at Gowrie camp were arrested for this mildly bizarre offence and were discovered to have stolen food too, including sugar and golden syrup, the main ingredients of ‘jungle juice’. ‘There is a big Criminal element in the road camps’, asserted Constable Law darkly; but, as Loutit said, ‘Law was addicted to exaggeration’. 41 The great majority of road workers, like their Service counterparts, were simply trying to alleviate the daily grind of a trying life. The rail boom of 1942–43 on both the Terowie-Alice Springs and the northern routes revived the hope that the Commonwealth government would complete the north-south transcontinental railway as it had undertaken to do in 1911. Unluckily for the Territory, no time limit had been placed on this promise. As noted, rail extensions from the south ended at Alice Springs in 1929 and from the north at Birdum in the same year. In May 1942 the alarming state of the Stuart Highway led army engineer officers to propose that the 1000-kilometre rail gap be closed. The rapid improvement of the road surface soon diminished the urgency of the proposal but even in October 1942, A Kelso, Business Adviser to the government, recommended that the line be built on the ground that goods transported by road was inherently more wasteful and costly than by rail.42 The government did nothing. Anticipated defence problems of the postwar Pacific led the Minister for the Army, with Australian Army Commander General Blamey’s backing, to press Cabinet for the building of a ‘strategic and developmental’ railway to link the Darwin-Birdum section with the TownsvilleMt Isa line. Territorians, and sporadically, defence experts, have been pressing for their strategic and developmental railway ever since; alas, a conservative Federal government closed down the North Australia Railway (NAR) in 1976, the succeeding Labor ministry promised but did not perform – and the north-south rail link came 25 years later. The NAR was not alone among Territory-based agencies in finding need for

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alien labour in World War II. Prisoners of war mainly were used as fettlers on the Trans-Australia (Adelaide-Perth) and Central Australian (Terowie – Alice Springs) lines; and the Civil Alien Corps (CAC), created in May 1943; and especially after the surrender of Italy in September that year, this body provided labour everywhere in the Northern Territory except in the most strategic areas of the Top End. As Pam Oliver remarks: The wartime changes in Alice Springs brought the reflections of ‘Alice Springs out of the Camel Stage ‘…with the war, government departments moved down from Darwin, Then the third invasion began: The Allied Works Council which set up its grand officers [sic] and hammers and concrete mixers to make constant music. Men’s camps spread their tents in large numbers. Then came many aliens: Italian, German, Polish and other strange languages heard in the street.43 The bucolic replaced – temporarily – by the cosmopolitan.

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Chapter 6

World War II and the Aborigines

While the army’s high command in Melbourne failed to recognise Aboriginal achievement or to make full use of their willing manpower, Northern Territory Force did much better. Shortly before the first Japanese raid Abbott had moved Native Affairs Branch headquarters and ‘large numbers’ of Aborigines to Mataranka, 450 kilometres south of Darwin. In March 1942 Deputy Director White, in response to army complaints of continued Aboriginal drift to Darwin, rounded up 120 fringe-dwellers. A number of them, he reported, were ‘incorrigibles’ who had been deported from Darwin months before. Others were Bathurst and Melville islanders ‘of the intelligent class who visit the mainland periodically’. On his own authority White ordered 100 ‘incorrigibles’ on to a train for Mataranka, explaining to Abbott: Whatever opposition may be forthcoming to this move I feel that it was the only one possible as in most cases the aboriginals concerned had divorced themselves from any consideration because of the repeated warnings conveyed to them in the past combined with the fact that they had already been removed to their countries at the government’s expense.1

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There was no opposition. White immediately put twenty-five of them to work on the new Mataranka airstrip and asked Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Stokes, CO of the ordnance workshops there, if he could use more. Stokes could; he worked them hard, at concreting, timber cutting, cartage and stacking of ammunition. In July Bill Harney reported: ‘The opinion of those in charge is that the natives are good toilers, and capable of exertion far in excess of soldier and labour units in the Middle East’.2 At that time, 121 of the Mataranka Aborigines worked for the army and 22 for the railways. Stokes asked Harney to find him 40 more; NT Force headquarters requested Native Affairs Branch to form another labour unit at Katherine. From this beginning grew a labour organisation that employed a peak number of 742 Aborigines in May 1943. As Bob Hall points out, this made the army the largest single employer of Aboriginal labour in the Northern Territory; and the extent of army influence over Aboriginal life was much greater than the employment figures suggest because dependants, too, lived in the work camps. The census of June 1944 showed the Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory as 14,153. Of these, 3,314 were in regular employment; 5,857 others lived in supervised camps of all kinds.3 The main camps for the army’s Aboriginal workers were scattered along the length of the north-south road; Koolpinyah (near Darwin), Adelaide River, Manbulloo (Katherine). Mataranka, Larrimah and Alice Springs, with smaller camps at Dunmarra, Elliott, Banka Banka and Barrow Creek. As the army gained confidence in its black labour force their range of duties expanded into semi-skilled work: storage and reconditioning of tools, stripping and assembly of motor vehicle parts, sawmilling, driving. Aboriginal women extended their prewar role as house servants into AWAS barracks and hospitals; some gained new skills as nursing aides and orderlies. By agreement with Native Affairs, an officer of that Branch was to be in overall charge of each major camp, with an army NCO to take care of work

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organisation; but from the start, staff shortages crippled the civil agency. Chinnery went south as Commonwealth Adviser on Native Affairs and, though he retained his Directorship of Native Affairs Branch, he spent very little time in the Territory – to the constant exasperation of Abbott. By July 1942 Deputy Director White and one woman clerk/typist comprised the whole Native Affairs office staff. Ten months later Abbott told the Secretary of his Department that he had only two Patrol officers, Bill Harney and Gordon Sweeney; he thought both had ‘almost reached breaking point’ under the strain of constant patrolling.4 Neither did break, but as a result of these staff shortages, control of the camps passed increasingly to the army’s Controller of Native Personnel, Lieutenant (later Captain) F.R. Morris, while Native Affairs Branch concentrated upon cattle stations, missions and other outposts of Aboriginal settlement. The military sense of order governed the army’s control of Aboriginal labour camps. Huts were laid out in neat rows, ablution blocks erected, sanitation enforced. Army doctors supervised Aboriginal health, rations were issued, for each worker and two dependants, on a scale similar to that for soldiers, simple schooling was provided for children, all received free clothing issues, ‘walkabout’ leave was granted, workers were regularly paid. The standard sum, five shillings per week, was small, but, as Hall explains, taken together with the other conditions of army employment, it was a great deal better than that provided on Vestey’s cattle stations where poor food, insanitary living conditions, long, uncertain hours of work, and, effectively, much lesser pay rates were accepted as normal.5 Northern Territory Force grew proud of its record in the treatment of Aborigines. In 1947 Colonel R.M. Sadler, who had commanded Lines of Communication troops in both northern and southern areas of the Territory declared: The army found these semi-detribalized people disgustingly destitute and prey to every form of disease, filth and hunger can

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bring. It, therefore, literally took them by the hand, settled, fed, clothed, doctored, protected and employed them giving them back their self respect and some measure of independence.6 Sadler wrote in defence of army practices that critics, including Donald Thomson, had implied were virtual slavery. With due allowance for over-reaction there was still point in Sadler’s conclusion. Most who entered the army’s work camps had been better treated there than ever before in their lives – and not only in a material sense. After extensive interviewing of Territory Aborigines who served the military during World War II, Jay and Peter Read comment: ‘There is … not a word of dissatisfaction with Services life spoken by those who were in actual employment’7 – and they suggest that a major reason for this was that the army treated them with a degree of equality previously unknown. Hall makes the same point, noting that, from 1941, the huge military influx to the Northern Territory reversed the numerical dominance of Aborigines over whites that had existed since white settlement began. Together with the evacuation of much of the pre-war white population, this meant, in Hall’s words, that ‘the Army … became the dominant social organisation in the north’; and that thousands of men from the cities of south-eastern Australia came into contact with Aborigines for the first time. They brought with them a new attitude to Aborigines which was a mixture of the more liberal if disinterested approach to Aborigines common in south east Australia, a general ignorance of pre-war racial attitudes and conditions in the north, and the egalitarian influences of the Army society.8 Hall may be too generous to city Australians. They shared to the full the automatic assumption of racial superiority held by white Territorians; but they

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did lack the Territorians’ fears, suspicions and motivation for suppression of Aboriginal advancement. Not all of the army’s actions were to the benefit of Aborigines. Brigadier E.M. Dollery, the officer responsible for army control of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, was notably sympathetic to their needs and future prospects; yet he encouraged tribal mixing that ran completely counter to Aboriginal custom. in 1945 Warrant Officer Duffy, Inspector, Native Personnel, boasted: Despite age-old beliefs that Tribes would never intermingle, ARMY has been successful in bringing together, within one Settlement [Mataranka] as many as twenty-three Tribes and sub-Tribes from the entire Northern Territory. Further, by tribal consent intertribal marriages have taken place thus linking the tribes more closely. This has been achieved without any suggestion of detribalization.9 One can only wonder what were the ultimate repercussions brought about by such utter disregard of the delicate web of Aboriginal marriage and kinship laws – but the army should not be blamed. They were simply carrying to its logical conclusion the most progressive white belief of the time, propounded by A.P. Elkin and the anthropological lobbyists, expressed clearly, and tactlessly, by Colonel Sadler: Whilst Aboriginal tribal life will eventually disappear the race will never really die out but will, in the course of time, be assimilated into the white race. This does not mean a future ‘colour’ question for Australia for the aboriginal, unlike the negro, will not ‘throw back’ and in a few generations of crossing … his physical characteristics will disappear.10

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Possibly the most serious effect of army labour recruitment policies was the opportunity given for increased prostitution and the spread of venereal diseases. Colonel Sadler contended that ‘whilst absent from the settlement, the men had contentment of mind because there was no molestation of their women’.11 This was probably true, so far as forced molestation was concerned – but it took no account of the Aboriginal view of sexual relationships – and the 1942 policy of Aboriginal concentration near military camps in place of dispersion away from them gave new opportunities to an old Territory pastime. Olive Pink and the southern feminists who feared for the virtue of Aboriginal women at the hands of the road-building gangs did not do so without cause; they had their ‘bitumen blondes’;12 and while Armed Services sources tend to avoid specific discussions of sexual relations between their men and Aboriginal women, there are enough references to show the extent of the problem and military concern about it. Olive Pink, self-appointed champion of Aboriginal women, was a longlasting thorn in the side of the Territory Administration. ‘Miss Pink has addressed voluminous correspondence to this Department over a number of years in connection with native matters in the Northern Territory’, wrote J.A. Carrodus, Secretary to the Department of the Interior, in September 1940. ‘She could never agree with the Government’s policy … and steps had to be taken to discontinue correspondence with her’.13 Undaunted, Miss Pink wrote – voluminously – from her Alice Springs base to Mrs Menzies, wife of the Prime Minister, in the cause of volunteer women Protectors to police the sexual activities of the road gangs, ‘for black women and girls and for Australia’s good name’. ‘P S’, she added, ‘Please don’t think I am a rabid feminist. I like men. But not in regard to sex, and especially black women.’14 Mrs Menzies failed to help; but Miss Pink, ‘wallowing’, in the words of an exasperated police inspector, ‘in Sex suggestions’,15 continued the task of driving the Administration ‘troppo’. In some respects they deserved it, for seeing only the problems and not the possibilities. Only Strehlow’s wife Bertha was offered the Protector’s post – and she refused it.

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DOMF Camp, Alice Springs, 1941, Eric Lee and Powell, Far Country, No. 58

Map, NT Staging Camps and settlements, 1941–5, Powell, Far Country, 5th edn., p. 142

Army quarters for the Aboriginal workforce, AWM and Powell, Far Country, No. 65

Aborigines working on an Army farm, AWM and Powell, Far Country, No. 66

Left

Miss Olive Pink, NTL, PH009/0058 Below

Army convoy on the Stuart Highway, early 1940s, NTL, PH0425/0014

Bogged truck near Elliott, 1941, NTL, PH0549/0007

Halted troop convoy allowing another to pass on narrow bitumen surface, SLSA, PRG 1435/4/27

Top

Brigadier Noel Loutit, DSO AWM, 026995 Left

C.L.A. Abbott, 1940s, Wikipedia Below

Brigadier E.M. Dollery (facing camera) taking the salute at an Army parade, 1940s, AWM, 056372

Bill Harney’s view of Aboriginal-white relations owed more to long experience than theory. ‘I read in the Aboriginal Ordinance that ‘cohabiting with an Aboriginal woman was an offence punishable by law’ ‘, he wrote, smiling at ‘that attack on established custom’ and dividing the Territory’s single men into two groups, ‘those who have lived with native women and admit it and those who will not admit it.’16 Prostitution was more likely to be found among uncontrolled groups than in the supervised camps; but the concentration policy allowed, indeed encouraged, such drift, from missions, cattle stations and tribal country as the army extended its recruiting further and further afield in search of more labour. Yet defence, not Aboriginal welfare, had to be the army’s first consideration and the treatment of Aborigines by Northern Territory Force was a distinct improvement on pre-war conditions. Brigadier E.M. Dollery, the officer responsible for the control of Aborigines in the NT, wished to do more. In November 1943 he proposed to Land Headquarters, Melbourne, that an Employment Company be raised from his Aboriginal labour force. Recruits were to have the status of soldiers, pay at three times the rate allowed the army’s black civilian workers and, key point of the proposal, the opportunity for work skills training. Dollery explained: Apart from the temporary question of the value which the army obtains from native labour … this proposal would be a much needed contribution towards improving the lot of the native after the war … up to the present time, with some exceptions, the native has ranked in the NT on the approximate level of cattle … If the army can show that at least a proportion … are capable of more skilled work and are fitted to hold the status of soldiers, there is reason to hope that these natives may, after the war, be able to hold their [skilled or semi-skilled] positions in the Territory.17

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Abbott strongly supported the proposal; so did Chinnery. But at Land Headquarters it encountered a remarkable level of opposition from the AdjutantGeneral’s Branch. Finally, in October 1944, an LHQ Investigation Committee opined, in direct contradiction to the whole experience of Northern Territory Force, that ‘the employment of natives by the army is not economic’.18 The Commander in Chief, Blamey, sat on the fence; his Director of Mechanical Engineering firmly supported the proposal – but in the end the AdjutantGeneral won out through sheer procrastination. In June 1945 he had the matter withdrawn from War Cabinet’s agenda on the ground that an Aboriginal Employment Company was no longer needed. Federal MP Archie Cameron outlined the basis of the opposition when he wrote, after a 1944 tour of the Northern Territory: On the general question of the employment of native labour by the Army, I find a certain amount of criticism on the part of certain station owners … They assert that many of these people have been taken from the stations and have been placed in [the] charge of persons with no experience whatever in the handling of labour, and they contend that the Army … is building up a serious labour problem for the Northern Territory after the war is over. Natives, they believe, will not only be discontented when they are forced to return to the only life that they have hitherto known in the Territory, but they believe that the soft treatment accorded to them by the Army will also make them arrogant, insolent and overbearing.19 Similar references to the correspondence of the Adjutant-General’s Branch make it clear that the interests of the pastoral lobby in maintaining their supply of cheap, docile labour were a major factor in the delay and eventual defeat

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of Dollery’s far-sighted proposal. Abbott, usually identified with the pastoral interest, still had the courage and fairness to support Dollery. Land Headquarters, in Bob Hall’s words, was ‘maintaining the post-war status quo at the expense of its own employees to whom it owed first allegiance’.20 Full-blooded Aborigines were not subject to general evacuation from the Territory – such a move was not practicable. But those of mixed blood were less scattered and much smaller in number. A 1941 census showed the Territory’s half-caste population as 1,037; half of them were children and numbers of them were being sent to north coast mission stations until the very eve of the first Japanese attack on Darwin. That catastrophe abruptly changed army attitudes towards this group. The able bodied men could – and mostly did – stay; many were key workers; but women, children, the old and infirm were ordered south. ‘The Northern Territory Administration under instructions from the army is endeavouring to evacuate south all half caste women and children within the area of operations’, noted Chinnery in June 1942.21 He also evacuated the children from the half-caste home at Alice Springs. According to Native Affairs Branch figures, 362 evacuees went to South Australia while 127 children and six or seven young women were sent to New South Wales. Their status remained ambivalent. Evacuation equated them with whites; but, once evacuated, the official grip on their lives did not relax. The churches retained control of the mission children and the bulk of evacuees to South Australia – 244 of them in August 1942 – went to an improvised camp on the racecourse at Balaclava, a small wheat town on the windswept plain eighty kilometres north of Adelaide. The army was concerned only with the speedy removal of half-castes from a war zone, and not with their ultimate fate. There are indications that Abbott and Chinnery allowed haste to overrule prudence. When the first northern evacuees reached Alice Springs in March, Government Secretary L.H.A. Giles suggested they be sent to Hermannsburg instead of Balaclava; he considered it a cheaper alternative. But a month later

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he and V.J. White opposed what the latter called ‘the indiscriminate removal of Half-castes to Southern cities’ on more humane grounds – family cohesion and familiar surroundings. They also feared that the dress and behaviour of these people, torn from the bush or shanty towns for the first time in their lives, would prove unacceptable. ‘I feared that the Katherine contingent, had they proceeded direct to a city, would create a most unfavourable impression whether they behaved well or not’ wrote White.22 One hundred and seventy-six evacuees left Alice Springs by train for Adelaide on 1 April 1942. Giles said of them to the South Australian Commissioner for Civil Defence: I am afraid I must apologise in advance for the quality of this group … To put it crudely, they are a poor lot, and include some of the worst types we have in the North … Most of the halfcaste women are without morals and have little experience of civilized life. To attempt to billet them on European homes would met [sic] with disaster … Unfortunately another batch of about 250 are [sic] due today but I can at least say that they will be no worse.23 The commandant of Terowie staging camp referred to the latter group as ‘the filthiest and most polygot [sic] to move’. Such attitudes, added to the reluctance on the part of Native Affairs to relax its grip, explain why most evacuees were destined for the Balaclava racecourse. There were, indeed, problems. Of six young half-caste women sent out to work in Sydney, three bore illegitimate children, two of them twice. The other three were dismissed from their employment at Penrith District Hospital. In the former cases, as usual, the women were blamed and the men, said to be soldiers, who fathered the children escaped scot-free. So did the employers who took no real interest in, or responsibility for, their servants. In the latter case, the relevant welfare report implies strongly that two of the Penrith employees were unfairly

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dismissed and makes that point clearly in the third case: that of Mrs Mills, sacked for ‘a fracas with a white girl’.24 Catholic children from Balaclava camp attended the local convent school; the government school refused to take the others, forcing the Commonwealth to set up a camp school in the charge of Miss P Heaney, formerly of Pine Creek. The South Australian Superintendent of Primary Schools explained that ‘our schools are not large enough to accommodate them’; 25 but the extra number concerned was only twenty-one and a Commonwealth official was nearer the mark in stating that the ban followed ‘protests by parents’ of European school children against the attendance of half-caste children’.26 The first accommodation provided at Balaclava was in open horse stalls. ‘Naturally’, wrote camp superintendent W.T. McCoy, ‘the people, coming as they had from a hot climate to a cold one, reacted violently, … epidemic influenza, sore eyes, … scabies and similar ailments were very prevalent’27 and when two cases of leprosy were discovered amongst them, a minor local panic resulted. Conditions improved; but even in 1944 women with families were living bereft of privacy in draughty dormitories, under the grandstand and in the totalizator building, a situation, said McCoy, that they ‘dislike[d] intensely’.28 Abbott found there ‘an air of great melancholy and depression’29 when he inspected the racecourse in March 1944. McCoy responded, sharply: ‘nothing will solve this condition while evacuees are resident in this State … I do not know of one single instance of an evacuee expressing a wish to remain’.30 He noted in May 1944 that three families had then managed to get permits to return, which increased the restiveness of the others, who had to wait. In January 1946, 265 Northern Territory half-castes were still awaiting transport home from South Australia. They left at the end of March. For mixed blood Territorians the official blend of well meant paternalism and utter insensitivity had not changed; but it seems clear that evacuees did not find their southern experience entirely negative. In August 1942 Chinnery recorded the acquisition of three farmhouses near Balaclava for evacuees. He also

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noted that ‘52 of these people, as soon as they could draw child endowment and allotments from their male supporters now engaged in war work in the Northern Territory, left the racecourse at their own request to take up residence and live independently in other places’.31 The move from the racecourse camp continued. In July 1945 only eighty-five people still lived there; fifty-nine lived at the farms and one hundred and sixteen were classed as living independently. Twenty-five of this last group lived in the town of Balaclava. The others were scattered across South Australia. These people knew a degree of independence that did not exist in the Northern Territory, in living and working as ordinary Australians. Even at Balaclava, earlier racism was forgotten when the evacuees left. The District Clerk wrote in praise of them; the Adelaide Advertiser endorsed his words, saying: ‘When the refugees came the people of Balaclava looked upon the advent with some misgivings, but this quickly disappeared for the behaviour of the newcomers was always exemplary … Everybody is sorry to see them go’. 32 This eulogy was marred by mention of the 15,000 pounds a year in trade that the evacuees had brought to Balaclava – yet they had met in South Australia people of far more open mind than those in the Territory. The effects can only be inferred. These people certainly found a new and freer life in the south; the memory of it must have influenced the majority who returned, and perhaps was a significant factor in the post-war formation of the Australian Half-Caste Progressive Association which played a key part in shaking off nearly all legal restraints on mixed-bloods during the 1950s. Before the war began, there were only two supervised compounds for Aborigines – Bagot (Darwin) and Jay Creek, forty kilometres west of Alice Springs. Designed to control the drift of Aborigines to urban areas, both were initiated under the Cook regime; so was the appointment of the first Patrol Officer, T.G.H. Strehlow, in 1937. For three years from 1938 he supervised Jay Creek reserve from a tent home and patrolled the whole Centralian region. Jay Creek served Alice Springs. In November 1940 Government Secretary

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L.H.A. Giles noted that ‘the presence at Alice Springs of Defence personnel has made it desirable to remove certain of the Aboriginal population’,33 these being ‘over 100 aged and infirm natives, and those not in employment’. But Jay Creek had a limited water supply; so early in 1941 Native Affairs Branch assisted the Hermannsburg Mission to set up a second ration depot, for local Aborigines and those sent from Alice Springs, at Haasts Bluff, 220 kilometres west of the town. At the same time and for the same reason the administration declared an 8-kilometre strip on each side of the north-south road to be a prohibited area for Aborigines. Black and white were to be separated as far as possible – for whose benefit was a matter of opinion. Servicemen who depended on Aboriginal skills, saw that the cultural balance between black and white was not always in favour of the latter – a point that the deep racial prejudice and vested interests of most white Territorians would not allow them to concede. For much the same reasons the army command never saw it either; very few Territory Aborigines received formal recognition for all they did in the Allied cause during the war. The feats of Aboriginal police trackers were much admired by Servicemen who witnessed them. In July 1943 Superintendent A.F. Stretton drew Abbott’s attention to twenty years of loyal service by Tracker ‘Peter’ at Alice Springs and cited several notable tracking feats involving the army. The Minister for the Interior granted him a bonus of 5 pounds, the army nothing. Yet he was among those whose conditions of service were trenchantly criticised by V.G. Carrington (then Acting Director of Native Affairs) in 1945. Trackers were employed, not directly by the Administration, but by individual policemen who received an allowance of four shillings per day to maintain them, a sum Carrington called ‘totally inadequate’. Accommodation provided, he said, was usually a bare room in the back yard of a police station. Rarely is provision made for bathing, laundry or sanitary facilities. There is no furniture … there is no scope whatever for natural

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exercise, pleasure (involving noise) or the company of other natives … they get a plate of food and a can of tea and sit on the ground somewhere to eat it.34 Trackers, Carrington noted, received cash payment of ten shillings per month. ‘less than half the amount received by any native working in any town’. He might have added that their ultimate reward was often, like Tracker Peter, to be cast on to the scrapheap of civilisation. There were Aborigines in the western deserts that straddle the Northern Territory-Western Australian border, who remained entirely untouched by war – or had only a fleeting glimpse of it, like the nomads who recalled for anthropologist Mark de Graaf the Japanese planes that ‘buzzed’ them at Ringakurtji waterhole, south-west of Broome, at about the time that town was raided.35 There were others whose lives went entirely unchanged, such as the Alyawarr of the Queensland/NT border country. It is likely that the building of the Barkly Highway from Mt Isa to Three Ways diverted all but local station traffic. Lake Nash station recorded a great expansion of its cattle shipping facilities owing to wartime demand for beef and one truckload of American Servicemen from Mt Isa is known to have visited the station in September 1942. Lake Nash engineer Ted MacFarlane recalled that ‘sometimes the manager would pick up an American Lieutenant or Captain at Mt Isa and bring him out to have a look at the cattle station’ – but, as MacFarlane said, ‘that’s all we saw of the war there’.36 Strehlow noted the presence of three Sandover River men at Hatches Creek as the only indication of wartime influence upon the Ooratippra people.37 It seems that the great majority of Alyawarra people were left alone. When the war ended the Army withdrew from the Territory and its Alice Springs transport source. By the end of March 1946, all its men and all their trucks had left the Northern Territory for ever; and for the Aborigines of Central Australia the war experience seemed, at first, to make no difference. Pre-war

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plans for assimilation went on as if the war were merely an interruption. Yet the next thirty years were to see greater gains in civil rights for the Northern Territory Aborigines than had occurred anywhere in Australia since white settlement began. Was war the catalyst? A.P. Elkin saw the 1930s, not the war years, as the ‘turning point’ for Aborigines – but he had in mind the assimilation policy which was to reach its peak in the 1950s and be swept away in the 1970s. Ronald and Catherine Berndt, anthropologists who worked on Vesteys’ cattle stations from 1944 to 1946, wrote in the latter year: While the aborigine is satisfied with very little in return for his labour, there is a certain standard below which it is wise not to fall. This is particularly true at present, when the Army compounds have set a precedent in the distribution of food to workers, dependants and old people; in the establishment of regular working hours; and in the setting up of showers, with washing and sanitation facilities.38 Jay and Peter Read make the same point. Their work must rank as the most extensive oral history project ever carried out amongst Territory Aborigines and their judgment commands respect. ‘The war years were the agents of change of attitude, in outlook and expectation, which were in turn the precursors of changes in the law’, they say.39 For the Aborigines, the most telling example is Johnny Martin Jampijinpa, a Walpiri who, as a small child, saw his father shot dead in the Coniston massacre. During the war he worked in several army labour camps, achieving a degree of leadership. When it all ended he was sent to Bullocky Soak, south of Barrow Creek, to join a group of his countrymen. There, they were ordered into trucks, to go out and build the new Yuendemu settlement. ‘Lotta people … just get into the truck’, Johnny Martin Jampijinpa told Peter Read – just as they always had – but ‘I’m not going that far. I’m going back to my home’.40 And he did.

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Chapter 7

Post-war Progress

Alice Springs had done well as the Australian centre of defence in the Northern Territory; and when the soldiers went home to the seaboard states, they were soon replaced by newcomers from the same states. As Peter Donovan notes: The most basic indicators of the regional growth of Alice Springs were successive census figures. In 1933, the last census before the war, the total white population of the town was 526. In 1947 in had increased nearly four times to 2,078, and more than doubled again in the fourteen years to 1961, when it stood at 5,124.1 In part this expansion was due to the Army; not only did they provide sealed roads from Alice to Darwin and Mt Isa to join this road near Tennant Creek, plus paved streets, an integrated water system, a new airport south of the Gap, a new power supply and long-distance telephone services for the first time; but they also brought the town to Australian public notice because of the tens of thousands of Servicemen who had passed that way during the war. The transport industry boomed. The Northern Territory cattle industry came out of the war in better shape than it had ever been in the seventy-odd years of its existence. The whole Territory cattle industry gained from the world shortage of meat during the 1950s and

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most of the 1960s. At war’s end Britain pressed the Australian government to expand its beef production. The Australians agreed, in return for a long-term guaranteed market in Britain and a formal supply agreement, for fifteen years, was signed in 1951. Efforts to expand beef production had begun two years earlier with the provision of Commonwealth grants to Western Australia and Queensland for road-building in their cattle country. Truck transportation solved many problems; it extended the turn-off season, permitted much greater selectivity in timing and numbers of stock supplied and enabled cattle to be delivered to markets in prime condition. Phillip Ward of Banka Banka station saw the advantages in 1945. For three years thereafter he sent a thousand cattle a year down the 650 kilometres of war-built bitumen road to the railhead at Alice Springs. Kurt Johanssen, a mailman and contractor before the war, worked with his father to establish tourist services for Bond’s Tours and from 1947 began developing a road train service for cattle transport from Centralian stations.2 He was also a pioneer of road transport to Darwin and the north, since the railhead still was at Alice Springs. Others, large cattle companies in the north, followed by developing their own cattle transports, including the huge British company Vesteys. By 1959 some twenty road trains were operating in the Northern Territory. In 1961–62 the Commonwealth began to build beef roads there. Roads approved under this program were to cost $630 million for a total length of over 2,500 kilometres. In 1958–59 only 20% of all cattle moved from Northern Territory stations were carried by road transport. Six years later the percentage had risen to 76 and the long-distance drover was rapidly becoming a relic of the past.3 The balance of cattle production – and political influence with the Federal government – still lay in the north; but Centralian cattlemen shared in these developments and the town of Alice Springs benefited from becoming the headquarters of most Centralian trucking concerns. Cattlemen of the Centre, too, gained from what the Darwin union newspaper, Northern Standard

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bitterly called ‘Vestey’s Benefit Law’,4 forced into law by the Menzies Liberal government in 1953: This Act gave to big lessees the right to apply for long-term ‘development’ leases. For small lessees (mainly the independent cattlemen of the Centre) the pill was sugared by a provision giving to individuals, but not to companies, the right to a pastoral homestead lease under perpetual title. (This provision was repealed in 1967.) Prosperity for the cattle industry in the 1950s and 1960s helped bring prosperity to the town of Alice Springs, aided by the opening of the American hamburger market in the late 1950s. There were ominous signs. A long drought reduced cattle numbers in Central Australia from 353,000 head in 1959 to 139,000 in 1965, and a quarter of all NT cattle stations ran at a loss in those years.5 But the Centre cattlemen with their cheap – or free – Aboriginal labour grimly held on. Ted Hayes, grandson of the pioneer of the MacDonnell Ranges, expressed their viewpoint to another of Central Australia’s most notable characters, Padre Graham Bucknell: We became very attached to the land we’ve been bred on and have worked on all our lives. We’ve got an attachment to the land, that few outsiders can understand … You feel part of the land …6 And his attitude to the Aranda people who had exchanged their ancient way of life for the station regime of the white man was both appreciative and paternalistic: My old grandmother Hayes reared a lot of black children and if she hadn’t they would have died. The blacks were great people … To prove a point that they are as good as white men they have to be better … The women of the station thought they had to look after you. They were very good with us. We had Aboriginal women

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looking after us as children … In the afternoons when we went to get the cows with them they used to show us where all the bush tucker was and how to gather it and how to know the ones we could eat.7 Perhaps these deep feelings help us to understand why the Centralians held on through good times and bad so tenaciously and tend to contrast with the outlook of the Company men on the big stations in the north. For most of the Centre cattlemen and their families, Alice Springs was both supply depot and the sole source of communication. Yet Alice Springs was changing, growing, diversifying as improved communications brought tourists in ever-growing numbers to see the core of their own country. The Port Augusta – Alice Springs railway helped greatly. Even more significant, probably, was the growth and expansion of air transport, first successfully inaugurated by Guinea Airways in 1937. Ansett Travel Industries took them over in 1939 and in 1959 they were renamed Airlines of South Australia. The federal government’s own airline, Trans Australia Airlines (TAA) had replaced Guinea Airlines on Territory routes in 1947; and MacRobertson Miller Aviation (MMA) – better known to Territory locals as ‘Mickey Mouse Airlines’ – reopened a pre-war route for a flight from Perth to Darwin and showed interest in expanding into Central Australia. But there, Eddie Connellan stood firmly in their way. Jim Goulding has entertainingly digressed on this fiery, conservative and controlling character who expanded his wartime mail and goods services into tourism after the war. His successful bid for permission to fly the Alice Springs – Uluru route in 1958 put him squarely into the Centralian tourist market; and his fiery clashes with his ground-based collaborators – such as Stan Cawood’s Alice Springs Tours Inc and the Pioneer Bus/Ansett Pioneer Line – made him locally notorious – though the usually blunt Jim Goulding is remarkably diplomatic in remarking:

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Remembering Connellan’s diatribes against the ‘socialist’ public service generally … and recalling the detrimental reports made on Connellan’s administrative abilities, one might perhaps conclude that his problems had their origins elsewhere.8 For all that, Connellan managed to keep his Connellan Airways (later Connair) going until self-government, and greatly assisted both the remote cattle stations and the tourist industry. We are left with the picture of two southernbased organisations – Central Australian Tourist Association (CATA) in cahoots with the government and TAA versus the privately-owned Ansett-Pioneer, battling over Central Australian tourism revenue, while Darwin-based tourism organisations were dismissed as being related to the northern area only. There’s no great problem there. It was true. Tourism was not, however, the most important development of the postwar years. That honour – if it can be so called – belongs to the coming (and the ramifications) of self-government to the Territory. A second great factor was the elevation of traditional Aboriginal society to a level scarcely liable to dispassionate examination – while at the same time running through a series of clumsy efforts to better the lot of the remaining remnant of a traditional people; efforts that were bound to fail because of, as Colin Tatz said: An abysmal absence of historical perspective in Aboriginal affairs, resulting in a policy and administration myopia that is staggering in its implications and results. No one learns from the past, no one listens, and hardly anyone stays around long enough to osmose anything. Everyone re-discovers the wheel.9 That includes those whom Professor Marcia Langton called ‘the ideologues in the Aboriginal industry’ who cannot imagine ‘the problems that face Aboriginal

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citizens of the inland gulags and outback ghettos of remote Australia’.10 And those who had been long enough in the bush to know and articulate enough to express their knowledge, were unheeded. As Inga Glendenning has said: ‘The voices of the truth-speakers (there were always some) were drowned in the futile clarion of the culture wars’.11 But these factors – the continuation of tourism, the Centralian cattle industry, the development of road communications, of effective communication services and the population increase in the Alice Springs Aboriginal town camps, plus the passionate love of the country that draws so many people to live there – have led to an astonishing growth in population from a village of approximately 1,100 in 1944 to the size of a small city, about 25,000 in 2017. Alice Springs has environmental problems that may limit its future growth, namely uncertainty of water supply, sheer isolation and the consequent high costs of living; but its principal problems are political. This did not necessarily appear to be so immediately after the war. Until then, as political scientist Alistair Heatley, pointed out in 1979: On the whole the pattern has been, until very recently, one of local demand met by small concessions by the Commonwealth, which constantly argues that ultimate control of Territory affairs should remain vested in the federal government so long as the area was financially self-supporting and remained dependent on Commonwealth resources for much of its development.12 This view was held by every Federal Cabinet member up to and including Paul (later Sir Paul) Hasluck, Minister for Territories in the Menzies government from 1951–63; but long negotiations with Territorians caused him to bring about significant changes to the Territory’s constitutional position. As he remarked in looking back:

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Oratically we heard the rumblings of a war of independence. Two lawyers – Dick Ward of Darwin and Neil Hargraves of Alice Springs brought to the campaign local knowledge as well as reforming zeal and later they were joined by Ron Withnell, a senior officer of the Attorney-General’s Department. They were the local Jefferson, Adams and Washington of this revolutionary campaign. As Minister, I was cast in the double role of George the Third and Lord North – as villainous opponents of freedom. Privately, however, I regarded the agitation as one of the most welcome and helpful portents.13 Even for those unfamiliar with American Revolutionary War doctrine, the inference is clear. However, Hasluck was wrong in one of his assumptions. Dick Ward had begun his legal career in Darwin, but after surviving the first devastating Japanese raids of 19 February 1942, he moved to Alice Springs where he established a legal practice. As Barbara James has said: A dedicated socialist, Dick Ward became known as ‘Red Richard’. He was held in high esteem by people of every political shade … Along with several prominent Alice Springs residents, Ward became a leader in the Northern Territory Development League [NTDL], formed to agitate for legislative and political reform … In 1946, following intense lobbying from the League, the Chifley government took the policy decision to form a Northern Territory Legislative Council … In 1947, Ward stood for and was elected to the first Northern Territory Legislative Council … and … began what became a long battle for improving Territory representation on the Federal scene and gaining self government.14

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So Ward, though he later moved to Darwin, was Alice Springs based during the period of his first effective political agitation and the key organisation for such a proposition was also Alice Springs-based – the NTDL. Another significant political figure at that time was also Alice Springs-based, very much so! This was Colonel (for his wartime rank) Lionel Rose, the NT’s Director of Animal Industry and the Chief Veterinary Officer. Hasluck recalled: Rose ran his department in Alice Springs, and not in Darwin; like all the other Departments. Having built up a departmental structure at ‘the Alice’, he strongly resisted all subsequent attempts to bring him more closely under control. Indeed, he openly regarded Darwin as the brake on all progress and as the seat of an authority to be evaded rather than to be obeyed … Whereas my critics in Darwin always complained about those ‘bloody fools’ in Canberra, Rose targeted those ‘bloody fools’ in Darwin. And Hasluck, with magnanimous insight, remarked: At a time when other branches of the administration had difficulty in overcoming their many handicaps, Rose, often acting independently, built up an efficient and largely self contained unit of his own to serve the animal industry.15 Rose became an independent member for Alice Springs in the Legislative Council in 1962, and began his own conservative party there – the North Australia Party – in 1965. So Centralia figured prominently in the initial impetus towards selfgovernment in the Northern Territory; and the Centre has had strong representation before and since at the Federal level.

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In 1949, John Norman (‘Jock’) Nelson, part-owner of three Central Australian cattle stations – Harper Springs, Mt Skinner and Utopia – won the Northern Territory’s sole Federal Assembly seat and held it for seventeen years in the Labor interest. He was succeeded by Stephen Edward (‘Sam’) Calder, exConnellan Airways pilot and Centralian station manager, who won the seat in the interest of the Country Party and held it through six elections for fourteen years. Both men were diligent in promoting Territory interests in Canberra – and in 1968, Calder finally received a full vote in the House of Representatives. ‘Bernie’ Kilgariff, first an NAP supporter and nominated member of the 1960s Legislative Council (and later from 1975 until 1987, a Territory Senator) became influential in Territory affairs as has Warren Snowdon, the long-serving MLA for Central Australian seats in the federal lower house. Centralia has also provided a long list of notable members to the Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory;16 and, of course, the polymathic patrol officer, writer, entertainer and Administrator of the Northern Territory (2003–2007), Ted Egan. But in the long and convoluted struggle for self-government in the Northern Territory, granted by the Fraser Liberal-Country Party government in 1978, and in the plethora of parties and individuals in the Territory Assembly in the last forty years, these Centralians discovered – and could do nothing about – the sheer dominance of Darwin and the north country.17 The coming of self-government was no present to Central Australia; it merely stamped this image on all Territory matters. It soon became axiomatic that the numbers, the power – and now the seats – were in the north; that to gain government a party needed to win most of the Darwin seats, plus the bush; Alice and the bush was never enough; for Darwin is five times the size of Alice Springs and, except for the period of the war emergency and Cyclone Tracy, always has been. Darwin and its hinterland contains roughly 135,000 people – against 25–28,000 in Alice Springs. This appears on the surface to be a mirror to the states; the majority of the population lives in and around the

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major city in each political entity. However, there is a major difference, too – the state capitals e.g. Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide – and even Perth and Brisbane to some extent – have strong commercial and social ties to their states, each linked to their country as supply centre, market and cultural hub. But this is not true of the Northern Territory. Because of the peculiar way the Territory was formed – being what was left over of Australia when the rest had had taken what they wanted, there are no natural and almost no trade or cultural links between the desert town that is the focus of Centralia and the north coast city of Darwin, fifteen hundred kilometres away. Alice Springs is still just a stop on the road to Darwin. The cattle industry, despite fluctuations caused by market conditions and droughts, remains as it has long been, a quarter to a fifth of the total Territory output; mining, particularly with the decline of Tennant Creek in recent years, is in a worse position. The tourist industries flourish in both towns; but they are separate industries. Apart from a declining amount of gas feeding the Darwin power station from the Centralian fields, the only things that appear to be traded between the two towns are the three ‘Ps’; politicians, public servants and policemen. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the ‘Berrimah line’ theory i.e. that everything south of this Darwin suburb was dominated by the north – has become the axiom of Centralians, in succession to Colonel Rose’s ‘bloody Darwin’. Residents of Darwin’s northern suburbs might wonder where lie the immense benefits they are supposed to be enjoying, but there’s point in the idea – and the Federal government is no help – and may even be the real source of the problem. The Commonwealth government has only two lasting interests in the Northern Territory: Defence and the Aborigines. The north coast is closest to Asia and therefore, closest to whichever danger is likely to threaten Australia. At the moment (2018), this is mainly fear of uncontrolled flocks of ‘boat people’; waterborne, uninvited migrants, which has resulted in most of Australia’s patrol boat fleet being based in Darwin. Here, too, are the thousands of northern-based

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Australian soldiers and the US Marines who join them for exercises each Dry – and the RAAF early warning and fighter aircraft. Nearly all defence effort – and spending – in the NT is in the far north – and Centralia, far, far, away, has only the mysterious Joint Defence Research Space Facility at Pine Gap, opened in 1970 and still the focus of much argument over cooperative activities with our American allies, but not of the Americans who come on rotation – sometimes for long periods – to run the base. As Peter Donovan says, they have gone ‘out of their way to participate in the life of the town …. They brought a new sophistication to the cultural life of Alice, and have given tremendous support to the arts’.18 And they – plus the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar project placed just north of the town in the 1970s – helped to increase the national and international importance of Alice Springs; yet, basically, the town, apart from its unpredictable tourist industry, is still only a transport hub, a stop on the way to the north. When the transcontinental railway, extended from Alice Springs to Darwin, opened, the focus of business and political leaders alike was on the opening of a new trade route to Asia.19 No one appears to have thought of commenting on the severe loss of trade and adjustments that had to be made by the well-developed Alice Springs-based road transport industry. There is, however, one significant change in the power and significance of the Central Australian regime since World War II – the quite astonishing rise of the Aboriginal people of the region from what W.E.H. Stanner called ‘the Great Australian Silence’20 to the forefront of Australian notice. How much of this rise was the result of world, Australian and Aboriginal opinion after World War II is arguable; that there is a link is clear. In 1951 A.P. Elkin, probably the most influential anthropological adviser to the Federal government in Aboriginal affairs, wrote: There is an unsettlement, a ferment almost everywhere among the younger virile Aborigines who have any contact with non-natives

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– townships, settlers, stations, missions. Cultural diffusion and mixing are going on apace. Many want the best of both worlds, the old and the new. Others … want a fair deal and good education.21 Elkin, unlike many fervent supporters of Aboriginal advancement, saw not only the absolute need, but also the great variety of it. Hasluck, too, saw this – and as by far the longest-serving and probably the most thoughtful minister to supervise Aboriginal affairs for the Commonwealth government – he adopted the McEwen policy of ‘assimilation’ as the only feasible way forward. He also recognised that, for many, adapting to the overwhelming power and pervasiveness of white society would take many generations; and he was prepared to support such people for as long as was necessary. This policy shifted the emphasis from part-Aborigines to full-bloods. The former, helped by a new pressure group, the Australian Half Caste Progressive Association, as noted earlier, managed to shake off most of the legal restraints upon them during the 1950s and move towards integration with the white Australian community. Most tribal Aborigines found they had exchanged one form of state paternalism for another. The Welfare Ordinances, 1953, authorised the government to place under its care and control as a ‘ward’ any person who, by reason of: (a) his manner of living (b) his inability without assistance, adequately to manage his own affairs (c) his standard of social habit and behaviour; and (d) his personal associations stands in need of such special care and assistance as is provided by the Ordinance.22 In theory, this Ordinance applied equally to all Territorians; in practice,

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almost solely to Aborigines and all but about eighty of those in the Northern Territory ended up on the Register of Wards (better known as the ‘stud book’) compiled by the Welfare Branch which replaced Native Affairs. The Register provided the first serious attempt at a full census of Northern Territory Aborigines. The wide powers given to H.C. (Harry) Giese, Director of Welfare, by the Welfare Ordinance and the complementary ‘Ordinance to Provide for the Training and Employment of Wards’ became a lasting target for criticism by Aboriginal support organisations. They seized, particularly on two cases which arose from the provisions of the Ordinance; the 1958 gaoling of one of Australia’s most notable artists, Aranda tribesman Albert Namatjira, for supplying liquor to friends and kinsmen who were wards of the state; and the long-drawn legal battle of 1959, headed by Dick Ward, to overcome the opposition of the Welfare department to the marriage of a white stockman to an Aboriginal woman, Gladys Namagu. Ward won and the couple married, in a rather dubious ‘happy ending’, since they soon parted. Neither of these cases was as simple as the press presentation of them would imply. Their use to discredit the Welfare Ordinance has tended to obscure the strong endorsement which Australian public opinion – and even the anthropological lobby – gave to the policy of assimilation under strong controls in the 1950s; and neither Native Affairs nor the Welfare Branch has received due credit for the advances made under their guidance in preserving the lives of Aborigines and preparing them to cope with the white man’s world. And was Paul Hasluck wrong, in the last years of the ‘White Australia’ policy, to envision a time far into the future, when the peoples of a multi-hued Australia might live together in equality of citizen rights? After the war government settlements, designed to provide better living conditions, education, health and job training services, expanded. In 1946, Yuendumu, three hundred kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, was founded by Native Affairs. Supply depots, partly administered by the Hermannsburg mission, already existed at Haasts Bluff and Areyonga, west of the mission.

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Services there were upgraded. Amoonguna and Warrabri, both replacing existing settlements, were founded in 1955. By 1970 there were twenty government settlements in the Territory. Expenditure on Aboriginal affairs (excluding salaries) rose from $843,000 in 1955–56 to more than $8 million in 1971–72. More importantly, the long decline in Aboriginal numbers was decisively halted and reversed. The 1956 census showed 15,211 Aborigines in the Northern Territory. At the end of 1971 they numbered 22,258 and their annual birth rate at nearly forty per thousand, was twice that of white Australians. Sadly, the Aboriginal infant mortality rate was also much higher, five or six times that of white Australians. The problems of a century were not to be wiped out in a few years and the very presence of the settlements raised new difficulties. Most settlements contained more than one tribal group. Unnatural proximity led to intertribal tensions and open fighting, worsened by the sense of loss felt by those whose homelands were far away. Pressures to learn new skills and new ways may have been too great for some and the pace of change too fast. The long-term results of the official assimilation policy can only be guessed at. It did not last long enough for us to know.23 In the 1960s a wave arose on the calm surface of affluent Australian society, a wave small at first, rapidly growing larger, of demand for change in favour of black Australians, fanned by the winds of growing knowledge and concern on the part of white Australians, but essentially driven by the growing assertiveness of the Aborigines themselves. The writings of Stanner, Elkin, R and C Berndt and other anthropologists, of political scientists C.D. Rowley and C.M. Tatz, of emotional sympathisers such as Dr H.C. Coombs and Judith Wright, gave an intellectual base. Governments responded, slowly, under the weight of inertia inherent in the Australian democratic system. In 1962 Aborigines received full voting rights for Commonwealth and Northern Territory elections. Two years later the Welfare Ordinance was replaced by a comprehensive social welfare ordinance which lifted all major restraints upon Aborigines; but the

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1967 referendum, which removed the constitutional bar to the ability of the Commonwealth government to legislate for Aborigines, was the point of no return for official policy. According to E.J. Maher, Prime Minister Harold Holt was more interested in passing the concurrent referendum proposed to break the nexus between Senate and House of Representatives numbers than he was in the Aboriginal question.24 Yet, when the nexus proposal was lost and the Aboriginal carried by 90.77 percent of votes cast, he quickly adjusted to the situation, created an Office of Aboriginal Affairs in the Prime Minister’s Department and appointed Dr Coombs, W.E.H. Stanner and Barrie Dexter, then Australian Ambassador to Laos, to a new advisory body, the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. On 19 December 1967 Holt drowned in a wild surf at Portsea, ‘a tragic setback for the Aboriginal cause’, according to Dr Coombs, for the next Prime Minister, John Gorton, ‘was frankly not interested and could see no good reason for special privileges for Aborigines or for programmes directed specifically at their needs’;25 but the pressure upon Gorton’s successor, William McMahon, grew steadily, from press, parliamentary Opposition, some of his own followers and, directly, from Aborigines themselves. In 1963 the Aborigines of Yirrkala, protesting the excision of 330 square kilometres of their land for mining, twice petitioned the Commonwealth parliament. They received a sympathetic Select Committee report and nothing else. In 1970–71 they took their claim to the Northern Territory Supreme Court on the basis of traditional ownership of the land. Mr Justice Blackburn gave judgment against them. Six years earlier the NAWU, still the great union of the Territory, had applied to the Arbitration Court for Aboriginal pastoral workers to receive the same pay as white stockmen. In March 1966 the Court approved the application but deferred its full execution until 1 December 1968. Two months later Aboriginal stockmen and domestics at Newcastle Waters station struck in protest. In August 1966 nearly all the Gurindji who lived and worked on the Wave Hill station walked off in protest at poor working and living conditions.

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The actions at Yirrkala and Wave Hill both attracted strong support and a great deal of attention from sympathetic whites; but the motivating force was Aboriginal. The lesson was not lost on the federal Labor party nor wholly upon the Liberals in government. During 1971 the McMahon government reviewed its Aboriginal policies and, in January 1972, put out a statement which retreated considerably from the direct assimilation policy, acknowledging specifically that Aborigines ‘should be encouraged and assisted to preserve and develop their own culture, language, tradition and arts so that these can become the living elements in the diverse culture of the Australian society’.26 Some of their own agencies and officers in the Territory were well ahead of them. In July 1961 Paul Hasluck, nearing the end of his long term as Minister for Territories, had told church representatives that, in the cause of assimilation, he expected them to train Aborigines for self-management of the mission settlements. Churchmen accepted the government’s view – as Bishop O’Loughlin of Darwin said, ‘the only thing that may be in dispute is how rapidly the missions will be out of a job’,27 but they and the administrators of the government settlements soon saw that the combination of self-management programmes and the rising spirit of Aboriginal assertiveness was leading in a new direction. The Watts/Gallacher report of 1964 noted the high degree of persistence in tribal beliefs and customs and laid down the principle that ‘the Aboriginal culture must be recognised and respected by all teachers and instructors.28 Following a study tour of the United States and Canada, Harry Giese noted in 1966 that in those countries he ‘rarely heard the terms ‘assimilation’ and ‘integration’ used except in an historical context’ and warned: We would be well advised in Australia to discontinue their use when referring to official government policies; they do not in fact describe present policies and their use can lead to overtones of racial arrogance and intolerance.29

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The ruling Liberal-Country Party responded too slowly to the growing wave of Aboriginal aspirations and in 1972 suffered the embarrassment of the tent ‘embassy’ maintained by young Aborigines on the lawns of Parliament House, Canberra. The Labor leader, Gough Whitlam, took up the Aboriginal cause, visited the tent embassy and promised that when Labor came to power the Aborigines would have ‘freehold title to their land’.30 Labor did come to power, at the end of 1972, and it seemed that evolution in Aboriginal matters was about to be replaced by revolution; ‘self-determination in economic, social and political affairs’ became the new policy.31 The Whitlam government created a fullyfledged Department of Aboriginal Affairs and poured money into its operations; they bought Willowra station for Aboriginal use; the Gurindji received title to their claimed lands at Wave Hill; an Act of 1975 outlawed racial discrimination in Australian society; in 1973 Mr Justice Woodward conducted a judicial inquiry as a first step towards Aboriginal land rights; but when Labor fell from power at the end of 1975 the resultant legislation had not passed through parliament, the states’ Aboriginal policies and practice were almost unchanged and the high hopes of three years previously had given way to disillusionment. The election of the Fraser government in 1975 promised no great advances for Aborigines, but the new rulers did announce an Aboriginal policy of ‘selfmanagement’ and, in 1976, passed into law an Aboriginal Land Rights Act for the Northern Territory.32 It is a strange piece of legislation, shaped more by political pressures within the ruling coalition parties than by either overall Aboriginal needs or common sense and it left intractable problems to be faced, from 1978, by the new Territory government. All Crown lands under lease (mainly cattle stations or town area) were, not unreasonably, placed beyond reach of land claims; but at the same time the Woodward-recommended provision for land to be claimed by Aborigines on a basis of need was removed. All this has led Aborigines and their legal advisers to seek loopholes in the Act or favourable interpretation in the Courts. For instance, various Aboriginal Land Trusts and Corporations have

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achieved notable success; in land claims involving the Alyawarra people, under the 1976 Land Rights Act and the subsequent Native Title Act of 1993. These include the Alyawarr and Kaititja claim to 1540 square kilometres of western Alyawarra lands granted under freehold title in 1979 and ultimately held by the Alyawarra Aboriginal Land Trust, the Ammatjirra and Alyawarra claim to Utopia Pastoral Lease, granted in 1991 and the Wakaya and Alyawarra Land Claim, on the boundary area between Wakaya and northern Alyawarra peoples. Portion of the claim was granted under freehold title in 1991. In 1999 the Indigenous Land Corporation bought the lease to the Alyawarra heartland, Ooratippra station, in May 2000 transferred the lease to the Ooratippra Land Corporation and in May 2011, they won a Native Title determination for the Ooratippra block. The climax came for the Alyawarra people on the 18 November 2014 when the Sandover Native Title Determination gave them Native Title rights to the whole Sandover River area of northeastern Centralia, except for minor existing excisions – and Lake Nash.32 Here a long and, at times bitter, struggle with powerful white leaseholding interests firmly established the Alyawarr as rightful successors of the Pwelany tribe and confirmed their ownership of the township, Alpurrurulam, on Lake Nash land.33 All this was orchestrated or backed by the Central Land Council, created after the passing of the 1976 Act – and the influence of this powerful body has been felt with equally far-reaching force in every corner of Central Australia, most notably on the return of title to the traditional owners of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in 1985, Barrow Creek Telegraph Station in 1992 and the declaration of huge areas in the Tanami Desert in 2007 and 2012. In 2004, too, the CLC successfully negotiated with the NT Government for joint management of twenty National Parks and Reserves. In moving to Alice Springs and Tennant Creek, white Australians have made the Aborigines of Centralia a minority in their own land, perhaps a 30% minority in the Territory as a whole and somewhat less in the Centre where desert

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conditions have thinned the Indigenous population. Yet the forces unleashed by the war and those that had been gathering strength before the war – of international decolonising sentiment, of anthropological opinion in Australia, of government search for an equitable settlement between black and white – joined this new emphasis which stemmed from the Aborigines themselves, to push forward the impetus for Aboriginal emancipation. The final settlement is still a long way ahead and what it will finally be no one can say. One thing is certain: there is no going back. In all this, Commonwealth governments have been a catalyst, instigator, financier, even dictator, of change in an often stormy partnership with Territorians. Without the power and resources of the Commonwealth, local energy and vision could not have carried the Northern Territory – and Centralia as part of it – far beyond the sad cycles of the past. Yet those who have long worked in the bush with Aborigines are inclined to think, ‘Why does the Commonwealth always push its own ideas? Why don’t they sit down with and listen to the bush people, black and white? Why are the concepts of the academic theorists and/or the people who run what Marcia Langton has called ‘the vicious world of Aboriginal politics’35 accepted as gospel when they are often separated from the desires of those closest to the land by a gulf as great as the Grand Canyon?

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Stations in the Sandover Area, 1950s, Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 54–5

Sandover River bed at Ooratippra, 2005, Jan Moore

Urandangi, Lake Nash road, Jan Moore

Left

Sir Paul Hasluck at NT Legislative Council opening, 1950, NTL, PH6141/0025 Below

Art Exhibition, Alice Springs, 1950. Jock Nelson (left), Rex Battarbee (2nd left) and Albert Namatjira (centre), NTL, PH0034/0076

Left

Pastor Paul Albrecht, NTL, PH0167/0206 Below

Dick Ward, NTL, PH0416/0002

Left

‘Bernie’ Kilgariff, NTL, PH0416/0087 Below

Alice Springs from Anzac Hill, 1999, Jennifer McFarland

Kings Canyon Land Title Handover: NT Chief Minister Ian Tuxworth with Aboriginal Elders, 1985, NTL, PH0730/0016

Conclusion: Quo Vadis?

The Land Councils, plus such bodies as Tangentyere Council which services the fast-expanding town camps of Alice Springs and the Central Australia Youth Link Up Service (CAYLUS), which has achieved remarkable success in virtually eliminating petrol-sniffing by Aborigines in Centralia, are themselves constructions of mainstream Australian society, run on a shared management basis by Aborigines and non-Aborigines – and thus address directly the basic problems in reconciling the cultural streams of the two societies. W.E.H. Stanner put his finger squarely on the crux of the problem in writing, ‘Ours is a market civilisation, theirs [of Aboriginal peoples] not. Indeed there is a sense in which The Dreaming and The Market are mutually exclusive’.1 They are indeed! This has been well illustrated by the events of the 1970s that seriously affected the Aboriginal population of Centralia who had been operating in reasonable harmony with the cattle industry in the Northern Territory for many years. As Peter Sutton puts it: Apart from welfare dependency and a withdrawal or defeat of disciplining regimes of land governance, other critical historical factors have been at work since the late 1960s and early 1970s. From 1968, agreed wages for Aboriginal stockworkers proceeded to be enforced, resulting in extremely widespread and typically undesired departure from small communities on pastoral holdings in remote Australia, where local Aboriginal people had tended

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to live close to their homelands while enjoying meaningful employment. This was the same era in which motorbikes, helicopter mustering, diesel pumps, chainsaws and four-wheel drive vehicles were reducing traditional labour needs through mechanization, and the fencing of runs was improving stock control. Beef roads and road trains killed off distance droving. With the collapse of pastoral employment, large numbers of Aboriginal people became concentrated in artificial Aboriginal townships or were attracted to fringe settlements at real towns on highways in and sometimes outside their home regions. For many in the pastoral districts and in nearby labour pools on missions this period, which occurred mainly in the early and mid-1970s, was an entry into the gates of hell.2 And the gates of hell were – and are – oiled by alcohol. The damage done to Territory Aboriginal society was worsened by what Sutton has called ‘some Indigenous practices that derived from the ancient past, including the legitimization of men’s violent power over their women … and a customary permissiveness in the rearing of children.’3 Indeed, the brutal killing of women by the drunken men who should be protecting them is too prevalent in mainstream Australian society; it is far worse in the town camps of Alice Springs and the remote settlements – some could well be called ‘urban ghettos’ – of Centralia. Not all Centralian Aboriginal settlements have problems of this kind; but there are enough urban ghettos that nurture youth crime, suicide, violence to women and children and despair. Is it time to return real responsibility to these people to give them purpose? Could the Aboriginal state movement of the 1920s be revived? Perhaps not in the kind of Aboriginal Free State envisaged by Blair and Jennifer McFarland of CAYLUS in their imaginative series of futuristic stories. That, as the authors concede, would require a new world.4

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But numbers are against any great change; in the 1920s Centralian Aborigines outnumbered whites in a ratio of 40:1, now the whites outnumber the Aborigines by 2 or 3 to 1; and in both cases, Aboriginal kinship obligations would make it just about impossible to administer a modern neo-liberal state. Does the answer lie in joint black/white control, which has been shown to be workable in the case of the CLC and its offshoots? CLC boasts that ‘over 417,000 square kilometres of land [in Central Australia] are now Aboriginal freehold under the Land Rights Act,5 and they have their fingers into virtually every aspect of Centralian politics and economics. Aborigines and nonAborigines in these organisations know one another well and have worked together successfully for many years. Here is the scope for shared power; to run a new state and one that would demonstrate to the world our commitment to the survival and development of the Aboriginal people; surely the last chance ever to do so. There’s no other area of Australia where the Aboriginal presence in the population and the economy is so strong. But that prospect implies a drastic – and logical – re-arrangement of state borders. As noted, Central Australia has no solid links to the Top End of the Northern Territory. Logic dictates that a new state be carved out of the deserts, not only of the Territory but also including the neighbouring areas of the surrounding states; while a new state is forged in the north containing the Kimberleys of Western Australia and the eastern Barkly Tablelands of Queensland. The idea is not new – nor is its instant rejection. What State or Territory in Australia has ever given up a square centimeter of land to a neighbouring state, or ceded an ounce of sovereignty? So the Northern Territory seems set to survive. Can Centralia ever be free from northern dominance? The links are few and mainly artificial; except for the Aboriginal question. This is the only section of Australia where Aborigines form a large percentage of the population – up to 30% and their birthrate (as previously stated) is twice that of the non-Aboriginal population. They must be built into all plans for the present and the future as

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part of Centralia and the Top End. Both areas suffer from the same disability, dominance by a federal government that provides most of their money – and still has a tight grip on the main interest of southern voters, Aboriginal advancement. Even there, federal policies seem to be aimed at short-term political advantage rather than the patient long-term planning required to make a significant difference to Aboriginal lives; witness the Howard government’s ‘Intervention’ of 2007 which contemptuously pushed aside years of planning by the Territory government – or Kevin Rudd’s very public apology to the ‘stolen generation’ in 2008. Great public theatre; but what of the bush Aborigines such as the woman who said of the Apology to Peter Sutton: ‘That’s for urban people and whitefellas’.6 All her kind want is a decent life. Or Sutton’s own comment, which pinpoints a world of evasions and excuses about the startling rate at which Aboriginal men kill their women: ‘A murdered mother is not ‘disadvantaged’ – she has lost her life.’7 Again, it seems that Central Australia will remain cattle country for as long as can be foreseen – so long as the Territory government remembers that underground water, not gas, is its most precious resource. That’s all the country is good for; it’s still a truism, as B.R. Davidson said fifty years ago, that ‘any agricultural product which could be produced in northern Australia could be produced at lower cost in the south’.8 Territorians of the well-watered north are used to sudden Federal government enthusiasm for developing the north – and for these ideas fading away without result; and Centralia is mostly ignored altogether. Yet Centralia has a problem for both the Commonwealth and Territory governments which must be resolved. The money that is spent there in Aboriginal welfare and services is vital to the whole region. When Dean Ashenden returned to Tennant Creek in 2005 after an absence of fifty years, he found that, in place of the thriving mining town of 5–6,000 mainly white miners, there stood a town of about 3000, dominated by the surrounding Warramangu land claims and camps.9 The

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town’s economy now depends on the tribal inhabitants of these camps. In the case of Alice Springs, a recent study by Professor Rolf Gerritson of CDU’s Desert Knowledge Research Centre indicates the vital part the Aborigines play in the economy of the whole region. As he says: What would happen if all the Aboriginal people of Central Australia and Alice Springs suddenly disappeared? Obviously the result would be economic catastrophe; the Alice Springs economy would shrink about 40% almost immediately … The Alice Springs economy would embark upon a downward spiral … The focus on Aboriginal affairs is too often on social problems. ‘This paper’, says Gerritson, ‘illustrates that the Aboriginal people of Central Australia are an essential and intrinsic part of its economy’.10 Quite so; and this makes it urgent to find a settlement here to race relations, perhaps as a precursor to an Australia-wide action. Still, bearing in mind Professor Ann McGrath’s warning that historians have a poor record in forecasting the future,11 I’m prepared to make only one observation and one prophecy: It’s taken us more than 200 years to get into this mess; it’ll take another 200 to get out of it.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1

Powell, Alan, Far Country: A Short History of the Northern Territory, 5th edn., Charles Darwin University Press, Darwin, 2009, p. 1.

2 Ibid., p. 2. 3 Central Land Council, 23/11/2016, p. 1 4

http://www.clc.org.au/articles/cat/where-we-are,

Laseron, C.F. (with J.N. Jennings), The Face of Australia, 3rd edn., Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1972, p. 59.

5

See photograph, Helyer, G., They Led the Way, NT Dept. of Lands and Housing, Darwin, 1983, p. 118.

6

For the geography and geology of Central Australia, see Laseron, The Face of Australia, Angus and Robertson, 1972, pp. 58–68; Hiscock, Peter, Archaeology of Ancient Australia, Routledge, Oxford, 2008, pp. 25–9; Jennings, J.N. & Mabutt, J.A. (eds.), Landform Studies from Australia and New Guinea, ANU Press, Canberra, 1971.

7

The reptilian and animal/bird life are listed in the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Year Book of Australia, 2006; http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@. nsf/mf/1301.0. This site lists 26 scientific publications for source statistics.

8

One of the best outlines of the conventional theory is that of Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1995, passim.

9

The ‘firestick farming’ controversy – See Gammage, Bill, The Biggest Estate on Earth, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2012, pp. 125–8; Bowman, DMJS, ‘The Impact of Aboriginal landscape burning on the Australian Biota’, New Phytogenesis, 140, 1998.

10 Powell, Far Country, pp. 12–13.

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11

Flood, Josephine, The Original Australians, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2006, p. 179.

12 Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, pp. 102–3. 13

See Powell, Far Country, pp. 13–14.

14

Mulvaney, J., The Prehistory of Australia, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, p. 49.

15

Oral communication, J. McFarland to author, 6 December 2016.

16 These language groups and tribal homelands are redrawn from names and regions used in the Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press, for AIATSIS, Canberra, 1994. The tribal boundaries generally equate with those of Norman Tindale’s monumental Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974. Tindale gives a considerable number of possible names for each tribe. 17

Tindale, N.B., ‘Results of the Harvard-Adelaide Universities Anthropological Expedition 1938–1939: Distribution of Australian Aboriginal Tribes: A Field Study’, Royal Society of South Australia Transactions, Vol. 64, December 1940.

Chapter 2 1

For the history of these posts, see Alan Powell, World’s End: British Military Outposts in the ‘Ring Fence’ around Australia 1824–1849, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2016, passim.

2

Cross, Jack, Great Central State: The Foundation of the Northern Territory, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2011, p. 1.

3

Letter, A.J. Gregory to John Roe, 30 May 1856, quoted in Birman, W., Gregory of Rainworth, University of Western Australian Press, Perth, 1979, pp. 144–5.

4

Eyre, quoted in Hartwig, M.C., ‘The Progress of White Settlement in the Alice Springs District and its Effects upon the Aboriginal Inhabitants 1860–1894’, PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 1965, p. 80.

5 Ibid. 6

Bailey, John, Mr Stuart’s Track, Pan McMillan Australia, Sydney, 2006, outlines Stuart’s travels clearly. Other sources for Stuart are Hardman, W. (ed.), The Journals of John McDouall Stuart, Hesperian Press, Carlisle, W.A., 1984;

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Webster, M.W., John McDouall Stuart, MUP, Melbourne, 1958; Mudie, Ian, The Heroic Journey of John McDouall Stuart, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1968. 7

Stuart’s journal, quoted in Webster, John McDouall Stuart, p. 125.

8

Quoted in Bailey, Mr Stuart’s Track, p. 313.

9

Quoted in Webster, John McDouall Stuart, p. 138. Stuart’s ‘Mt Sturt’ was soon altered to ‘Mt Stuart’ by, it is suspected, James Chambers.

10 Quoted by T.G.H. Strehlow, Comments on the Journals of John McDouall Stuart, Libraries Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1967, p. 8. Strehlow, born in Central Australia, spent much of his life in studying its original inhabitants. 11 Strehlow, Comments on the Journals, p. 5. 12

Hardman, William (ed.), The Journals of John McDouall Stuart, p. 197.

13

Ibid., pp. 217–20.

14

Quoted in Bailey, Mr Stuart’s Track, p. 181.

15

Quoted in Ibid., p. 182.

16

Ibid, p. 181. This book is probably the best among many that have been written to trace Stuart’s track. The best-known edition of his journals (but littered with inaccuracies) is Hardman’s Explorations in Australia, first published in England in 1864.

17 Harcus, W (ed.), South Australia: its History, Resources and Publications, London, 1876, p. 2. 18 An outline of the 1843–47 period of Territory occupation is in Powell, Far Country, pp. 60–5. 19

For the history of the Escape Cliffs settlement (1864–67) see Browne, Lloyd ‘“Then My Memory Will Get Justice”: The Finniss Controversy Revisited’, Ph D thesis, C DU, 2017, passim. For a summary version see Powell, Far Country, pp. 61–5.

20 Fitzgerald, Ross, From the Dreaming to 1915: A History of Queensland, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1982, p. 133. 21

Powell, Alan, Blood and Sand, Blair McFarland, Alice Springs, 2016, pp. 4–5.

22 Norman Tindale called the Lake Nash tribe ‘Jaroinga’, a variant of the ‘Yaroinga’ nomenclature used in the writing of his principal informant, Dr

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Walter Roth and they are now best known (and named here as) ‘Pwelany’ from their language group. 23 Tindale, N.B., Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974, p. 227. 24 Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 6–7. 25

‘J.L.D’, Sydney Bulletin, 27 May 1897, p. 7.

26 Ibid. 27

Quoted in Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915, p. 144.

28

Taylor, Peter, An End to Silence, Methuen, Sydney, 1980, p. 23.

29

Ibid., p. 158.

30

Clune, Frank, Overland Telegraph, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1955, p. 233

31

Ibid., p. 232.

32 Cross, Great Central State, p. 176. 33 Taylor, An End to Silence, p. 44. 34

W.W. Mills quoted in Taylor, An End to Silence, p. 73.

35

Arthur Ashwin, one of Millner’s stockmen, recalled his transcontinental trek more than 50 years later. See Wills, L.A. (ed.), ‘Arthur C Ashwin’s Reflections of Ralph Millner’s expedition from Kopperamanna to the Northern Territory with Sheep and Horses in 1870–71’, typescript compiled 1927.

36

Lewis, John, Fought and Won, W.K. Thomas, Adelaide, 1922, pp. 91–2.

37

The early sheepmen of the Lake Nash area did not attempt to legalise possession of their runs.

38 Cross, Great Central State, p. 330. 39

Giles, quoted in Hartwig, ‘The Progress of White Settlement’, Vol. 1, p. 255.

40 Giles’ flight of fancy is noted in Dutton, C., Australia’s Last Explorer: Ernest Giles. Faber and Faber, London, 1971, p. 27. 41

Quoted in Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 23.

42 Ibid. 43 H.V. Barclay’s five exploring expeditions and his surveying career in the NT are set out in Strong, B.W., Henry Vere Barclay: Centralian Explorer, Historical Society of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 1989, passim.

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44 Barclay, quoted in Strong, Henry Vere Barclay, p. 18. 45 Winnecke, ‘Report of Mr Winnecke’s Exploration from Alice Springs to the Herbert River and Tennant Creek, SAPP, No. 121, 1880, p. 23. 46 Lindsay, D., ‘Explorations in the Northern Territory of South Australia’, PRGSA, South Australian Branch, No. 2, 1884–88, p. 9. 47

Ashwin, quoted in Hartwig, ‘The Progress of White Settlement’, Vol. 1, p. 256.

48

Ibid., pp. 262–3.

49

See Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 8.

50 Winnecke, C., ‘Report of Mr Winnecke’s Exploration from Alice Springs to the Herbert River and Tennant’s Creek’, entry for 29 June 1880, p. 28. 51 Ross’s comment is noted by Powell, Far Country, p. 79 as is the transfer of Centralian properties in the late 19th century. 52

Costello, M.J., Life of John Costello, Dymocks, Sydney, 1930, p. 77.

53 Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 9 and endnote 43, Ch. 1, p. 17. 54 See Hartwig, ‘The Progress of White Settlement’, Vol. 1, p. 271. Hartwig’s evidence for the killing of 50 or more Aborigines is given on pp. 273–6. 55

See Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 6–7.

56

Costello, M.J., Life of John Costello, p. 81.

57

Hartwig, ‘The Progress of White Settlement’, Vol. 2, p. 388; Hartwig’s thesis, Ch. 4, ‘The Pastoral Frontier, 1872–1894’, provides a detailed study of this period in Central Australia.

58 Thompson, D.C., ‘Lake Nash Inspection Report 1891’, National Australia Bank Archives, Springvale, Victoria. 59

Hartwig, ‘The Progress of White Settlement’, Vol. 2, pp. 398–9.

60

Ibid., pp. 397–8.

61

Ibid., pp. 400–1.

62

See Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 26.

63

Beckett, quoted in Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 26.

64 Ibid., p. 26. 65 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 66 Ibid., p. 27.

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67 Robinson, Judith, interviewed by Frances Good, 5 May 1991, NT Archives, NTRS 226, TS 667. 68

Gillen’s Diary: The Camp Jottings of F.J. Gillen, Libraries Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1968, entry for 24 March 1901.

69 The NT’s Daly River killings by Aborigines of three white miners and the resultant indiscriminate massacre of tribespeople in 1884 resulted in sharp protest from these Adelaide groups. Frontier feeling was well-expressed by Darwin’s Northern Territory Times, which wrote exultantly: These white men with their loaded guns Made black men scarce as married nuns. See Powell, Far Country, p. 98. 70 Leske, E. (ed.), Hermannsburg: A Vision and a Mission, Lutheran Publishing House, Adelaide, 1977, pp. 7–17. 71 Ibid., p. 3, quoting L. Grope, President General of the Lutheran Church of Australia, 1977. 72

See M. Lohe, in Leske, Hermannsburg, pp. 17–19, for these events.

73 Leske, Hermannsburg, foreword, p. 3. 74 Donovan, Peter, Alice Springs: Its History and the People Who Made It, Alice Springs Town Council, Alice Springs, 1988, p. 75.

Chapter 3 1

Hartwig, ‘The Progress of White Settlement’, Vol. 2, Appendix iv, pp. 603, 604.

2

Ibid., p. 371.

3

Ibid., pp. 372–4.

4

Horn, W.A. in Baldwin Spencer (ed.), Report on the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia, Part 1, Introduction, pp. ix–x.

5

See Mulvaney, D.J. and Calaby, J.H., So Much That is New: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, MUP, Melbourne, 1985, p. 117.

6 Ibid. 7

See Stirling, B.C., Report of the Horn Scientific Expedition … Part IV,

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Anthropology, pp. 2–154, passim. For the route of the Horn Expedition, see Map. 8

Morton, S.R. and Mulvaney, D.J. (eds.), Exploring Central Australia: Society, Environment and the 1894 Horn Expedition, Surrey, Beatty and Sons, Sydney, 1996, p. 125.

9

Spencer, Baldwin and Gillen, F J. The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Macmillan and Co, London, 1899, passim.

10 Spencer, Baldwin and Gillen, F.J., The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Macmillan and Co, London, 1904, passim. 11 Some of the best of these historic photographs are found in Batty, P., Allen L. and Morton, J., The Photographs of Baldwin Spencer, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2005. 12 Briscoe, Gordon, in Morton and Mulvaney, Exploring Central Australia, p. 129. 13

Mulvaney, D.J., Petch, A. and Morphy, H. (eds.), From the Frontier: Outback Letters to Baldwin Spencer, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2000, p. 64. Cowle’s letters to Spencer are extant; Spencer’s replies are not.

14

Mulvaney, D.J. and Calaby, J.H., So Much That is New, p. 163.

15 Mulvaney, D.J., Morphy, H. and Petch, A. (eds.), My Dear Spencer: The Letters of F.J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, Hyland House Publishing Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 2001, p. 270. 16

Murif (1896), quoted in Hartwig, ‘The Progress of White Settlement’, Vol. 2, p. 580.

17

Quoted in Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 30.

18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., pp. 10–11. 20 May, D., Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 59. 21

Rowley, C.D., The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Penguin, Ringwood, 1983, p. 184

22 Ibid., p. 183. 23

This conflict is well documented by Tony Roberts in Frontier Justice, University

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of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2005. 24 Powell, Far Country, p. 95. 25

Hartwig, ‘The Progress of White Settlement’, Vol. 2, p. 387.

26 Hayes, Ted, ‘Undoolya’, 3rd Doreen Braitling Memorial Lecture, National Trust of Australia (Northern Territory), 10 May 1983. 27 Stirling, E.C., Report on the Work of the Horn Expedition …, Pt. IV (Anthropology), p. 7. 28

Beckett, J.T., quoted in Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 28.

29

Chronicle (Adelaide), 17 August 1907, p. 1.

30

Quoted in Hartwig, ‘The Progress of White Settlement’, Vol. 2, p. 356.

31

Harney, W.E., Content to Lie in the Sun, Robert Hale Ltd, London, 1962, pp. 44–5.

32

Willshire, quoted in Hartwig, ‘The Progress of White Settlement’, Vol. 2, pp. 450–1.

33

SAPP, No. 148 of 1891–92, quoted in Tony Austin, Simply the Survival of the Fittest, HSNT, Darwin, 1992, p. 77.

34

See Austin, Simply the Survival of the Fittest, p. 78.

35

Ibid., p. 79.

36 Ibid., p. 68. 37

Register (Adelaide), 24 July 1895. For the 1895 Royal Commission findings and recommendations, see this issue of the Register.

38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40

Costello, John, written submission to the 1895 Royal Commission is quoted in Powell, Far Country, CDU Press, Darwin, 2009, pp. 82–3.

41 Bradshaw, Doris, and Lockwood, Douglas, Alice on the Line, New Holland Publishers Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2010, pp. 164–5. 42 Donovan, Alice Springs, p. 116. 43

Traynor, Stuart, Alice Springs, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2016, pp. 183–4.

44 Donovan, Alice Springs, p. 204. 45

Parsons’ comment is from the Government Resident’s report of 1890, quoted

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in Powell, Far Country, p. 93. 46

Kingston is quoted in Elder, Peter, ‘Northern Territory Charlie: Charles James Dashwood in Palmerston,1892–1905’, B.A. (Hons) thesis, ANU, 1979, p. 52.

47 Mildren, Justice Dean, in Mearns, L. and Barter, L. (eds.), Progressing Backwards: The Northern Territory in 1901, HSNT, Darwin 2002, p. 69. 48

For a summary of the transfer negotiations, see Powell Far Country, pp. 103–5.

49 Le Hunte is quoted in Hon. L.E. Groom, Minister for External Affairs, memorandum, ‘Northern Territory’, July 1909.

Chapter 4 1

Reece, Bob, ‘The Debate on the Commonwealth Takeover of the Northern Territory, 1910’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, No. 41, 2013, pp. 12–16.

2

Donovan, Peter, At the Other End of Australia, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1984, p. 3.

3

Reece, ‘The Debate on the Commonwealth’, p. 12.

4

Northern Territory Report of the Acting Administrator (S.J. Mitchell), for 1911, p. 8. Mitchell, previously the South Australian Resident in Darwin, was retained by the Commonwealth Government as Acting Administrator until a permanent official could be appointed.

5 Powell, Far Country, p. 110. 6

For these events, see Powell, Far Country, pp. 106–15. Gilruth’s 1913 visit to Centralia is noted in NT, Reports of the Administrator, 1913 and 1914/15.

7

Beckett, J.T., ‘Report on Aborigines’, addendum to NT Administrator’s Report. 1914, pp. 26–8.

8

Aboriginal Ordinance (NT) 1918, (No. 9 of 1918). For the main provisions of this Act, see Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 33.

9

See Oliver, T.G., Mines Dept. Report, 1913, pp. 76–7.

10

Jensen, H.I., Director of Mines, Mines Dept. Report, 1913, p. 60. H.L. Jensen gave way to Oliver as Mines Director in 1914.

11

Gilruth, 1914–15 Report, p. 3.

158

12 Ling, Ted, Commonwealth Government Records about the Northern Territory, National Archives of Australia, Canberra, 2011, pp. 24–5. 13 Powell, Far Country, p. 107. 14 Donovan, At the Other End of Australia, p. 27. 15 Powell, Far Country, p. 109. 16 Ling, Commonwealth Government Records, p. 20. 17 Powell, Far Country, p. 108. 18

Cramp, Norm, personal communication, 2017.

19

See Bray, George, Laughton, Kenny and Forster, Pat, Aboriginal Ex-Servicemen of Central Australia, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1995, p. 1.

20 Ling, Ted, Blame and Martyrs: The Commonwealth Government and the Northern Territory Cattle Industry 1911–1978, HSNT, Darwin, 2014, p. 1. 21

McLaren, Glen and Cooper, William, Distance, Drought and Dispossession: A History of the Northern Territory Pastoral Industry, NTU Press, Darwin, 2001, p. 60.

22 See Leske (ed.), Hermannsburg …, pp. 31–2. See also Donovan, At the Other End of Australia, p. 29. 23 NT Lands and Survey Dept, ‘Land north of Marshall River to Alroy Downs and west to Telegraph Line, open for application for Lease, Block Descriptions, September 1920; David Lindsay, ‘Report on my Topographical Survey in Central Australia, made in the year 1919’, 9 April 1920, NTAS, F5, p. 155. See also Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 34–5. 24 Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 35. 25

Urquhart, F.C., 1921, Administrator’s Report, p. 4.

26

C.P.D., Vol. 127, 11 December 1930, p. 1322, quoted in Powell, Far Country, p. 123.

27

C.P.D., 8 November 1920, p. 6279, quoted in Powell, Far Country, p. 121.

28

Quoted in Powell, Far Country, p. 123.

29 Ibid. 30 Ling, Blame and Martyrs, p. 3. 31 Ling, Commonwealth Government Records, p. 40.

159

32

Ibid., p. 42.

33

Ford, Margaret, Beyond the Farthest Fences, Rigby Ltd, Adelaide, 1969, p. 8.

34 Groom. Arthur, I Saw a Strange Land, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2015, p. 13. 35

Ibid., 106–9.

36

Strehlow, T.G.H., Journey to Horseshoe Bend, Rigby, Adelaide, 1970, p. 17.

37 Ibid. 38

Madigan, C.T., quoted in T.G.H. Strehlow’s Journey to Horseshoe Bend, np.

39

See Powell, Far Country, p. 122.

40

Buchanan’s Report on Northern Territory Development and Administration can be found in C.P.P. No. 48, printed 13 August 1925.

41 Nelson, H.G., speech in the Budget debate, 23 July 1926, C.P.D., 1926, p. 4493. 42

O’Brien, V.T., ‘Weddell, Robert Hunter’, NTDB, pp. 624–5.

43

O’Brien, ‘Cawood, John Charles’, NTDB, p. 87.

44 See NTDB, p. 87; and Annual Report of the Government Resident, Central Australia, 1927–28, pp. 5–8. 45 Traynor, Alice Springs, p. 273. 46 Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 42–3. 47

Argument about the Coniston massacres still goes on. See, for instance, Powell, Far Country, pp. 131–2, Blood and Sand, pp. 42–3; Traynor, Alice Springs, pp. 273–7. These are just a suggested start for those interested in the topic. Just about every book or article touching on Centralia in the relevant time period has mention and discussion of this topic.

48

Johnny Martin Jumpijinpa. a Walpiri man, was interviewed by Peter Read on 14 August 1977. See Read, J and Read, PA, ‘A View of the Past’, unpublished typescript, 1980, in possession of the author. See also Read and Read, Long Time, Olden Time, IAD Publication, Alice Springs, 1991, pp. 123–5.

49 Traynor, Alice Springs, p. 277. 50 Wilson, Bill and O’Brien, Justin, ‘Seventy-Five Years On: Revisiting the Conniston Massacre’, in Carment, D (ed.), Northern Encounters, CDU Press, Darwin, 2004, p. 27.

160

51

Cawood, C.A., Report of the Administration of the Territory of Central Australia for the Year Ended the 30th June 1929.

52

See Austin, Tony, Never Trust a Government Man, NTU Press, Darwin, 1991, pp. 218–19.

53 For the building of Adelaide House see Carment, David, History and the Landscape in Central Australia, NARU, Darwin, 1991, p. 52. 54 Carrington, V.G., Annual Report of the Government Resident on the Administration of Central Australia, 1929/1930, p. 3. 55 Shepherd, F.P., Chief Surveyor, Lands and Survey Branch Reports, in NT Administrator’s Report 1934/37, p. 41. 56

NT Administrator’s Report, 1936/37, p. 7.

57 Donovan, Alice Springs, p. 140; Traynor (Alice Springs, p. 280) places the population at about 90. 58

See Ling, Commonwealth Government Records, pp. 46–9 for details of this plan

59

See Traynor, Alice Springs, pp. 286–7 for Lasseter’s story. As Traynor says (p. 280): ‘The map [of the reef] and the reef have never been found’ – probably because they don’t exist.

60

Carrington, V.G., Report of the Deputy Administrator, Alice Springs, 1934, p. 8.

61

Carrington, V.G., Report of the Deputy Administrator, Alice Springs, 1936, p. 15.

62 Haines, A.B., in Walkabout, June 1937, p. 43, quoted in Carment, David, Australia’s Depression Gold Rush, Tennant Creek 1932–1936, NTU Occasional Paper, No. 5, 1991, p. 15. 63 Carment, Australia’s Depression Gold Rush, pp. 16–17. 64 Hayes, Ted, ‘Undoolya’ lecture, 16 May 1983, CDU Library, p. 3. 65

McGrath, Ann, Born in the Cattle, Allen and Unwin Pty ltd, Sydney, 1987, p. 175.

66 See National Archives, Darwin, Reports of Committee Investigating Northern Territory Leases, 1933–34, NAA F68 series. 67

PLIC report on Undoolya/Unbalara, NAA F658, 93, p. 2.

68

PLIC report on Anningie, NAA F658, 9, p. 3.

69 Ling, Commonwealth Government Records, p. 45. 70

Abbott, CLA, Administrator’s Report 1937/8, p. 5.

161

71 Powell, Far Country, p. 135. 72

Bleakley, J.W., Report, The Aboriginals and Half-Castes of Central Australia and North Australia, 1928, Commonwealth of Australia, printed 8 February 1929.

73 Austin, Never Trust a Government Man, pp 130–1. For a full and penetrating analysis of Bleakley and Cook, see this work, pp. 121–39. 74

Bleakley, Report, p. 30.

75 Donovan, Alice Springs, p. 140. Aborigines were not counted in the official Australian census at this time. 76

Bleakley, Report, p. 30.

77 Nugget Smith Apetwarr, Affadavit under Native Title Act, 1993, Section 62 [1], sworn 5 October 2001; see also Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 38–9. 78

Pastoral Leases Investigation Committee, Report, ‘MacDonald Downs’, 1933, NANT F658, 65.

79 Central Reserves Committee, The Central Australian Aboriginal Reserves, Government Printer, Western Australia, Perth 1965, pp. 5, 7. 80 CRC, The Central Australian Aboriginal Reserves, pp. 8, 9. 81 Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 55–6.

Chapter 5 1

Abbott, NT Administrator’s Report, 30 June 1939, p. 6.

2

Ibid., p. 4

3

Ibid., pp. 5, 6, 15, 16, 17.

4 Powell, Far Country, p. 129. 5 Donovan, Alice Springs, p. 177. 6 Ibid., p. 178. 7

Personal communications, Norman Cramp, PhD student, CDU, to author, April–May 2017.

8 Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, pp. 16–17. 9 Donovan, At the Other End of Australia, pp. 137–8. 10 Ibid., p. 138.

162

11 Ibid. 12 Hall, Robert A. in Ball, D. (ed.) Aborigines in the Defence of Australia, ANU Press, Canberra, 1991, p. 35. 13 Ball, Aborigines in the Defence of Australia, p. 15. 14

Read, Peter and Jay, Long Time, Olden Time, IAD, Alice Springs, 1991, p. 133.

15

Carrington to Abbott, 4 June 1940, NANT, F1 43/22.

16 Abbott to Secretary, Department of the Interior, 1 December 1943, NANT, F1 43/22. See also Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, p. 233. 17

Beasley to Curtin, 17 September 1943, NANT, A5954, Box 251.

18 Stahl, C.R. to First Secretary, Chinese Legation, Canberra, 4 January 1943, NANT, F 320, 41/181. 19

Jones, F.H., Dept. of Supply and Shipping to Director-General of Manpower, 6 November 1943, NANT, F475, 43/322.

20

GSO 111, 7 MD to GSO, 7 MD 4 June 1940, NAV, MP 742/1, 175/1/189.

21 GSO 7 MD to ISGS, 4th Military District, 11 July 1940, NAV, MP 742/1, 175/1/189. 22 For suspicion of Hermannsburg in early 1942, see the above two footnotes. See also Secretary, Texas sub-branch RSSAILA to Minister for the Army, 25 March 1942; Secretary, Department of the Army to Assistant Secretary, 6 May 1942, NAV, MP 742/1, 175/1/189. 23

Quoted in Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, p. 26.

24 Abbott to Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, 27 September 1940, NANT F1 40/614. 25 For an explanation of the Alice Springs-based military structure during the war, see Smith, Alan, Convoys Up the Track, Smith, A.C., Adelaide, 2000, pp. 67–8. 26 Thompson, D., (interviewer Judy Reid), November 1954–February 1958, NAA. This source also covers the ‘Colonel and Mona’s Travelling Circus’ episode. For a general account of civil and Aboriginal affairs during WW2 see Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, pp. 213–64. 27

Quoted in Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, p. 221.

28 Oliver, Pam, The Intrepid Hilda Abbott, HSNT, Darwin, 2017, p. 142. This

163

book (pp. 124–42) outlines in detail Hilda Abbott’s actions during 1942–45. 29

Abbott to Loutit, 3 June 1941, 11 April 1944, NANT F1 42/108.

30

Abbott to Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, 17 May 1944, NANT F1 42/468 Pt 1.

31 Lycurgus J.R. Underdown repeated his statement to Abbott, 26 April 1944, NANT F142/408. 32

Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, to Abbott, 12 April 1943, NANT, 2 September 1943, NANT F1 43/58.

33

Carrodus to Abbott, 29 October 1942, NANT F1 42/353.

34 Connellan to Director General, Civil Aviation Dept., 28 October 1944, NANT F1 42/402. 35 E.W. Tonkin, Prime Minister’s Dept., to A.G. Michael, 31 March 1942, NANT F1 42/350. 36 For the relevant correspondence, see H.M. Rolland, for Director of Works, NT to Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, 14 May 1942; Abbott to Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, 14 June 1942; T.H. Garrett, Acting Secretary, Dept. of the Interior for Abbott, 15 July 1942, NANT F1 42/109. 37

Loutit to Lowe Commission, 10 March 1942, NAV Crown Solicitor’s Office, C.I. files, unnumbered.

38

Casey to Theodore, 5 September 1942, AWM 863/2/18.

39

See Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, p. 228 and notes, p. 310.

40

Quoted M Terry, Bulldozer, Frank Johnson, Sydney, 1945, p. 200.

41 Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, pp. 229–30 and notes pp. 310–11. 42

Kelso, ‘Inspections, Northern Territory, October 1942’, AWM 625/5/23.

43 Oliver, The Intrepid Hilda Abbott, p. 141.

Chapter 6 1

White to Abbott, 1 April 1942, NANT F1 42/367.

2

Harney to Deputy Director of Native Affairs, Alice Springs, 13 July 1942, NANT F1 42/435. White and the headquarters staff of Native Affairs Branch had moved to Alice Springs shortly before this date.

3

Hall, cited in Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, p. 254.

164

4

Abbott to Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, 13 May 1043, NAACT, A431, 46/915.

5

Hall, ‘The Army and Aborigines During World War II’, MA qualifying thesis, ANU, 1979, np.

6

Sadler, 9 May 1947, quoted in Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, p. 255. Sadler was reacting to adverse reports of the Army’s treatment of its WWII Aboriginal labour force.

7

Read, J. & P., A View of the Past, p. 269.

8

Hall, ‘The Army and the Aborigines’, p. 40.

9

Duffy, ‘Report, Care and Guidance of Native Race by Army’, 23 April 1945, AWM 419/27/6.

10

Sadler, quoted in Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, p. 256.

11

Ibid., p. 258.

12

Terry, M., Bulldozer, p. 203.

13 Carrodus to Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, 3 September 1940, quoted in Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, p. 244. 14

Pink, quoted in Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, p. 244.

15 Ibid. 16

Harney, Bill, Life Among the Aborigines, p. 14.

17

Dollery to GOC, Northern Territory Force, 18 November 1943, NANT F1 44/333. For the support of Abbott and Chinnery, see Abbott to Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, 17 March 1944, NAV, MP 742, 92/1/302

18 Adjutant-General to Secretary, Dept. of the Army, 31 December 1943; December 1944, précis of file NAV, MP 742, 92/1/302. 19

Cameron to GOC, NT Force, 25 January 1944, NAV, MP 742/1, 325/45/696.

20

Hall, ‘The Army and Aborigines’, p. 104.

21

Chinnery to Fenner, 5 June 1942, NAACT, A659, 44/1/168.

22

White to Abbott, 13 April 1942, NANT, F1, 42/367.

23

Giles to Colonel G.D. Shaw, 2 April 1942, NANT, F1, 42/367.

24 See Attachments, Under-Secretary, Dept. of Labour, Industry and Social Welfare, NSW, to Chinnery, 24 January 1945 (?), NAACT, A659, 45/1/2493.

165

25 Superintendent, Primary Schools, South Australia to Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, 10 June 1943, NAACT, A659, 44/1/168. 26 D P Israel to Secretary, Commonwealth Treasury, 13 July 1943, NAACT, A659, 44/1/168. 27

McCoy to Abbott, 22 July 1944, NAACT, A659, 44/1/168.

28 McCoy to Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, 12 April 1944, NAACT, A659, 44/1/168. 29

Abbott to Acting Director of Native Affairs, 10 March 1944, NAACT, A659, 44/1/168.

30

McCoy to Acting Director of Native Affairs, 28 March 1944, NAACT, A659, 44/1/168.

31

Chinnery to Barrenger, 6 August 1942, NAACT, A659, 44/1/168.

32 Adelaide Advertiser, 29 March 1946. 33 Giles to Secretary, Dept. of the Interior, 21 November 1940, NANT, F1, 40/585. 34 Stretton to Abbott, 9 July 1943. Secretary, Dept. of the Interior to Abbott, 11 August 1943, NANT, F1, 45/121. 35

Personal remarks to author by anthropologist Mark de Graaf.

36

Quoted in Powell, Blood and Sand, pp. 57–8.

37 Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 62. 38

Quoted in Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, p. 263.

39

J. and P. Read, ‘A View of the Past’, p. 271.

40

Quoted by J and P Read, ‘A View of the Past’, p. 304.

Chapter 7 1 Donovan, Alice Springs, pp. 222–3. 2

See Johanssen, Kurt (ed. D Ward), A Son of the Red Centre, Kurt Johanssen, Adelaide, 1992, pp. 141–89.

3 Powell, Far Country, p. 161. 4

Ibid., pp. 163, 213 (notes).

5

See Bureau of Agricultural Economics, The Northern Territory Beef Cattle

166

Industry: An Economic Survey, 1962–3 to 1964–5, Canberra, 1968, pp. 6–8. 6

Hayes, Ted, interview, quoted in The Conquest of Distance, HSNT, Darwin, 1996, p. 24.

7 Ibid. 8

Goulding, James, Centralian Tourism: The Early Years, Australian Scholarly Publishing ltd, Melbourne, 2016, p. 193. Goulding discusses Connellan’s business affairs on pp. 189–99.

9

Tate, Colin, ‘Aboriginal Violence; a return to pessimism’, The Australian Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 25, 1990, p. 249.

10 Langton, Marcia, foreword to Sutton, Peter, The Politics of Suffering, MUP, Melbourne, 2009, p. x. 11

Glendenning, Inga, 2nd foreword to Sutton, The Politics of Suffering, p. xii.

12 Heatley, Alistair, The Government of the Northern Territory, ANU, Canberra, 1979, p. 30. 13

Hasluck, Sir Paul, State Library of the Northern Territory, Occasional Paper, No. 28, Darwin, 1992, p. 5; paper delivered on 7 November 1991.

14 James, Barbara, ‘Ward, Richard Charles (Dick) 1910–1977’, NTDB revised edn., p. 409. 15

Hasluck, Occasional Paper, No. 28, p. 5.

16

These include former Chief Minister Adam Giles; Leaders of the Opposition Brian Ede, Neil Bell, Bob Collins and Jodeen Carney; Government Ministers Peter Toyne, Johan Elferink, Richard Lim, Roger Vale; Aboriginal MLAs Bess Price, Neville Perkins, Marion Scrymgour, Alison Anderson – and many more. These people and their parlimentary careers may be followed in Jaensch, A.D. and Smith, Robin, Turning 40: The Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory 1974–2014, HSNT, Darwin, 2016, passim.

17

A detailed constitutional history has no place in this short work. An outline may readily be found in Powell, Far Country, pp. 169–70; and detailed accounts are available in the following sources: Heatley, Alistair, The Territory Party: The Northern Territory Country Liberal Party, 1974–1998, NTU Press, Darwin, 1998; Heatley, Alistair, The Government of the Northern Territory, UQP, Brisbane, 1979; Jansch, Dean and Smith, Robyn, Turning Forty: The Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory 1974–2014, HSNT, Darwin, 2015.

167

18 Donovan, Alice Springs, p. 293. 19 See, for instance, the comments of Clare Martin, Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, and Australian trade officials, quoted in NT News, 9 March 2013; see also the statistics quoted in Alice Springs Economic Profile at a Glance, NT Government, Darwin, 2012. 20 Stanner, W.E.H., After the Dreaming: The 1968 Bayer Lecture, ABC, Sydney, 1969, p. 18. 21

Elkin, 1951, quoted in Powell, Far Country, p. 171.

22

Northern Territory of Australia, Welfare Ordinance 1953–60, Part III, 14 (1).

23

See Powell, Far Country, pp. 172–3.

24 Maher, E.J., ‘The 1967 Referendum; The Shadow and Substance of a New Deal for Aborigines’, Litt B thesis, UNE, 1979, pp. 58–62. 25

See Powell, Far Country, p. 123.

26

For the January 1972 Aboriginal Policy Objectives of the McMahon government, see Dept. of the Interior, Northern Territory Report, 1971–72, p. 66.

27 See Missions/Administration Conference Paper ‘The Future of the Missions’, 18 July 1961. 28

See Powell, Far Country, p. 174 and endnote 45, p. 205.

29

Giese, H., ‘Report on Study Tour of Canada and the United States of America’, November 1966, p. 3.

30

Whitlam (1972), quoted in Maher, ‘The 1967 Referendum’, p. 91.

31

Whitlam (1974), quoted in Maher, ‘The 1967 Referendum’, p. 94.

32 The Liberal-Country Party self-management policies for Aborigines was most clearly enunciated by Minister for Aboriginal Affairs R.I. Viner in a statement to the House of Representatives, 24 November 1978: see Viner, ‘Self Management the Key to Aboriginals’ Future’, Canberra Publishing, 1978. 33 Powell, Blood and Sand, p. 76. 34

For the Lake Nash land struggle see Lyon, P and Parsons, M., We Are Staying: The Alyawarre Struggle for Land at Lake Nash, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1989. See also Powell, Blood and Sand, Ch. 6, pp. 80–108.

35

Langton, 1st Foreword to Sutton, The Politics of Suffering, p. viii.

168

Conclusion 1

Stanner, W.E.H., White Man Got No Dreaming, ANU Press, Canberra, 1979, p. 58.

2 Sutton, The Politics of Suffering, p. 53. 3 Ibid., p. 218. 4

See J. & B. McFarland, ‘Victor Zulu of the Free Aboriginal State’, Richards, D. (ed.), Alice Online, www.aliceonline.com.au.

5

CLC Annual Report 2015–2016, Dept. of Prime Minister and Cabinet, http: www.clc.org.au, p. 1.

6 Sutton, The Politics of Suffering, p. 196. 7 Ibid., p. 76. 8

Davidson, B.R., The Northern Myth, MUP, Melbourne, 1972 (3rd ed.), p. 286.

9

Ashenden, Dean, Telling Tennant’s Story, abstract, Monash University Press, Melbourne, 2010, passim.

10 Gerritson, Rolf, ‘The Economic Core? The Aboriginal Contribution to the Alice Springs/Central Australian Economy’, Journal of Economic and Social Policy, Vol. 13, No. 2, n.p. 11

McGrath, Ann, personal comment to author, April 2017.

169

Bibliography

This bibliography refers only to books and papers actually consulted in the writing of the text. The thousands of sources I have read on this subject over the last forty years and which underlie the conclusions reached in this work are too numerous and varied to include.

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Brady, M. (ed.), First Taste: How Indigenous Australians Learned About Grog, Allied Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, Canberra, 2008 Bray, G., Laughton, K., and Foster, P., Aboriginal Ex-Servicemen of Central Australia, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1995 Browne, Lloyd, ‘Then My Memory Will Get Justice; The Finniss Controversy Revisited’, PhD thesis, CDU, 2017 Buchanan, G., ‘Report on Northern Territory Development and Administration’, CPP, 1925 Bucknell, G., and Guthrie, R. (eds.), The Conquest of Distance, HSNT, Darwin, 1996 Camm, J.C.R., McQuilton, J., Plumb, T.W., Yorke, J.G., (eds.), Australians: A Historical Atlas, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987 Carment, David, Australia’s Depression Gold Rush; Tennant Creek, 1932–36, NT University, Faculty of Arts, Occasional Paper No. 5, Darwin, 1991 Carment, David, History and the Landscape in Central Australia, NARU, Darwin, 1991 Carment, D. (ed.), Northern Encounters, CDU Press, Darwin, 2004 Carment, D., Edward, C., James, B., Maynard, R., Powell, A., and Wilson, H., Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography, revised edn., CDU Press, Darwin, 2008 Carrington, V.G., ‘Report of the Administrator of Central Australia, 1929–30’ Carrington, V.G., ‘Reports of the Deputy Administrator, Alice Springs’, 1934, 1936 Cawood, C.A., ‘Report on the Administration of Central Australia’, 1929 Chronicle, Adelaide, 17 August 1907 Central Reserves Committee, The Central Australian Reserves, WA Govt Printer, Perth, 1965 Clune, Frank, Overland Telegraph, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1955 Costello, M.J., Life of John Costello, Dymocks, Sydney, 1930 Cross, Jack, Great Central State, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2011 Dewar, Mickey, In Search of the Never Never, NTU Press, Darwin, 1997 Donovan, Peter, At the Other End of Australia, UQP, St Lucia, 1984 Donovan, Peter, Alice Springs: Its History and the People Who Made It, Alice 171

Springs Town Council, 1988 Dutton, C., Australia’s Last Explorer: Ernest Giles, Faber & Faber, London, 1971 Elder, Peter, ‘Northern Territory Charlie: Charles Jones Dashwood in Palmerston, 1892–1905’, BA (Hons) thesis, ANU, 1979 Fitzgerald, Ross, From the Dreaming to 1915: A History of Queensland, UQP, St Lucia, 1982 Flood, Josephine, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1995 Ford, M., Beyond the Furthest Fences, Rigby Ltd, Adelaide, 1969 Gale, Fay (ed.), Women’s Role in Aboriginal Society, AIAS, Canberra, 1974 Gammage, Bill, The Biggest Estate on Earth, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2012 Gillen’s Diary: The Camp Jottings of FJ Gillen, Libraries Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1968 Goulding, J., Centralian Tourism; The Early Years, Arcadia Press, Melbourne, 2016 Gray, Stephen, Brass Discs, Dog Tags & Finger Scanners, CDU Press, Darwin, 2011 Groom, A. I Saw a Strange Land, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2005 Harcus, W. (ed.), South Australia: Its History, Resources and Publications, London, 1876 Hardman, W. (ed.), The Journals of John McDouall Stuart, Hesperian Press, Carlisle, 1984 Harney, W.E., Content to Lie in the Sun, Robert Hale Ltd, London, 1962 Hartwig, M.C., ‘The Progress of White Settlement in the Alice Springs District and the Effects on the Aboriginal Inhabitants 1860–1894’, Ph D thesis, University of Adelaide, 1965 Hayes, Ted, ‘Undoolya’, Doreen Braitling Memorial Lecture, National Trust of Australia, NT, 1983 Heatley, Alistair, The Government of the Northern Territory, UQP, St Lucia, 1979 Helyar, G., They Led the Way, NT Department of Lands and Housing, Darwin, 1990 Henson, Barbara, A Straight-Out Man: FW Albrecht and Central Australian Aborigines, MUP, Melbourne, 1992 Hiscock, Peter, Archaeology of Ancient Australia, Routledge, Oxford, 2008 Horn, W.A., ‘Report of the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia; 172

Part 4, Anthropology’ Jennings, J.N. and Marbutt, J.A. (eds.), Landform Studies from Australia and New Zealand, ANU Press, Canberra, 1971 ‘J.L.D.’, Sydney Bulletin, 27 May 1897 Laseron, C.F. and Jennings, J.N., The Face of Australia, 3rd edn., Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1972 Leske, E. (edn.), Hermannsburg: A Vision and a Mission, Lutheran Publishing House, Adelaide, 1977 Lewis, John, Fought and Won, WK Thomas, Adelaide, 1922 Lindsay, D., ‘Explorations in the Northern Territory of South Australia’, PRGSA, South Australian Branch, No. 2, 1884–8 Lindsay, D., ‘Report on the Topographical Survey in Central Australia made in the Year 1919’, NTAS F5 Ling, Ted, Commonwealth Government Records About the Northern Territory, NAA, Canberra, 2011 Ling, Ted, Blame and Martyrs: The Commonwealth Government and the Northern Territory Cattle Industry 1911–1978, HSNT, Darwin, 2014 Long, Jeremy, The Go-Betweens, NARU, Darwin, 1992 McGrath, Ann, Born in the Cattle, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987 McLaren, G., and Cooper, W., Distance, Drought and Depression, NTU Press, Darwin, 2001 May, D., Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry, CUP, Melbourne, 1994 Mearns, L. and Barker, L. (eds.), Progressing Backwards: The Northern Territory in 1901, HSNT, Darwin, 2002 Mitchell, S.J., NT Report of the Acting Administrator, 1911 Morton, SR and Mulvaney, D.J. (eds.), Exploring Central Australia: Society, Environment and the 1894 Horn Expedition, Surrey, Beatty and Sons, Sydney, 1996 Mudie, Ian, The Heroic Journey of John McDouall Stuart, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1968 Mulvaney, D.J. (ed.), Encounters in Place, UQP, St Lucia, 1989 Mulvaney,D.J., The Pre-history of Australia, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969 173

Mulvaney, D.J. and Calaby, J.H., So Much That is New: Baldwin Spencer 1860–1929, MUP, Melbourne, 1985 Mulvaney, D.J., Morphy, H. and Petch, A. (eds.), From the Frontier: Outback Letters to Baldwin Spencer, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000 Mulvaney, D.J., Morphy, H. and Petch, A. (eds.), My Dear Spencer: The Letters of FJ Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, Hyland House Publishing Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 2001 Oliver, P., The Intrepid Hilda Abbott, HSNT, Darwin, 2017 Powell, Alan, The Shadow’s Edge, 3rd edn., CDU Press, Darwin, 2009 Powell, Far Country: A Short History of the Northern Territory, (5th Edition), CDU Press, Darwin, 2009 Powell, Alan, Desert Country: A History of Newhaven, HSNT, Darwin, 2015 Powell, Alan, Blood and Sand, Blair McFarland, Alice Springs, 2016 Powell, Alan, World’s End: British Military Outposts in the ‘Ring Fence’ around Australia, 1824–1849, ASP, Melbourne, 2016 Read, Peter and Read, Jay, Long Time, Olden Time, IAD Publications, Alice Springs, 1991 Reece, Bob, ‘The Debate on the Commonwealth Takeover of the Northern Territory, 1910’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, No. 41, 2013 ‘Reports of the Committee Investigating Northern Territory Leases’, NAA, Darwin, F48 Series Roberts, Tony, Frontier Justice, UQP, St Lucia, 2005 Robinson, Judith, oral history interview by Frances Good, 5 May 1991, National Archives, Darwin, NTRS 226 TS667 Rowley, C.D., The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Penguin, Ringwood, 1983 Smith, A., Convoys Up the Track, Smith, AC, Adelaide, 2000 Spencer, Baldwin and Gillen, F.J., The Native Tribes of Central Australia, MacMillan and Co, London, 1899 Spencer, Baldwin and Gillen, FJ, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, MacMillan and Co. London, 1904 Stanner, W.E.H., After the Dreaming, ABC, Sydney, 1974 174

Strehlow, T.G.H., Comments on the Journals of John McDouall Stuart, Libraries Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1967 Strehlow, T.G.H., Journey to Horseshoe Bend, Rigby Ltd, Adelaide, 1970 Strong, B.W., Henry Vere Barclay: Centralian Explorer, HSNT, Darwin, 1989 Sutton, Peter, The Politics of Suffering, MUP, Melbourne, 2011 Taylor, Peter, An End to Silence, Methuen, Sydney, 1980 Terry, M., Bulldozer, Frank Johnson, Sydney, 1945 Thompson, D.C., ‘Lake Nash Inspection Report, 1891’, National Australia Bank Archives, Springvale, Victoria Tindale, Norman, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974 Tindale, Norman, ‘Results of the Harvard-Adelaide Universities Anthropological Expedition 1938–1939, Distribution of Australian Aboriginal Tribes: A Field Study’, Royal Society of South Australia Transactions, Vol. 64, 1940 Traynor, Stuart, Alice Springs: from Singing Wire to Iconic Outback Town, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2016 Urquhart, F.C., NT Administrator’s Report, 1921 Webster, M.S., John McDouall Stuart, MUP, Melbourne, 1958 Wells, L.A. (ed.), ‘Arthur C Ashwin’s Reflections on Ralph Millner’s Expedition from Kopperamanna to the Northern Territory with Sheep and Horses in 1870–71, typescript, 1927 Wills, Linda, Still a Town Like Alice, Alice Springs Town Council, 2011 Wilson, W.R., A Force Apart?, Peacock Academic Press, Sydney, 2001 Winnecke, C., ‘Report of Mr Winnecke’s Expedition from Alice Springs to the Herbert River and Tennant Creek’, SAPP, No. 121, 1880

Websites Central Land Council, www.clc.org.au/articles/cat/where-we-are/ Year Book Australia, 2012, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/1301.0

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Index

Allen, J.B. 102 Allen, Maj-Gen 99 Allied Works Council (AWC) 92, 101, 106–7, 109–10 Alyawarr(a) 7, 19, 27–9, 31–2, 35, 63, 67, 82–4, 124, 143 Amadeus Basin 3, 26, 40 Amnatjerre 7 American Revolutionary War 132 Amoonguna 139 AMP Society 10 Anderson, R.G. 69 Anderson, W.G. 69 Angas, J.M. 31 Anna’s Reservoir 34 Anningie 80 Annitowa 67 Ansett Travel Industries 129–30 Apetyarr, ‘Nugget’ Smith 82 Aranda 7, 14, 28, 34, 37, 43–4, 71, 84, 128, 138 Areyonga 84, 138 Argadargada 19, 67 Arltunga 22, 38, 64, 78 Ashenden, Dean 148 Ashwin, Arthur 23, 29 assimilation policy 85, 125, 137–9, 141 Association for the Protection of Native Races 74 Attack Creek 23–4, 51 Austin, Tony 51 Australian Army 66, 88, 90, 114, 118, 124–6

Abbott, C.L.A. 80, 86, 89, 91, 96–105, 111, 113, 118–19, 121, 123 Abbott, Hilda 99–100 Aboriginal Act 1910 57–8 Aboriginal advancement 115, 137, 148 Aboriginal Employment Company 117–18 Aboriginal Light Horsemen 66 Aboriginal military enlistments 66 Aboriginal Ordinance 1918 63 Aboriginal reserves 47, 51, 84 Aboriginal tribes see individual names Aboriginal workers’ camps 112–14 Aboriginals – tribal distribution 6 Aborigines Friends Association 36 Aborigines’ Protection League 81, 83 Adelaide 1, 9–12, 17, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 32, 36, 43, 46, 49, 52, 54–6, 59, 61, 70, 76, 83, 86–8, 92, 99, 102, 104, 106–7, 110, 112, 119–20, 122, 135 Adelaide House 76–7, 87 Adelaide River 92, 106–7, 112 Aerial Medical Service 76, 87, 104 AIF 88, 102 Akirkra 74 Albany 12 Albert River 18 Albrecht, F.W. 71, 93–4 Alice Springs 1, 3, 6, 21–2, 25–8, 34–5, 38–40, 43, 45–6, 51, 54, 59–63, 66, 70–1, 73–8, 80–1, 87–9, 91–110, 112, 116, 119–20, 122–4, 126–9, 131–6, 138, 143, 145–6, 149 Alice Springs radio base 87

176

Blamey, General 109, 118 Bleakley, J.W. 81–2 Blyth, Arthur 10, 32 ‘boat people’ 135 Bond Springs 31, 34 Bond’s Tours 127 Boulia 27, 70 Bradshaw, Alice 54 Bradshaw, Thomas 46, 51 Breinl, Anton 61 Brinkley Bluff 14, 22 Brisbane 11, 21, 91, 135 Briscoe, Gordon 44 British Phosphate Commission 91 Britons 1 Brooks, Fred 73–4 Broome 124 Browne, Dr W.J. 24 Bruce, S.M. 68, 81 Buchanan, Nat 27, 29 Buchanan, Sir George 72 Bucknell, Graham 128 Burke & Wills 16 Burketown 19 Burnett, A.M. 65 Burra 10

Australian Half-Caste Progressive Association 122 Australian Inland Mission 76 Australian Red Cross 99–100 AWAS 112 Ayers, Henry 10 Babbage, B.H. 12–13 Bagot compound 122 Bagot, Christopher 55 Bagot, Edward 25, 30 Bagot, Ned 25, 30 Balaclava 119–22 Ball, Desmond 89 Banka Banka 112, 127 Barcaldine 70 Barclay, Henry 27–9 Barkly Highway 96, 105, 124 Barkly Tableland 3, 18, 25, 27, 30, 53, 59, 62, 64, 69, 86, 96, 103, 107, 147 Barrow Creek 2–3, 21–3, 31–3, 35, 62, 112, 125, 143 Barrow’s Creek Pastoral Company 31–2 Barwick, D.I. 44 Bathurst Downs 19 Battarbee, Rex 94 Battle Mountain 33 Beasley, John 91 Beckett, J.T. 35, 49, 63, 65, 67 beef roads 127 Bennett 35 Benstead, Billy 39 Berndt, R.M. 44, 125, 139 Berrimah Line 135 Birdum 75, 77, 95–7, 106, 109 Bisley, Inspector 35–6 ‘bitumen blondes’ 116 Black Watch 88 Blackall 70 Blackburn, Mr Justice 140 Blackfellas Bones 34

Calaby, J.H. 43, 45 Calder, ‘Sam’ 134 camels 29, 43, 55, 61, 67, 76, 110 Camooweal 62, 96, 108 Campbell, Walter 61 Canberra 61, 133–4, 142 Cape York 18 Carey, H.E. 63 Carment, David 79 Carrington, V.G. 73, 75–6, 78, 89, 91, 97, 123–4 Carrodus, J.A. 103, 116 Carruthers, John 31 Casey, Brig-Gen Hugh 106

177

Cockburn, John 52 Colter, John 10 Commonwealth Parliament 2, 52, 57–61, 63–9, 75, 77, 79, 81–4, 109, 121, 127, 131, 135, 137, 139–40, 144, 148 Coniston massacre 73–5, 125 Connellan, Eddie 88, 104, 129–30, 134 Cook, Dr Cecil 75, 81–2, 85, 122 Coombs, H.C. 139–40 Cooper, William 66 Costello, John 30–1, 53 Costello, M.J. 31, 33 Coulthard, William 31, 35–6 Country Roads Board of Victoria 106 Cowan, James 31 Cowle, C.E. 44–5 Cowper, Charles 9, 62 Cramp, Norm 66 Cross, Jack 11, 22, 25 Crosswaite, Ben 29 Crown Lands Ordinance 1924 69 Crown Point 31, 34 Curtin, Prime Minister John 91

cattle 4, 12, 19, 21, 24–5, 27, 29–32, 34–7, 40–1, 47, 49, 51, 53–4, 66–7, 68, 72– 4, 76, 79–81, 83–7, 102–4, 113, 117, 124–8, 130–1, 134–5, 142, 145, 148 Cawaral 30 Cawood, John 72–5 Cawood, Stan 129 Central Australia 1–4, 6–7, 12, 17–18, 21, 23, 25–6, 29–30, 37, 40, 43, 52–3, 59, 63–6, 69, 71–3, 75–7, 80–1, 86–8, 90–1, 94, 97, 110, 124, 128–30, 134, 136, 143, 147–9 Central Australian Motor Transport Column 96, 98 Central Australian Tourist Association 130 Central Australian Youth Link Up Service (CAYLUS) 7, 145–6 Central Capital City 60 Central Land Council 2, 143 Central Mt Stuart 16, 22–3 Centralia 3–7, 10, 13, 15, 17–19, 22, 24–5, 27, 29, 31, 38, 40, 44–5, 47–9, 53–5, 57, 59–61, 63–7, 69–72, 74, 78–87, 89–94, 98, 101, 122, 127, 129, 131, 133–6, 143–8 Centralian Pastoralists’ Association 81 Chalmers family 69, 83 Chalmers, Cora 69 Chalmers, C.O. 69–70 Chambers Pillar 4 Chambers, James 12–14, 16, 25 Chambers, John 12 Chapman, C.H. 78 Charlotte Waters 21, 25, 32, 41, 51 Chinese 91–2 Chinnery, E.W.P. 85, 113, 118–19, 121 Civil Alien Corps 92, 110 Civil Construction Corps 107 Cloncurry 27, 62 Clune, Frank 22 Co-ordinated Road and Rail Transport Service 103 Cobourg Peninsula 23

Daer, M.C. 34, 36 Daly Waters 21, 23 Darling River 24 Darwin 21, 23, 30, 55–6, 59–65, 68, 74, 80–1, 86, 88–90, 93, 95, 97–100, 104–7, 110–12, 119, 122, 126–7, 129, 132–6, 141 Darwin Mobile Force 88 Darwin Overland Maintenance Force (DOMF) 96 Dashwood, C.J. 56 Davenport Range 67 Davidson, B.R. 148 de Graaf, Mark 124 Deakin, Alfred 57, 60 Department of Aboriginal Affairs 140, 142 Department of the Interior 95, 97, 105, 116

178

Forde, Frank 94 Forrest, John 26 Franks, John 32 Fraser government 134, 142 Freeling, A.H. 12 Frew River 31, 33–6, 40, 49, 73

Department of Main Roads (DMR) NSW 106–7 Devil’s Marbles 3, 23 Dexter, Barrie 140 Djingili tribe 23 Dodd, L. 103 Dollery, Brig E.M. 115, 117, 119 Donovan, Peter 38, 60, 64, 76, 87–8, 126, 136 Dreamtime legends 5 Duffy, W.O. 115 Duncan, Capt D.G. 99 Dunmarra 3, 112 Dutton, E.S. 10

gas 3, 135, 148 Gason, Samuel 32 Georgina (Herbert) River 18–19, 27, 70 Gerritson, Rolf 149 Gibson Desert 26 Gidjingali of Arnhem Land 6 Giese, H.C. 138, 141 Gilbert, Joseph 25, 30–1 Gilbert, William 25, 31 Giles, Alfred 22, 24 Giles, Ernest 25–6, 53 Giles, L.H.A. 119–20, 123 Giles, P.A. 75 Gillen, Frank 36, 43–6, 51, 84 Gilruth, John 62–5, 67–8 Glen Helen 31, 34 Glendenning, Inga 131 Glynn, Patrick Mahon 64 gold 3, 9, 24, 26, 38, 53–4, 78–9, 86–7, 90 Gordons Creek 70 Gorton, John 140 Gosse, W.C. 26 Goulding, Jim 129 Gowrie camp 109 Goyder, G.W. 12, 27 Great Artesian Basin 3 Great Australian Bight 12 Great Central State 11 Great Depression 77–9 great shield zone of Western Australia 3 Great War 64, 66, 90 Gregg – pastoralist 18 Gregory, Augustus 11 Gregory, Beryl 99

Eastern and African Cold Storage Supply Company 47 Egan, Ted 134 Elder, Sir Thomas 3, 43 Elkedra 31, 33, 35, 40, 67, 69, 73 Elkin, A.P. 44, 115, 125, 136–7, 139 Emungalin 75 English 17 Erldunda 34, 40 Escape Cliffs 18 Evangelical Lutheran Synod (ELSA) 37–8 Eyre, Edward John 11–13 Farrar, Jack 30 Favenc, Ernest 27 Federation, Commonwealth 2, 47, 52, 55, 57–61, 63–4, 66–9, 75, 77, 79, 81–4, 104, 109, 121, 127, 131, 135, 137, 139–40, 144, 148 Finke River 14–15, 23, 37, 88 Finke, William 12–13, 16 Fisher, Andrew 57 Fitzgerald, Ross 18 Fletcher, W.R. 77, 85 Flinders Ranges 12, 19 Flood, Josephine 6 Flynn, John 76, 87

179

Holt, Harold 140 Horn Scientific Expedition 41–4 Horn, W.A. 41 Horseshoe Bend 71 Howard ‘Intervention’ 148 Huckitta 35–6, 69–70, 73 Hugh River 14, 22 Hughes, Bert 107

Groom, Arthur 70 Guinea Airways 88, 104, 129 Gulf of Carpentaria 2, 16, 86 Gurindji 7, 140, 142 Haasts Bluff 84, 123, 138 Hadlock, Ralph 78 Haines, A.B. 78 half-castes 47, 51, 57, 63, 66, 72, 81, 85, 94, 119–22 Hall, Bob 112–14, 119 Hall, K.M. 35 Hall, R.A. 89 Hanlon, Tom 49 Hanson, R.D. 16 Harcus, William 17 Hargraves, Neil 132 Harms, Theodore 37 Harney, Bill 50, 112–13, 117 Harper Springs 134 Hart, John 10 Harts Range 28–9, 87, 91, 93 Hartwig, Rex 33–4, 40–1, 48 Harvey, William 22 Haslam, W.T. 107 Hasluck, Paul 131–3, 137–8, 141 Hatches Creek 67, 78, 86, 91, 124 Hayes, Ted 48–9, 79–80, 128 Hayes, William 48 Head, Ben 13 Heaney, P. 121 Heatley, Alistair 131 Heavitree Gap 22, 38, 101 Henbury 34 Henty, Harry 73 Hermannsburg 34, 37–8, 48, 51, 62, 66, 70–1, 74, 81, 84, 93–4, 100, 119, 123, 138 Hiatt, Les 6 Hill, Joseph 38 Holmes, Tom 30

Idracowra 34 Illamurta 44 Ilperrelhelam 82 Immanuel Synod 38 Indian Army 10, 27 Indian Ocean 27 inland sea 2, 26 Italians 90–3 ‘J.L.D.’ 19–20, 33 James Range 14 James, Barbara 132 Japanangka, ‘Bullfrog’ 74 Japanese 89–90, 93–4, 97–8, 103–4, 111, 119, 124, 132 Japangardi, Tim 90 Jay Creek 81, 122–3 Jensen, Dr H.I. 65 Jervois Range 28 Jindalee radar 136 Johanssen, Kurt 127 Jumpijinpa, Johnny 74 Kalkadunga tribe 33 Katherine 21, 24, 107, 112, 120 Kaytitja 7 Kekwick, Daniel 13–14 Kelso, A. 109 Kempe, A.H. 37 Kennedy, M.F. 67, 69, 73 Kilgariff, ‘Bernie’ 134 Kingston, C.C. 56–7

180

MacDonnell Ranges 1, 5, 14, 16, 22, 25, 30, 38, 41, 43, 52, 59–62, 128 McEwen, John 84–5, 137 McFarland, Blair 146 McFarland, Jennifer 7, 146 MacFarlane, Ted 124 Mackay, J.R. 46 McGrath, Ann 79, 149 McLaren, Glen 66 McMahon, William 140–1 McMinn, Gilbert 22 MacRobertson Miller Aviation (MMA) 129 Maddrill, W. 69 Madigan, C.T. 71 Maher, E.J. 140 Main Roads Boards 95 Malakunanja 6 Maranboy 91 Marshall River 28–9 Mary Lake 18 Meggitt, M.J. 6 Melbourne 16, 21, 26, 52, 61, 99, 111, 117, 135 Melbourne University 43, 62 Melbourne-Williamstown telegraph 21 Menzies, Mrs 116 mica 66, 78, 87, 90–2 Mildren, Hon Justice Dean 57 Military Board 95 Military District – 7th 88 Millner, John 23 Millner, Ralph 23–4 Mills, W.W. 22 Minehan, Mona 97, 102 Mitchell, Mr Justice 61 Morris, F.R. 113 Morton, ‘Nuggett’ 74 Morton, S.R. 43 Mt Burrell 34 Mt Connor 5

Kintore Range 40 Krichauff Range 5, 26 Lake Amadeus 26, 40 Lake Frances 18 Lake Frome 12 Lake MacDonald 40 Lake Nash 2, 19, 28–31, 33, 53, 59, 66–7, 69–70, 73, 82–3, 124, 143 Lake Torrens 12 Land Rights Act 1976 142–3 Landsborough, William 18, 25 Langton, Marcia 130, 144 Larapinta Track 5 Larrimah 96, 105–08, 112 Laseron, Charles 3 Lasseter, Harold Bell 78 Law, Leo 108–9 le Hunte, Sir George 57 League of Nations 83 Leichhardt, Ludwig 12 Leske, Everard 37 Letters Patent 1863 51 Lewis, Jim 23 Lewis, John 23–4 Lindsay, David 29, 38–9, 67 Ling, Ted 65–6, 69, 80 Littlejohn, Inspector 108 Lockheed aircraft 88 Longreach 29 Loutit, Brigadier Noel 96–8, 100–2, 105, 109 Lucy Creek 28 Luritja 7, 37, 43 Lynch, Senator P.J. 68 Lyne, William 19 Lyons, Joseph 77 MacArthur, General Douglas 91, 106 McCoy, W.T. 121 MacDonald Downs 70, 83

181

Northern Territory Development League 132 Northern Territory Legislative Council 57, 132–4 Northern Territory Medical Service 75 Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees Association 69 Northern Territory Police Force 32

Mt Freeling 14 Mt Hopeless 12 Mt Isa 19, 95–6, 106–9, 124, 126 Mt Liebig 5 Mt Olga 26 Mt Riddock 34 Mt Skinner 134 Mt Sonder 5 Mulvaney, John 6, 43, 45 Murif, J.J. 46 Murray Downs 31, 33 Murray, W.G. 67 Murray, William 73–5 Musgrave Ranges 26

O’Kelly, A.H. 75 O’Loughlin, Bishop 141 Ocean Island 91 oil 3, 88 Olgas 5, 26 Oliver, Pam 110 Oliver, T.G. 63, 65 Oodnadatta 13, 42–3, 54–5, 60, 71, 76 Ooratippra 28, 35, 124, 143 Ord River 103 Overland Telegraph 17, 21 Owen Springs 25, 30, 34

Namagu, Gladys 138 Namatjira, Albert 138 Napperby 87 Nash, F.E. 18 National Bank 10 Native Affairs Branch 111–13, 119–20, 123, 138 Native police 20, 33, 36 Native Title 143 Nauru Island 91 Nauwalabila site 6 Nelson, ‘Jock’ 134 Nelson, Harold 68, 72 Nelson, T. 25 Netherlands East Indies (NEI) 95 New South Wales 1, 9, 18, 21, 69, 95–6, 106, 119 Newcastle Waters 16, 95, 103, 140 Noble, Jack 78 North Australia Party 133 North Australian Commission 72, 75 Northern Territory 1–4, 6, 10, 17–18, 25–8, 30–2, 36, 40–1, 47, 51–3, 55–8, 60–4, 67–72, 75, 77, 80–1, 83–4, 86, 88, 91–2, 97–8, 102–5, 107, 110, 112, 114–16, 118, 121–2, 124–7, 133–5, 138–9, 142, 144–5, 147

Padygar 74 Parkes, Henry 9 Parsons, J.L. 56 Pastoral Leases Investigation Committee 80, 83 Payne, W.L. 77, 85 Pearce, George 68–9, 71–2 Percival Gull aircraft 88 Perth 110, 129, 135 Peter Pan mine 78 Petermann Ranges 5, 7, 26, 29, 84 Pine Gap 136 Pink, Olive 116 Pioneer Bus Line 129 Pipakareny 82 Pitjantjara 7, 29 Plains of Promise 2 Playford, Thomas 52 Plenty River 28, 83–4 Poeppel, Augustus 4

182

Sadadeen, Charlie 55 Sadler, R.M. 102, 113–16 Sandover River 28, 67, 70, 124, 143 Scarr, Frank 27, 30 Schwarz, W.F. 37 Scotland 12 Scullin Labor Government 77 sheep 12, 18–19, 21, 23–4, 27, 40, 68–9 Shepherd, F.P. 76 silver 3 Simpson Desert 4, 7 Simpsons Gap 22 Smith, Bruce 38 Smith, D.D. 87, 97, 103–04 Smith, Michael 6 Smith, Staniforth 68 Snowdon, Warren 134 South Australia 1, 4, 7, 9–14, 17, 20–1, 23–8, 30–2, 37–9, 41–2, 51–7, 59–60, 65, 67, 69, 75–6, 80–1, 83–4, 87, 93, 95, 102–3, 119–22 South Australian Education Department 102 South Australian Highways Department 106–7 South Australian Museum 43, 83 Spencer, Baldwin 43–5, 62, 84 Spencers Gulf 12 Springvale 24 Stafford, R.B. 73 Standley, Ida 63, 81 Stanner, W.E.H. 44, 136, 139–40, 145 Stapleton, J.L. 32 Steele, Brigadier W.A.B. 97 Stevens, Maj-Gen 99 Stirling, Dr Edward 43, 49 Stirling Ranges 34 Stokes, Major 112 Stott, Sergeant Bob 63, 73 Strehlow, Bertha 116 Strehlow, C.F.T. 38, 67, 70–1 Strehlow, T.G.H. 14–15, 44, 70–1, 84,

Poeppel’s Corner 4 Port Augusta 21, 32, 35, 42, 55, 59–60, 95, 129 Port Darwin 21, 25, 32, 61, 64 Port Lincoln 15 Port Phillip 1 Powell Springs 21, 62 Poynton, Alexander 68 Prout Brothers 27 Puritjarra rock shelter 6 Pwelany tribe 19, 27, 31, 33, 82, 143 Queensland 2–4, 18–21, 25, 27–31, 33, 47, 52, 54–5, 57, 59–60, 65–6, 68–70, 75, 77, 80–1, 94–6, 102–3, 124, 127, 147 Queensland Main Roads Commission 95–6, 107 Queensland National Bank 53 Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 44 Rankine River 27 Read, Jay 114, 125 Read, Peter 90, 114, 125 Reece, Bob 60 Reynolds Range 14 Riley, N.L. 67, 69 Ringakurtji waterhole 124 Robertson, John 9 Robertson, Lt-Col 95, 97 Robinson, Judith 35 Rocklands 18, 29, 31 Rocklands Pty Ltd 30 Roper River 23, 53 Rose, Lionel 133, 135 Ross, John 22, 31 Roth, Walter 19 Rowley, C.D. 47, 139 Royal Commission into the Northern Territory 1895 41, 52–3, 64 Royal Flying Doctor Service 76 Rudd, Kevin 148 Ryan, ‘Mick’ 98

183

tourism 76, 78, 87, 127, 129–31, 135–6 Tracker ‘Peter’ 123–4 Traegar, Alfred 76 transcontinental railway 52, 55, 57, 60, 77, 109, 136 Traynor, Stuart 73–4 Tropic of Capricorn 12 Trower, H.M. 67

122, 124 Stretton, A.F. 123 Stuart Arms pub 39 Stuart Highway 2, 96, 105, 107, 109 Stuart, John McDouall 12–17, 22–3, 25 Sturt, Charles 12–13 Sturts Plains 16 Surveyor-Generals Corner 4 Sutherland, John 18 Sutton, Peter 145–6, 148 Sweeney, Gordon 113 Sweer’s Island 2

Uluru 5, 26, 129, 143 Unbalara 80 Underdown, Ly 102 Undoolya 25, 30, 34, 48, 80 University of Adelaide 10, 83 Urandangi 19, 70 Urquhart, F.C. 68 Utopia 134, 143

Tambling, E.A. 102 Tanami Desert 4, 6, 16, 78, 87, 143 Tangentyere Council 145 Tate, Professor Ralph 43 Tatura camp 90–1 Tatz, Colin 130, 139 Taylor, Peter 21 Tempe Downs 31, 34, 49 Temple Bar 22 Tennant Creek 2–3, 21, 23, 27, 31, 51, 78–9, 86–8, 90, 95–6, 100, 102, 105– 7, 126, 135, 143, 148 Tennant, John 15 Theodore, E.G. 92, 106 Thompson, D.C. 33 Thompson, Deric 97 Thomson, Donald 114 Thomson Reservoir 6 Thornton, R.F. 49 Three Ways 124 Tietkins, W.H. 40 Tindale, Norman B. 7, 19, 83 Tobermorey 66 Todd River 22 Todd, Alice 22 Todd, Charles 21–2, 29, 32 Toko Range 28 Top End 23–5, 52, 61, 88, 110, 147–8

Vesteys 125, 127 Victoria River 2, 11, 30, 53, 59, 64, 69, 86, 103–4 von Steiglitz, Oskar 19 Wakaya Desert 27 Wakaya people 18, 32, 35, 143 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 17 Walgra 70 Wallis, Frank 55 Walmulla tribe 75 Walpiri 6–7, 73–4, 90, 125 War Cabinet 91, 96, 107, 118 Warburton, Peter 13, 27 Ward, Dick 132–3, 138 Ward, Phillip 127 Warrabri 139 Warramungu 7, 15–17, 23–4, 32, 44, 51 Waterhouse Range 5, 14 Waterhouse, G.M. 14 Watt, J.A. 43 Watts/Gallacher Report 141 Wauchope Creek 78, 86–7, 91

184

Wave Hill 2, 103, 140–2 Weddell, R.H. 72, 75, 80 Welfare Branch 138 Welfare Ordinance 1953 137–9 Wells, L.A. 31 Western Australia 1, 4, 11, 26, 53, 55, 60, 75, 77, 80, 84, 103, 124, 127, 147 Wheal Doria mine 78 White, Deputy Director 111–13 Whitlam, Gough 142 Wickham, James 49 Willowra 142 Willowie Land and Pastoral Association 31 Willshire, M.C. 34, 45 Wingillpin 13 Winnecke, Charles 27–30, 43 Winnecke’s Depot 54 Withnell, Ron 132 wolfram 67, 86, 90–2 Woodroffe, ‘Woody’ 78 Woodward, Mr Justice 142 Woolbridge, A.M. 31 Woolnough, W.G. 61–2 World War II 35, 86, 110–11, 114, 136 Wright, Judith 139 Wurmbrand, MC Erwin 34, 49 Wyndham 80, 94, 104 Yam Creek 24 Yirrkala 140–1 Yuendemu 125

185