This book is for ‘Old Darwin’ and the remaining few who still live there. For me, they are not names in history books but real people I knew and cared about.
First published in 2015
Copyright © Jacqueline Hammar 2015
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Arena Books
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 76011 201 1
eISBN 978 1 92526 645 0
Map by MAPgraphics
Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney
Contents
Prologue
PART I
1 North to the Territory
2 Mounted Constable Jack Sargeant
3 Old Darwin Town
4 Life Down Batchelor Way
5 Searching for Gold
6 Murder in the Desert
7 Hard Times
8 My Parents Wed
9 My Welcome to the World
10 The Many Ways to Die in the Bush
11 Newcastle Waters
12 He Redeemed his Vices with his Virtue
13 Daughter of the Mounted
14 North to Gold Field Country
15 Buffalo Shooting
16 Darwin Convent School
17 Leaping Lena
18 A New Darwin Emerges
19 War is Declared
20 The Bombing of Darwin
21 Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
PART II
22 Emerging from the Cloister
23 Back to Newcastle Waters
24 Anyone Can Do Anything
25 Go Bush, Young Man!
26 And That Says It All
27 The Old Stockman of the Bush
28 A Time Long Gone
29 Hard Men Who Lived Hard Lives
30 Travellers on the Murranji Track
31 On the Wilton River
32 Jackie’s Gone a Drovin’
33 Droving Across the Barkly Tableland
34 An Invitation
35 The Townsfolk of Borroloola
36 Under a Wide and Starry Sky
37 Graveyards in the Grasses
38 Naming Butterfly Spring
39 My ‘Get Up and Go’ Had Got Up and Gone
40 ‘With All My Worldly Goods I Thee Endow’
41 Missus Ken
PART III
42 Managing McArthur River Station
43 Our First Wet Season
44 End of the Wet
45 New Additions
46 Heading Bush
47 My Unique Household
48 The Good Old Bush Life
49 A Bush Child Comes Home
50 Alone Under the Milky Way
51 Twenty-Chebbin Dog Johnny
52 Along the Old Coast Track
53 Bauhinia Downs Station
54 Money is Like a Sixth Sense
55 A Veritable Noah’s Ark
56 Bush Race Meeting
57 A Bush Christmas
58 Working on Bauhinia Downs
59 ‘Just Shoot the Bloody Thing’
60 Our New Homestead
Epilogue
Picture section
Acknowledgements
There’s the land. (Have you seen it?) It’s the cussedest land that I know . . . Some say God was tired when He made it; Some say it’s a fine land to shun; Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it For no land on earth—and I’m one.
ROBERT W. SERVICE
Prologue
Close to a hundred years ago, a young man not yet twenty years old rode with the Afghan camel teams over the red sand of the Centralian desert into the Northern Territory. He went on to ride the wild miles of the Territory as a trooper in the Mounted Police, when less than forty mounted men patrolled a country larger than Great Britain, France and Germany combined. He was to become my father.
When our family took root in the Territory, it was largely unpeopled, and inhospitable to Europeans. Men like my father came for the great adventure. The bush tracks they travelled were recorded as uncertain pin scratches on maps.
Four generations later, our family still flourishes under the guiding stars of the Southern Cross. We have ridden the hard ridges of the inland, travelled cattle through the old forgotten stock routes, and pioneered country where barefoot cattle kings, with no thrones but their saddles, patrolled their vast pandanus-bordered kingdoms. These adventures have been part of my life for nearly ninety years, passing through with the clink of spurs, the pad of bare black feet, and the night sounds of horse bells and corroboree.
In records of the Northern Territory’s Genealogical Society, my parents are recorded as Pioneers of the Territory. As Pioneer Number 0376, my name has also been enclosed in these dusty files that are possibly never to be opened again, and never to tell of the births, deaths and tragedies of the lives within.
But I have tales to tell of pioneering in our time, of lonely white men and gentle black women, of murder and suicide, of animals and children, fire and flood. Men of the bush loved their hard, unbound life; wouldn’t have considered another. The freedom and farness of the Outback suited them fine.
White women were very few and very far between on the hard ground of the old Territory. They dispensed hospitality to all who travelled bush roads. Newspapers repeatedly stated that: ‘A far greater need than railways, naval bases, gold and garrisons is the Territory’s need of white women.’
In 1928—before the days of radio, telephone and real medical aid—my mother came as a bride to live in a wide, wild-man’s country. A trained nurse, she cared for the bush Aboriginals when they were sick: naked people wary of new ways, suffering the white man’s diseases such as measles, yaws and leprosy. Late at night, many a lubra would come seeking my mother’s help, guiding her through darkness with the light of a kerosene lantern to their camp.
The bush Aboriginals of our time were ever eager to hear a good yarn.
‘Tell me a story, Jack-a-leen, true-fella story,’ they’d say to me.
So gather around with the shades of these long-ago people of the old bush and I’ll tell you our story—our true-fella story.
PART I
‘Overall brooded the silence and loneliness of the north, a land of appalling distances and the fastest and only way to bridge them, a man on a galloping horse.’
GLENVILLE PIKE
‘These sand hills are suggestive of death by fatigue, thirst, and famine.’
ERNEST FAVENC
‘Amazing is the record of heroism, and endurance, that is the history of the North Australian Mounted, they lived the hair-raising thrillers of a boy’s dream—dashing in their uniforms and wide hats�
�hats that more than once had been the target of showers of spears, they laughed over stories that would electrify an author of adventure tales, scarcely one has not a life and death story to tell, but rarely tells it.’
ERNESTINE HILL
CHAPTER 1
North to the Territory
My story begins with my father, Arthur Edward (Jack) Sargeant. Queen Victoria was still sitting steadfastly upon her throne in the early months of the year he was born. He and the twentieth century began their journey through time together.
At fifteen he left his home in South Australia and joined the army. There was no conscription during the First World War, with young men joining for adventure, for patriotism, or both. Perhaps my father presumed life in the army wouldn’t differ much from life as the youngest of seventeen children in a strict Presbyterian household.
After lying about his age, he was given an ill-fitting uniform and sent on a 20-kilometre fitness march that resulted in the army doctors diagnosing ingrown toenails. These were smartly removed (and never grew again) and he was soon on a ship sailing off to war.
And what a war it was! One of guts, no glory, no glamour, and such appalling horror that a child soldier could only return from mud-filled trenches and bayonet charges on the battlefields of France as a man.
In his journal, my father tells a little of his war:
We went up through the Hindenburg Line recently taken by Australians, we were in trenches up to our waists in mud, I was on Lewis Guns, we were there for a week, it was my sixteenth birthday, and the men celebrated my birthday with sixteen lighted matches in a loaf of bread.
We were relieved by the first American troops to come into the front line, the 32nd Battalion. They seemed not to have good leadership for they tried to get through the barbed-wire entanglements where they were caught, and the Germans machine-gunned them, every one.
We were ordered out; the only way through the wire was to climb over the dead bodies of the Americans. There was no other way. There was a moon that night and it was a sight I’ll never forget, men caught on the wire, their frozen grimacing faces, white in the moonlight.
My father caught the Spanish flu that killed thousands of fighting men. While he was lying in an army hospital, yet another flu victim was placed in the bed beside him. In the morning, seeing the bed empty, my father said with the naivety of a bush lad, ‘Has he gone home, Nurse?’ The nurse replied, ‘Yes son, he’s gone home.’
He was invalided out to hospital in England, later onto a hospital ship back to Australia. They called in to Colombo, but he was too sick to go ashore. Then the ship set sail right into a cyclone, during which everything on top of the vessel was blown away—showers, toilets and sadly, their entire cargo of potatoes. The men remained battened down below or they would have gone too. Blown hundreds of miles off course, they finally sailed into Albany rather than Fremantle.
At war’s end, my father was still a teenager. The years that followed his return held a diversity of adventurous pursuits for him.
In 1919, ten years before a railway line linked Oodnadatta in South Australia to Alice Springs, my father rode into the Northern Territory on the back of a camel. Eighteen years old, a soldier returned from war, he had been directed north by the British Australian Telegraph Company to work on the Overland Telegraph Line. This was an amazing feat of human achievement that linked Australia across more than 3000 kilometres, from Port Augusta in South Australia to the far tropics of Darwin. There it joined with the cable that ran along the ocean floor to Java, and so to communication with the rest of the world.
My father left Adelaide on the slow train that crawled through dust and heat every two weeks, taking an overnight break to the relief of passengers at Marree. Originally the area was named Hergott Springs—the story goes that a German explorer was the first man through and exclaimed in horror, ‘Herr Gott!’ at the desolate scene. It was in fact named for Hergott, an artist in John McDouall Stuart’s exploration party who’d found water there.
Next day the train moved on to Oodnadatta, where the rail line stopped dead in the sand. A collection of dirty Afghan tents and a tin mosque defined it as little more than a camel camp. From there, my father travelled with the Afghan camel train over the red sand dunes of Central Australia, a journey of around three weeks. Like desert caravans of ages past, camel trains regularly travelled this route, one of the hottest and driest in the world. Turbaned Afghans packed their long strings of camels with every conceivable form of goods, furniture, building materials, grog—you name it, they found a way to load it.
My father wrote in his journal:
My travel documents stated, ‘Train to Oodnadatta, connecting with mail to Alice Springs.’ With expectations of a mail truck to continue on, I found no such thing—there was no mail truck, not a sign of a mailman, so back to the railway station.
‘Where’s the Alice Springs mail truck, mate?’ I asked.
‘That’s it up there; see those camels? That’s how the mail gets through. A lot of sand between here and the Alice, a motor vehicle couldn’t handle it.’ He went on to explain, ‘There are two camel teams, this one goes as far as Old Crown Station, that’s about halfway, there they change to another string to continue on to the Alice. They return the same way.’
My baggage consisted of a suitcase, which went into one of the boxes located on each side of a pack animal, and my swag, which I carried on my camel. ‘When you mount you’ll find a waterbag on one side, and on the other a satchel with food,’ I was told. On inspection, food was revealed as a packet of SAO biscuits and a can of sardines.
Loaded and ready to travel, we set off at what could be described as a fast amble—a shuffling sort of gait, the best way to travel, too fast, loads might shift, too slow, a feeling of motion sickness could overcome those so inclined. The camels were joined, nose to tail, in a long string, heavily loaded for settlements along the way. A big bull could carry half a ton and go without water for a week if conditioned to do so. We left camp before daybreak. Sometimes we travelled into the night; sometimes spent a day unloading.
When we finally reached Old Crown Station, the halfway point, the camels were unpacked, with blissful thoughts of some dinner and rolling out the swag for a few hours’ sleep before continuing. It was not to be: the new team, ready to travel, was preparing to leave, so reluctantly I remounted, settled myself as comfortable as possible, and with a ‘Hoosta’ my new mount swayed to its feet and we were away again.
My father’s route followed the watering places that explorers had first marked about half a century earlier: Bloods Creek, Alice Well, Deep Well and, just across the present Northern Territory border on the 26th parallel, Charlotte Waters. A story of hardship and loneliness goes with each one. At that time even Alice Springs—or Stuart township, as it was then known—consisted of the telegraph station, a ramshackle pub and a couple of stores, along streets of red sand.
In 1870 the South Australian government had undertaken to build the Overland Telegraph Line in eighteen months. The British Australian Telegraph Company would finance it and lay the undersea cable to Java, with a penalty clause of £70 sterling a day if work proceeded after 1 January 1872. Charles Todd, the South Australian superintendent of telegraphs, was appointed to lead and organise the project.
At that time, the interior was virtually unknown country. In 1862 John McDouall Stuart’s exploration party had crossed the continent from north to south on its sixth attempt. Information gleaned from their records wasn’t encouraging: hundreds of miles without water in the dry season and flooding rains in the wet, and the country was peopled with Aboriginals who were not about to make welcome these strange pale debil-debils.
So when the OT Line was proposed and the contract signed, newspapers said it couldn’t be done. They published derisive cartoons and made great fun of such an impossible project; of Charles Todd’s need for thousands of insulators and permanently manned repeater stations that would be necessary to convey Morse code al
ong the line.
Todd’s men went out with swag, water bag, bullock drays, wagons, and horse and camel teams across empty land with no cattle stations, little wild game and uncertain delivery of supplies. For $2.50 per week in today’s money they toiled northwards through spinifex plains into the tropics, where they were marooned for weeks by torrential rains. Bogged down, they subsisted on damp, weevil-infested flour, and boiled and ate their leather gear and greenhide. Volunteers made a boat of sorts from a tarpaulin-covered dray and careered crazily down the Roper River to hurry back the supply boats to the starving workers.
Still the poles went up, the wires sang in the wind, the line moved steadily forward. The project was completed in just two years.
As a Territorian, I admit to a thrill of pride, that prickles along the spine, when I read that with a twist of wire at Frew Ponds, England and Australia were joined in communication. In Adelaide, on 22 August 1872, with the town hall’s bells ringing, Charles Todd’s message was tapped through by Morse code:
We have this day, within two years, completed a line of communications two thousand miles long through the very centre of Australia, until a few years ago a terra incognita believed to be a desert.
Now there would be no more waiting months for the blue flag to flutter from Adelaide Town Hall, heralding the arrival of the P&O ships carrying stacks of English newspapers.
My father knew and spoke with men who had worked on the construction of this great line. Now his work was to help maintain it. As a linesman he travelled with packhorses from the Barrow Creek to Powell Creek telegraph stations, climbing the poles to test and repair. With handsets that attached to the main line, he could make contact with the nearest base. A break in the line meant a serious disruption in overseas contact, so constant surveillance was necessary.
The line was also vital for contact within Australia. When a man lay dying from spear wounds after an attack on Barrow Creek, his wife in far-off Adelaide farewelled him through the Morse code of the operators. Can it be imagined today, farewelling a husband with dots and dashes?
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