T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  By 1878 stations were being established and cattle were being moved into the valleys of the Finke and the Palmer; and the new era of violence brought on by white settlement ended any chances of counter-reprisals being made, except perhaps against some individual members of the leltja party. In any case men and women in all groups affected by the Irbmangkara massacre had become sickened by several years of murder and killing, and longed to return to an era of peace and quiet amity. Only the Matuntara remained unhappy, for in Tjinawariti and Kapaluru they had lost two of their outstanding leader figures and ceremonial chiefs.

  In return for their deaths it was decided by their kinsmen that at least one Irbmangkara man should lose his life. The man marked out for the final killing that would close the whole grim episode was, naturally, Nameia. Not only had he been a Matuntara himself, but he had also been the only man capable of identifying all the members of the original band of raiding warriors. He had been the leader of the avengers, and it had been his intimate knowledge of the Matuntara area that had made possible the stalking and the killing of Tjinawariti and of Kapaluru. But having come to the decision of executing Nameia, the Matuntara were willing to wait several years before taking any action: this time no risks were to be incurred that the executioners themselves would once more be detected by unforeseen eyewitnesses.

  Some twelve years elapsed before Nameia met his doom. A new police outstation, known as the Boggy Waterhole police camp, had recently been opened at Alitera, some twenty-two miles downstream from Hermannsburg; and its officer-in-charge was none other than the dreaded Mounted Constable W.H. Willshire himself. For several years previously all the ‘mulga wires’ in aboriginal Central Australia had been running hot with never-ending stories of the alleged murderous zeal of this police officer in going out and shooting down tribesmen in any area from which stories of cattle-killing had been sent to him by worried pioneer cattlemen. Aremala, Nameia’s eldest son, who had been safely at Arbanta while his two younger brothers had died at Irbmangkara, had been engaged as a native constable by Willshire; and Nameia decided to pay his son a lengthy visit at Alitera. Unfortunately Alitera was not far from the Matuntara border, and the news of Nameia’s arrival soon reached his waiting executioners. They decided to move quickly, and to take the calculated risk of killing him in close proximity to the new police camp. One night in January, a few days after the time of full moon, a number of dark figures stole over the ranges as soon as complete darkness had fallen over the narrow, closed-in Finke valley. They had several hours in which to move into position behind clumps of bushes; for the moon, according to local Central Australian time, was not due to rise till about nine-thirty that night. Although it was summer, the proximity of the great waterhole, whose waves were lapping the black rock walls of the gorge on the left side of the river, soon brought a delicious coolness to the campsite; and all the Aranda men made up their night fires from substantial logs, in readiness for the chilly midnight air. When the moon rose, sharp eyes began to watch the sleepers in the Alitera camp from behind the nearby bushes – eyes that were eager to identify the campfire of Nameia. The watchers were very tense, but managed to curb their impatience. A mistake had to be avoided at all costs; Nameia had to be killed, not wounded, and no other person harmed. The night grew colder with the passing hours; and, with the increasing chill in the air, one sleeper after the other began to stir and to stoke afresh the fires that were burning at his side. At last the patience of the watchers received its expected reward. Nameia himself sat up, drew the smouldering logs at his side closer together, and heaped small twigs on them. With a loud crackle the flames shot up brightly and revealed his face and body clearly to his enemies. The latter, on the other hand, received added protection from the wall of increased darkness cast up by the bright flames between themselves and their victim. Suddenly and without any warning several spears hissed sharply through the still air, and Nameia fell back mortally wounded. His enemies rose and fled, assisted by the light of the rising eastern moon. The long, opaque shadows of the trees protected them for the first quarter of a mile; and then they rushed forward in bright moonlight, knowing that they had safely outdistanced their would-be pursuers. By keeping to the rocky trail on which they had come, they left few marks behind for any trackers who might be interested in their identity next morning. When the sun rose above Alitera, they had regained the timbered country south of the Krichauffs, and were back safely in the Matuntara area.

  The shouting and the general commotion that spread through the Alitera camp after Nameia had fallen down by his fire quickly awakened the white police officer. But there was nothing that he could do that night, and in any case Willshire was not a squeamish man: the ‘tribal killing’ of some ‘rascally old nigger’ would not have interested him normally. He merely noted down next morning in his police journal that ‘old man Naimi’ had been murdered at his camp on the Finke River ‘at midnight on 9th January, 1890’, by a party of ‘Tempe Downs blacks’. Nevertheless, the intelligence that Nameia had been the father of his native constable Aremala was undoubtedly a very welcome discovery to Willshire. Even better, this had been a Matuntara raid executed upon a Southern Aranda camp, and the white officer felt that it would for this very reason deeply offend his other Aranda native constables as well.

  However, for the time being Willshire had to hold his hand in this matter, no matter how strongly he might have felt that his authority as a white police officer had been rudely challenged by this ‘tribal execution’. The Lutheran missionaries at Hermannsburg had not welcomed his setting up of a tough police camp in such relatively close proximity to their mission lease; and a number of reports had been sent down by them to Adelaide concerning the conduct of at least two of the Central Australian mounted troopers – of Willshire himself and of his main associate Wurmbrand. As a result, an official enquiry was looming in the near future; and Willshire adopted the prudent course of biding his time.

  The two South Australian Commissioners – H.C. Swan, S.M., and C.E. Taplin – who had been appointed to investigate the charges made as to the treatment of the aboriginals living in the southern part of the Northern Territory by the police, the pastoralists, and the missionaries, opened their enquiry in Central Australia in July and presented their Report to the South Australian Parliament late in September, 1890.

  Willshire had every reason to be satisfied with this Report; for the Commissioners found that there was ‘no foundation for any charge of his being guilty of shooting down the blacks’, even though they also recommended that his camp should be moved from Boggy Waterhole to a location more distant from Hermannsburg. The pioneer white settlers had risen solidly to the defence of the police. The time seemed ripe for action. Richard J. Thornton, the manager of Tempe Downs Station, had been complaining bitterly for some time, making allegations about the wanton and wholesale spearing of cattle on his run by the local aboriginals. The execution of Nameia by a band of Matuntara men early in 1890 hence seemed to afford an excellent excuse for Willshire’s punishing the dark cattlekillers in the usual way – by rifle fire. But because of the recent investigation, Willshire decided to be rather more circumspect on the coming occasion: the shooting would be done by his four Aranda native constables, who would be given arms and ammunition and ordered to kill the murderers of Nameia. To Willshire’s surprise, none of his Aranda subordinates were in the least enthusiastic about his well-thought-out plan. To pursue a blood feud according to the age-old tribal norms and to kill the victim by spear and boomerang was one thing; but for dark men to carry out a white police officer’s orders in a matter that was no concern of his, and to use the white men’s fire-arms against men of their own race, was an entirely different thing. It was an act of treachery against the dark race, designed to advance mainly the cause of the white usurpers of the aboriginal lands. But in the end, the four trackers could not refuse to carry out their orders; for they had good reasons for fearing their white master even more than any of their dark enemies.


  And so, in February, 1891, Willshire set out from Alitera with his four Aranda native constables. Two of them, Aremala, who had been renamed Larry, and Kwalba, who was now called Jack, came from the Upper Southern Aranda area. The third man was Tekua, who had been christened Thomas in 1887 as one of the first Western Aranda converts at Hermannsburg. The fourth tracker was Archie, who was probably a Central Aranda man. This police party headed swiftly across the Krichauffs into the Palmer River valley, and then moved upstream towards Tempe Downs. On 22nd February, 1891, in the hour of grey dawn – or as one of the official depositions taken down at the subsequent enquiry stated, at ‘piccaninny daylight’ – the four Aranda men swooped down upon the peaceful native camp close to Tempe Downs Station. One unsuspecting Matuntara man was shot by Aremala and Archie while he was lying asleep near his fire. His mate, however, woke up and fled, narrowly escaping the bullets sent after him. But there was a second victim. The sound of the rifle fire awakened a third man, who had been sleeping some distance away with his wife Naemi Nungalka, who had been baptised at Hermannsburg in 1888. This third man darted up and rushed away from his fire, only to be brought down by bullets fired by Tekua and Kwalba. The wails of the dark women who had been disturbed by the shooting now burst upon the grim scene. It was a morning in the mountains that could not have failed to delight the heart of Willshire, who was later to describe a similar attack on a camp of northern aboriginals in the following words: ‘They scattered in all directions…It’s no use mincing matters – the Martini-Henry carbines at this critical moment were talking English in the silent majesty of those great eternal rocks. The mountain was swathed in a regal robe of fiery grandeur, and its ominous roar was close upon us. The weird, awful beauty of the scene held us spellbound for a few seconds.’ When the quick burst of shooting was over, Willshire and his four trackers went to the station and enjoyed their breakfast at sunrise. After breakfast Willshire engaged one of the white station hands, William H. Abbott, to assist him in taking the bodies of the two dead Matuntara men away on camels, so that they could be burnt. This was done with the aid of native constables Archie and Kwalba, who also cut the large amount of firewood necessary for the grim job. One body was taken to a spot four hundred yards south of the station and burnt in the sandhills; the other was taken down a creek bed for the same distance north-east of the buildings, and burnt in the same manner.

  But though the bodies had been incinerated till only a few pieces of charred bones remained, Willshire had made one fatal miscalculation. The visit of the two Commissioners from Adelaide six months earlier had given new heart to those few white men in the Centre who believed that the police shootings had gone on long enough. The hour produced the man. Mr Frank J. Gillen, of the Alice Springs Telegraph Station, who was a Justice of the Peace, personally went down to the Boggy Waterhole camp, accompanied by a newly arrived police officer, Mounted Constable William G. South; and from Boggy Waterhole Gillen and South took Willshire and his native constables to Tempe Downs for a searching investigation.

  As a result of Gillen’s fearless enquiry, Willshire was committed for trial in Port Augusta on a charge of murder. The case aroused intense interest both in Adelaide and in Central Australia. Willshire spent seventeen days in the Port Augusta gaol till northern cattlemen and stock interests had raised the sum of £2000 which had been fixed as his bail money. Anxiety about the future safety of the cattle stations in the interior induced the same sections of the community to provide the money needed to engage the services of one of the most eminent legal men of the day, Sir John Downer, Q.C., on Willshire’s behalf. Sir John Downer, who had been the premier of South Australia from 1885–87, and who was to hold this office again from 1892–93, made a speech at the trial, which was described by at least one correspondent as a ‘powerful and eloquent defence of an innocent man’. But though Willshire was freed by the verdict of the Port Augusta jury, he was not permitted by his superiors to return to his old haunts. The police shots that rang out through the morning air at Tempe Downs on 22nd February, 1891, had not only concluded the grim chapter whose first blood-stained pages had been written at Irbmangkara one evening sixteen years earlier: they had also brought to an end a decade of uncurbed police violence in Central Australia. Gillen’s courage was never forgotten by the Aranda; and some years later their gratitude found its expression in the ceremonial festival held at Alice Springs in 1896, where the secret totemic cycle of Imanda was revealed for the first time before the eyes of white men – to Gillen and to his friend, Baldwin Spencer.

  Like many other men responsible by their lies for the tragedies of other people, the real culprit who had been responsible for the deaths of well over a hundred men, women, and children, remained unpunished. Kalejika died many years later peacefully in the Western Aranda area, and apparently no man had ever seen fit even to ostracise him. Perhaps his grey and white hairs saved him from that punishment which he had so richly deserved.

  This, then, had been the tragic story of Irbmangkara less than fifty years earlier. But Nature does not remember human tears or human suffering. Men may live and men may die, but Nature is indifferent to their fate. And so on that October afternoon, when Mrs Strehlow was busily reading out letters to her sick husband, Theo was conscious only of the peace and beauty of one of the loveliest landscapes he had ever seen.

  Sitting near the edge of a thick fringe of bulrushes, he watched the black-and-yellow butterflies flitting about gracefully among the blue flowers that grew along the damp bank of the quiet pool, over whose calm waters delicatebodied, red dragon-flies were hovering in quest of water insects. Every now and then the smooth surface of the pool was disturbed by little eddies caused by fish which thrust up their cold, wet mouths to snap at unwary flies and gnats which had flitted down too low for their own safety. A busy black-and-orange wasp with a threadlike waist carefully picked up with its slender legs some of the clay from the wet bank in order to build its many-chambered home at the entrance of a wide cave several chains away. This cave also provided a welcome rain shelter for a number of swallows whose mud nests had been built on its inner red rock walls. Almost lost to view in the sky, a pair of eagles, poised one above the other, surveyed the peaceful scene below with sharp menace in their eyes; but the huge birds soon moved eastward in order to circle over more open country: they were too wary to venture into the treacherous thicket of gums and ti-tree bushes below. From time to time the faint whisper of a summer breeze sighed through the rustling stems and sharp leaves of the bulrushes, and then the clear outlines of the trees and the surrounding cliff walls temporarily lost their mirror-like keenness. The twittering of small birds sitting on the tree branches, the cooing of the large-eyed crested rock pigeons on the stony ground below, and the occasional rush of wings as a flight of long-necked ducks with gleaming green-and-black feathers skimmed low over the water: these were the only sounds that filled the ancient scene with their gentle, age-old music. Here was water, here was beauty, here was peace. It was easy to understand why among the Western Aranda Irbmangkara was believed to have been, like Japalpa, one of the cradles of mankind at the beginning of time.

  But the race whose love and imagination had given to Irbmangkara its rich store of songs and myths had gone down sadly in numbers since the advent of the whites. Theo recalled Jack Fountain’s remark that until the turn of the century the figures of aboriginal hunters had often been visible in the Finke valley upstream and downstream from Irbmangkara, stalking animals that had left the game sanctuary precincts of the sacred site. But on that afternoon no hunters remained to be spotted; for the numbers of the aboriginal population had slumped dangerously since Fountain’s first arrival in the Centre. Irbmangkara had ceased being a home for any of its remaining dark children for more than a decade before the present travellers from Hermannsburg were able to set their eyes on its haunting beauty.

  Theo’s parents meanwhile had been far too busy with their mail to cast more than a few glances at the pools of Irbmangkara
. The message that had brought them most joy was a telegram giving fairly full details about the proposed journey by Mr Gotthold Wurst, the Appila wheat farmer who had accepted the challenge to come to Strehlow’s rescue after all other appeals for help had failed. He was going to join at Hawker the train on which Stolz was due to go north after leaving Light’s Pass. Wurst’s car was going to be trucked at Hawker; and if everything went according to plan, Wurst and Stolz would be leaving Oodnadatta in this car on Saturday – the day on which the Hermannsburg party hoped to reach Idracowra Station. This heartening telegram brought tears of joy into the sick man’s eyes: his clerical colleagues had failed him in his hour of need, but here was a man of goodwill and humanity who was prepared to risk his car and to come to his rescue without any expectations of liberal financial recompense. Expressed in different terms, here was a man’s man who was ready to help his neighbour in his troubles, not a professional Christian who was content to seek personal favours for himself from the Almighty.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon the canteens and water containers on the van were filled at the clear pool, and after that all horses were given a drink: there would be no water for them at the proposed night camp. The Finke Valley had to be left behind for the time being; for the river took a huge bend to the south below Urualbukara.