T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  Nor had the owners ever shown much liberality in the issue of the rations supplied to their employees. For the white employees these rations represented the major part of their wages. For the dark stockmen they constituted virtually the whole of their remuneration, except for some occasional handouts of small sums of money which enabled them to buy for themselves and their families from the station store such ‘luxury’ items as jam, tomato sauce, lollies, large coloured handkerchiefs, and dresses. On these items – needless to add – the management made very useful profits: all of these supplies and stores were virtually impossible to obtain except from the station store. All Central Australian stations, including Hermannsburg, had to depend for the cartage of their supplies on camel teams which brought up their loads on the average only twice each year. Hence the only arrangement possible for the supply of food and rations was that the station should issue to each of its employees a fixed amount of flour, tea, sugar, meat, and jam (or treacle) each week or fortnight, and then count these items as the major portion of the wages paid to them. But some stations were sufficiently mean to depress the quality of the stores supplied to their employees. When the unprecedentedly heavy rains of the 1920–21 season had disrupted all camel transport in the Centre for some six months, and Hermannsburg too had been obliged to borrow rations from the neighbouring cattle stations, Strehlow had been startled to discover how many of these stations were supplying second-grade white flour, and brown, or even grey, sugar to their employees in order to prune down the cost of their wages to the station management. Henbury had been one of the stations run on these miserly lines. The stations with the worst reputations, however, had been those owned by Australia’s Cattle King. It was claimed throughout the Centre, whether truthfully or not, that Kidman’s managers received relatively good pay cheques on the condition that they kept down the remuneration of their dark and white stockmen and station workers to the lowest possible levels. For, as the bush phrase so neatly put it, ‘Kidman won’t take on any man as manager who doesn’t stand the treacle tin out in the sun for at least an hour before putting it on the kitchen table’. To do Henbury justice, it must be admitted that its reputation had always stood much higher than that. Some of the rations supplied might have been inferiorgrade in quality, but the quantities issued had always been generous. Beef, too, was given out most liberally; and the comparatively large number of cattle slaughtered at Henbury annually enabled ‘Bob Buck’s tribe’, as Buck referred to the non-working dark people in the camp, to have some share in the food supply issued to the station hands. The Aranda local groups on the Henbury run had, on the whole, been fortunate in their treatment by the white pioneers from the earliest days. Unlike Mount Burrell Station, where stock had been introduced into the ancient tribal lands to the accompaniment of rifle shots fired by the first white cattlemen, Henbury had not witnessed any grim outrages by the early pioneers against the original dark residents. As a result even Mounted Constable Willshire had been compelled to admit grudgingly that, unlike Tempe Downs and certain other Central Australian properties, Henbury was ‘in a “quiet” neighbourhood, as far as blacks are concerned – cattle spearing not being in vogue to any great extent there’.

  While Bob Buck was showing Theo over the station, Alf Butler had been inspecting the harness, and repairing some minor breaks and tears in the leather straps. Theo had a great liking for both men and an even greater admiration for their skill in handling stock. He had seen them in action whenever boundary musters had been held jointly by the Hermannsburg and Henbury stockmen. Buck’s ability in directing half-wild bullocks in a drafting yard had seemed to him quite uncanny. He would stand in front of the cattle, whip in hand, facing the beasts on foot as they were being driven towards him by the men behind; and a light flick of his whip would determine whether a bullock went through an inner gate to another division of the yard or whether he was turned back into the milling mob behind him. Occasionally a bullock, excited by the shouts and whipcracks of the stockmen behind him, would rush forward and charge Buck with his horns. But Buck had never had any difficulty in evading him, and only rarely had he been forced to clamber up swiftly in his riding boots to one of the top rails. Butler, on the other hand, had built a reputation for himself as one of the finest drovers in the Centre. It was claimed that he never lost his temper with stock, and that he could drove a mob of half-wild horses just as quietly as though they had been sheep. These two men had been the best of mates for years, and their long, drooping moustaches even gave their faces some kind of a vague family resemblance. Butler’s moustache, however, was black, while Buck’s luxuriant walrus version was of a dull sandy colour, tinged faintly with red.

  The most important permanent piece of station property at Henbury was a brass memorial plate bolted to a stout post standing in front of the main blockhouse. This was a valuable historical document, for it gave the names and the years of arrival of the early Finke River pioneers – that is, of the white cattlemen who had taken up the first properties on the Finke River and of the white stockmen and station hands who had worked for them.

  According to this plaque, the first two of these pioneers had been Richard Egerton Warburton (commonly known as ‘Dickie’ Warburton) and Allan Breaden, and both of them had come into this country in the same year – 1875. ‘Dickie’ Warburton, a son of the explorer Major Peter Egerton Warburton, had died some years earlier; but Allan Breaden was still living, and managing Idracowra Station. Many of the other names on this plaque, such as those of the two Parke brothers, Bill Stokes, Charlie Walker, Tom Norman, Ted Sargeant, Gus Elliot, Louis Bloomfield, and Bob Coulthard, were also familiar to Theo. He noticed that the list of names on this plaque excluded those of the early Hermannsburg pioneers. They had undoubtedly been omitted because of their association with the welfare of the aboriginal folk: this was believed by the cattlemen to be a lost cause since all the aboriginal lands had become ‘the white man’s country’. In any case, Hermannsburg would have needed a special plaque to itself; for no fewer than eleven men and eight women had resided there as members of the mission staff during the period 1877–90, and a considerable number of white children had been born to them in those years.

  The final item on the plaque commemorated one of Joe Breaden’s proudest achievements – to have been driven up from Todmorden to Henbury in 1917 in his own car. The journey had taken many days; and donkeys had provided the pulling power over the worst Finke crossings and sandhills. Quite unintentionally, this concluding plaque notice foretold, to the people of Central Australia, the passing of an age – the age of the technically advanced peoples’ dependency upon the horse. Breaden had always been intensely proud of his fast, Todmorden-bred horses. Till the beginning of World War I he had used a buggy and pair when making his fortnightly trip of sixty miles from Todmorden to Oodnadatta to meet the mail train. Though the track went over rough gibber country and expanses of heavy sand, he had never taken more than nine hours to reach the railhead, where he used to arrive ‘like clockwork, on the strike of the hour’, at three in the afternoon. To maintain this speed, he used to effect changes in his pairs every couple of hours from the small mob of loose horses driven by an accompanying ‘blackboy’. But late in 1914 he had accepted a challenge made by Fred Budge, a ‘T model’ Ford car agent employed by the Farina firm of J. W. Manfield & Co. Breaden had left Oodnadatta at six in the morning, with Budge following him four hours later. Though the little car had to cut tracks for itself whenever the road went over sand, Budge had chugged triumphantly past Breaden at two o’clock in the afternoon, fifty miles out from Oodnadatta. Defeated and deflated, Breaden had purchased the Ford and become the Centre’s first car owner. That contest had convinced Breaden that the age of the horse as a draught animal was rapidly waning. Only in war there still seemed to be no substitute for it: Australians had every reason to be proud of the military glory that the Australian Light Horse Brigades were winning for themselves in World War I. Surveyor-General Day, in the 1916 Report al
ready referred to, had spoken enthusiastically about the reputation of Centrebred horses, and had urged the Government to establish a central horse breeding station in the MacDonnell Ranges ‘for defence or other purposes’. But towards the end of World War I the British invention of the tank suddenly made all cavalry units obsolete. Over thousands of years of military history cavalry charges had determined the outcome of many important battles. The Roman Empire itself had collapsed when its borders had been crossed by whole tribes of Germanic peoples advancing westward to escape from the horsed Huns of the Asian interior. Now the age of the horse was reaching its end. Eight years after Day’s recommendation for a central horse-breeding station, terrified horses were going to be shot in their thousands in trapping yards built around the pools and springs of the Centre, whose waters were to be defiled by their brains and blood. Soon afterwards the patient donkeys were to be wiped out in similar fashion. The only mourners for both the horses and the donkeys were to be the aboriginal station workers who had handled them for so many decades. The dark men could not comprehend the white man’s mercenary attitudes: once his faithful animals had ceased being useful to him, he coldly exterminated them with brutal and callous ruthlessness. A cynic might have remarked that it had been Central Australia’s greatest tragedy, in more ways than one, to have been lifted out from what could have been termed technologically the Stone Age straight into the age of the rifle and the bullet.

  When Bob Buck and Theo had completed their survey of the station buildings, the yards, and the aboriginal camp, they returned to the kitchen, and Molly Tjalameinta put a huge pot of tea and some johnny cakes before them. Alf Butler, too, came in and joined them.

  After all three had finished their cups of morning tea, Buck, Butler, and Theo went out to the van, to find that the eight donkeys had already been harnessed to it. Bob Njitiaka and his wife Lornie were waiting for the signal to leave, and Ettie and a few more Henbury boys and girls were sitting on some other donkeys, ready to accompany the van for a few miles and see Theo off according to the Aranda rules of courtesy. Titus, the Hermannsburg van driver, had been lent a fresh riding horse and a saddle so that he could drive an additional eight loose wagon donkeys behind the vehicle.

  And so, at half past nine in the morning, the van drew out of Henbury. Tjalameinta wept a few tears when she saw Theo leaving, and then called out a farewell to Lornie and to Njitiaka. Tjalameinta and Lornie were sisters. But whereas Tjalameinta was cheery and chubby to the point of good-natured tubbiness, Lornie was a slim and somewhat reserved woman, though possessed of the same qualities of kindness and friendliness that also characterised her sister. Their father had been Aremala, the eldest son of Nameia, the triumphant avenger of the massacre at Irbmangkara.

  The Finke took a wide northward sweep at Henbury, and the furthest point of this huge loop came close to the low ranges which formed an edge for the northern skyline about five miles north of the station. Two well-known Upper Southern Aranda totemic sites were situated on the furthest portion of this loop – Tera, the home of a kwalba or sandhill wallaby ancestor, and Kantowala, the temporary hollow of a vicious ljaltakalbala serpent ancestor. Both of these mythological personages had eventually left their homes forever and set out for the MacDonnell Ranges. In the low hills north-east of Kantowala lay Inteera, the far-famed kangaroo centre whose sacred rites had been witnessed and described in detail by Spencer and Gillen before the turn of the century. Because of the long northward sweep of the river, the road to Idracowra crossed the Finke at Henbury, and the river remained out of sight till the next crossing, some sixteen miles away, at the point where the Britannia Sandhills had to be entered. The van accordingly crossed over to the southern bank. The eight donkeys pulled the vehicle across the Finke and up the steep sandhill bank on the other side without any fuss or bother. Nor did the donkey driver have to use any reins to guide them. Unlike horses, the donkeys stuck to their trail without any attempts to stray off the track. Even at night they could be depended on to keep to the road without any guidance or supervision on the part of their driver. As the van climbed up the southern sandhill bank, it passed a large river gum that still raised its tall trunk skyward in token of its triumphant defiance of the high floods that had badly eroded the bank at this point and exposed all its roots to the depth of about four or five feet. These roots had since succeeded in growing mottled bark over their exposed upper sections. This dauntless tree looked like a magnificent symbol of all the plants and creatures that lived in this timeless land – a land whose weathered face clearly showed the scars of its many grim periods. Nothing that was not tough or high-spirited could survive in it for long; and the extensive flora and fauna of Central Australia showed in all its characteristics how successfully all things that lived in this country had become adapted to their environment. Nature showed a resourcefulness in the Centre that mere man could only marvel at.

  Theo followed the van with the other children, enjoying his last ride on Possum who had come forward to him at Henbury, nuzzling him for the familiar crust of bread. With Tjalameinta’s help he had been able to reward Possum’s affection. It was easy for the riders to keep up with the van, for the pace of the donkeys pulling it varied only from a speed of about two miles an hour in heavy sand to two-and-a-half miles an hour on hard ground. This slow pace enabled all the young donkey foals to accompany their mothers. They had all been branded, and the males castrated, only a few days earlier, and most of them were still weak from their ordeal. All the dark children and adults hated branding day, and grieved for the unfortunate male foals. For the dark folk, who believed that human beings, animals, and plants were all indivisibly linked by a common thread of life, respected the dignity of the animals native to their country, and also that of the new animals introduced into their environment by the white men. They never failed to comment on the brutal manner in which the white men so frequently maltreated their own animals. These dark folk had not yet fully grasped the fact that, generally speaking, civilised man normally associates dignity only with power and with money. Even fellow human beings who are lacking in power and in money tend to be regarded as inferior creatures, fit for all kinds of exploitation. As for the animals, these exist merely to provide handsome profits for their owners or convenient targets for the bullets of so-called sportsmen who may wish to fill in their idle hours by destroying life out of sheer devilment. After two hours of slow travelling the Five Mile Creek, a winding dry watercourse studded with flourishing box gums, had been reached. The children turned back with their mounts and the tired foals. Theo sadly took his leave of them, stroked Possum affectionately for the last time, and climbed on to the front seat of the van.

  It was a little after four in the afternoon when the van reached the end of a long expanse of dreary flats that were skirted by a southern edge of low barren hills. Here the travellers once more caught sight of the magnificent gums of the Finke. The river, which had turned back from the hills north of Henbury in a series of great loops, now twisted its way south towards the Palmer River Valley. The road from Henbury forked at this point. One trail was the normal donkey wagon track, the other the rather shorter camel pad; but both led eventually to Idracowra. The wagon track bore to the right and kept to the Finke Valley. It crossed the river between Ekngata and Irkngalalitnama, and then went past Anbaia to Uratanga, a particularly salty waterhole which receded rapidly in dry periods and left behind great areas of salt-pans, yielding excellent supplies of crystallised salt. This salt was used, after grinding by dark women, both on Henbury and on Idracowra stations for dry-salting the corned beef supplies. After leaving Uratanga, the wagon road continued in an easterly direction and rejoined the Henbury-Idracowra camel pad close to Talpanama. This camel pad, which had crossed the Finke between Irkngalalitnama and Takalalama and immediately ascended into the Britannia Sandhills, was only slightly heavier and not much more sandy than the Finke Valley wagon road. But while the donkeys could have pulled an empty vehicle without much difficulty up the
steep Finke bank at this crossing, they would have had great trouble in bringing a fully loaded wagon down safely on the return journey. These station vehicles did not have effective brakes; and a loaded salt wagon could easily have careered into the donkeys from behind and maimed the shafters. Moreover, the road over the Britannia Sandhills had to cross many high red sand-dunes, and it was hence normally avoided by all wheeled traffic. However, the camel pad over the Britannia Sandhills was many miles shorter than the normal wagon trail down the Finke Valley; and hence both Hermannsburg vehicles had elected to follow it so as to save vital time. The van was pulled up in the Finke bed, and the donkeys were quickly unharnessed so that they could have a drink from the Takalalama waterhole. The loose donkeys and the saddle horse of their driver also took deep gulps of water; for the day had been a very hot one. Then the donkeys were harnessed to the van again. They were clearly tired from pulling the van for sixteen miles in the scorching heat; and since the river bank up which the road ascended into the sandhills was a particularly steep one, Njitiaka and Lornie, after breaking off new gum switches, walked on foot, one on either side of the bravely struggling team, yelling and shouting at the donkeys and bringing their switches down hard on the rumps of any animal that looked like slacking. For the vehicle had to reach the top of the steep bank without coming to a halt. Otherwise it would have had to roll back again into the river bed before making a second attempt. However, the sturdy little creatures did not let their drivers down. Puffing and snorting, and shaking their long ears till they flapped together noisily, they drew the van to the top of the sandhill bank without a hitch. Once the crest had been reached, the van was pulled up. An examination of the tracks left behind by the buggy and the horses that had gone up this bank some hours earlier showed that the advance party had experienced even greater trouble in reaching the top than had the van. Njitiaka and Lornie climbed up on their seats again, and the van went forward for a further five miles into the sandhills, now blazing red in the light of the sinking western sun. There was a small flat with a fair amount of dry feed here; and a halt was made for the night. The sun sank, and the rich sunset colour faded from the red sandhills. Theo sat down with his three companions and ate some of the steak that Lornie had grilled over the coals. Bob Buck had killed a bullock two nights earlier, and he had liberally replenished the fresh meat supply of the Hermannsburg party. Theo, who had previously seen only the yellowish sandhills on the Hermannsburg run, had been amazed by the brilliance and richness of the warm colouring on the Britannia Sandhills in the last glow of sundown. He looked forward to spending a night under the stars with his dark companions, and hoped to have a long chat at the campfire with them. But immediately after the evening meal Titus spoke up, and in his quiet and courteous manner suggested to Theo that he should retire for an early night’s rest. ‘We have to leave here after midnight,’ he explained, ‘soon after the moon has risen. We have to go a long way yet through the sandhills, before we get back to the Finke tomorrow and the donkeys can have a drink; and it will be night again tomorrow before we reach Idracowra.’ It did not take Theo long to work out that with only twenty-one miles of the distance covered, Idracowra must still be thirty-four miles away; and thirty-four miles meant a long day’s journey even when travelling with horses. The donkeys might take seventeen hours or longer to cover the same stretch. He unrolled his swag near the van and stretched himself out under the night sky, now ablaze with a myriad stars. Njitiaka and Lornie put down their blankets near the dying campfire, and Titus cleared a space for his swag a little further away. A welcome breeze sprang up and quickly lowered the temperature by several degrees. In the distance a lone dingo could be heard howling. From a mulga branch close by came the mournful night notes of a mopoke. Two or three bats swooped over the red embers of the fire to seize insects attracted by the dying glow. The clinking of hobble chains and the occasional tinkle of a bell indicated that the donkeys were still grazing contentedly close to the camp. It was reassuring to know that they would be too tired to stray far during the night. A few yawns from the weary travellers showed that they were tired also. And then their limbs relaxed in the luxury of sleep out in the open air, watched over by the eternal stars.