She had an uphill battle convincing Aboriginal mothers to prevent disease through cleanliness, especially the need to keep flies from clustering in eyes, ears and noses. But it was cure for their ills they sought and they had great faith in the ‘Missus medicines’. Often they presented for treatment when illness was well advanced; with no doctors and no antibiotics, the outcome could not be good.
Bush medical cases in the 1920s and 1930s could seem quite unbelievable to a doctor or nurse newly arrived from a far city. For the first time in their careers they might be called upon to deal with a man dying from the power of suggestion or one whose kidney fat had been ripped out to be used as a magic potion.
A person could be ‘sung’ by a power from within the tribe. A bone is pointed at the unfortunate one—to be truly effective, it must be human and the magic words must be chanted over it before use. The pointer’s back is always turned to the victim, the bone pointed from over the shoulder or between the knees. The victim is unaware of the pointing but he will hear of it, this is certain—then the terrible curse begins. He sits alone, this ill-fated man, and slowly, slowly, he withers. As his life fades, he imagines his blood is seeping away or his liver is drying out to become nothing within him, and he obligingly dies—a triumph of suggestion. There is apparently no way to survive the death bone.
My father took one such fading man to Dr Cook in Darwin. At a loss to know how to treat him, the doctor anaesthetised him with chloroform. After awakening from his induced sleep, the man was told the curse had taken its course and worked through to its end. He had died. Now he was reborn to occupy the same body—a reborn life can take any form—and could never be cursed again.
He returned to his tribe full of confidence. What arrogance he displayed! He was untouchable, need fear no authority and showed little respect for Elders. Never before had their power been thwarted; to them it was unbelievable. They retired in anger and bad grace, and with much loss of face.
A patient my mother always remembered was an elderly Aboriginal woman found dying and neglected in the native camp. She lay on the ground, children and dogs tumbling over her in play, and not a person cared. My mother had her brought up and settled in a bed on her verandah.
The woman had obviously been exposed to Christianity at some point, perhaps on a mission station. Sensing her end was nigh, she begged Mother, ‘Sing me Jesus song, Missus.’
Mother’s repertoire of hymns was limited, so she gave a shaky rendition of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’; the comforting word here was Jesus, so ‘Onward Jesus Soldiers’ was rendered somewhat off-key. Another hymn she recalled from her days of wartime church services, when her brothers were away fighting at the front, was ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’, which brought comfort to a woman who couldn’t have had the slightest notion of what a sea was.
When death was imminent, she had forsaken her old beliefs and sought solace in an alien faith.
When I was three months old, my father joined the police patrol to track down Moodoorish, an Aboriginal man who had murdered a young white man named Renouf.
Recently arrived in the Territory and set on seeking adventure in the wild, Renouf had teamed up with a bushman named Nichols. They bought a small launch and set sail out of Darwin, south-west down the coast. At Point Blaze they sprang a leak and beached for repairs, and it was there that their short-lived adventuring came to an abrupt end.
Renouf was alone on the boat, Nichols away on shore, when Moodoorish and his right-hand man Nijooli crept silently up on the man bending over his cooking pot and shot him in the back with his own gun.
So the police hunt began. Two mounted constables, Hoffman and Hemmings, from Daly River and their trackers set off on horseback with orders to pursue and capture the murderer. They tracked through bush for days, but the crafty Moodoorish was always just ahead. They were told by Brinkin tribespeople that he had reached the coast and was boasting to all of his shooting the white man. He was regaling the gathering tribes with his threats to kill all the pursing police and take the kidney fat of every tracker in the patrol.
On 19 June 1929 the patrol reached the coast, hobbled out the horses and made camp. Around midnight, settled under mosquito nets in their swags, they heard a call on the still night air—a long, low animal call, not quite that of a dingo—and presently an answering call from the other side of camp. Fully alert, they edged out of their swags and took cover. ‘Who’s there?’
They were answered with a shower of spears. They fired into darkness; the spearmen retreated through trees. All was quiet again.
Tracker Charlie was wounded in the leg. In darkness they removed long splinters of poisoned mangrove-wood spearhead, but Charlie was already poisoned, becoming fevered and confused.
In the morning twenty spears quilled up out of swags, fireplace and surrounding trees. In spite of their cunning, it hadn’t occurred to the attackers to kill or run off the hobbled horses. A good thing this was too, for it would have been more than 150 kilometres on foot with a wounded man, through country rapidly filling with overexcited tribespeople come to join the corroboree telling of Moodoorish killing the white man.
The policemen decided to abandon the patrol temporarily. Hemmings would take Charlie into Brocks Creek, while Hoffman went on to Tipperary Station to shoe the horses and refurbish the plant. So Charlie was brought in to my mother—more than 150 kilometres on horseback had been a hard trip for the wounded man. Later my mother sent him to hospital in Darwin, where he recovered from his wounds and returned to work as a tracker in the force.
With two more constables, my father and Constable Don, and additional trackers, the strengthened patrol rode straight back to the coast, where growing numbers of tribespeople were performing the triumphant corroboree that told of Moodoorish’s victory, along with the withdrawal of police.
The new patrol made camp on clear ground surrounded by mangrove and bush, and waited expectantly through the night. The sounds of corroboree continued with increasingly feverish excitement until morning, when over a hundred gaudily painted participants gathered among the mangroves—howling, threatening with clacking spears, chewing wildly on their beards. More than two hundred feet were stomping on the ground.
The patrol prepared to stand. The spearmen moved forward, rhythmically chanting; retired en masse; moved forward again, spears poised; and then fanned out, intending to encircle the camp.
‘Aim at the ground,’ Hemmings said. ‘When I say fire, fire in front of them and keep firing.’
Four white men facing a hundred naked, armed black men. It would have been so easy to take a spear in the gut and the trackers no doubt dwelled on unsettling thoughts of their kidney fat being unceremoniously ripped out.
Spears showered in at them. ‘Ready, fire, keep firing!’ They took aim, fired into the ground; bullets ricocheted; spears curved in a high arc at them; the blacks turned, fled into the mangroves. That was close! ‘If they’d had the courage to stand their ground,’ said Don, ‘what a mess they’d have made of us.’
Moodoorish was arrested for the murder of Renouf; his close brotherhood for the wounding of Charlie. It was a long, slow return trip with eight prisoners. For about 120 kilometres the patrol was closely shadowed by Moodoorish’s tribesmen. The constables and trackers remained tensely alert throughout the night, and surely it can be seen why they had to manacle their prisoners.
The Aboriginal men were tried in Darwin. They were dismissed and returned to their country on the grounds they were all implicated and couldn’t be witness against one another.
On his return, Moodoorish’s fame spread from the Daly to the Victoria River. He was hailed a great warrior, but he had only shot a new chum lad in the back and, with a hundred armed men around him, retreated before four mounted troopers.
In a book called Man Tracks, Ion Idriess wrote a detailed account of this patrol in 1929, telling of how Hemmings, Sargeant, Don and Hoffman coolly stood their ground in remote country. It is quite a tale.
/> In Brocks Creek a nine-month-old baby lay feverish in its cot, very sick with a severe case of bronchial pneumonia, and there was little hope she would survive the night. Despite my mother’s nursing prowess and success, she had been unable to return the baby to health.
My father, who knew everyone’s comings and goings, heard that the fortnightly train from Darwin had arrived. Its passengers, among whom was an English doctor, were settled for the night at Fannie’s Federation Hotel. My father raced over to seek the doctor’s help. Unfortunately, the good doctor was heavily loaded with rum and refused to leave his card game, whereupon my dear father, never one to dally about, produced his trusty service pistol. With this hard cold instrument jammed uncomfortably behind the reluctant doctor’s ear, my father marched him to the young patient’s bedside.
To his credit, when he realised the severity of the baby’s illness, the doctor sat with her all through the night—but then in view of my father’s earlier method of persuasion, perhaps he thought it politic to remain.
Obviously the patient recovered, for here I am telling of it today.
CHAPTER 11
Newcastle Waters
In 1930, when I was a year old, my parents left Brocks Creek and moved to Newcastle Waters, known to Territorians everywhere as the Ridge, which turned out to be my father’s last police posting. In the early days of the Territory, it was possible for a town to set its foundation on a bottle of rum, a couple of drinkers, a swag rolled out beside a waterhole; later, a bough shade could lend a homely touch, as well as protection from the elements. They could sell a bag of flour or a horse to someone passing. Other travellers might unpack the old horse for the night, find the company congenial and stay on through the wet. The place could take a name like ‘The Four Mile’, ‘Paddy’s Lagoon’, ‘Ryan’s Bend’—and so it was that a small settlement would begin, perhaps to grow larger, probably not too large, but a tiny fly-spot on the map it would remain, and an infant town might be born.
Back then roads weren’t gravelled and there was certainly no Stuart Highway with bog-proofing bitumen. Instead, two-wheel tracks led through spinifex from Alice Springs to Darwin, and you took your chances and battled on as best you could. In the wet you bogged; when river crossings went under floodwater, you camped ‘till they went down’.
About a half-mile from the Newcastle Waters Station homestead, a small store catering to drovers, and licensed to sell liquor, was flourishing. It was run by Jack McCarthy, widely known as Irish Mac, a teamster who carried loading through Elsey Station and whom Jeannie Gunn had written of in her book We of the Never Never, published in 1908.
Mac was unequalled as a bullock driver; he possessed the extraordinary facility of nursing his team of 22 bullocks through floodwater and over long waterless stages. The freight cost from the railhead at Pine Creek to Daly Waters (before the line was extended to Birdum in 1929) was £35 per ton, and further on to the Powell Creek telegraph station it was £45 pounds. It was hard work and, when the going was rough, goods could be twelve months on the road before delivery.
While Irish Mac was away with his wagons for many months at a time, his wife ran their store very capably. Her method of dealing with obstreperous drunks was a hard jab in the mid-section with a stout stick, kept behind the door especially for this purpose; as her target doubled over, she followed through with a mighty crack to the head. This, accompanied by a loud tirade of Irish-accented invective, kept her customers in reasonable control.
After a couple of years on the Ridge, my parents could see a profitable future there and with £1000 (a considerable sum then) borrowed from a Territory eccentric by the name of Harry Bates they bought the McCarthys out—lock, stock and every last rum barrel.
While my father awaited his replacement in the force, he remained the resident police officer, and when necessary would arrest a noisy drunk and haul him off to sober up in the police cell—the stout stick long gone from behind the door. There was some local puzzlement here: the publican serving grog and the policeman in his uniform looked so alike, it was even suggested by confused drinkers that they might be brothers.
My mother transferred her household—which consisted of me, the cook, my nursemaid, a pet brolga and dog, and the fine linen and silver of her trousseau—from the reasonable comfort of the police station to the less-than-luxurious house of the store, with not a pause in business. This house was definitely a temporary dwelling; its walls of tree bark were an open invitation to white ants to come, feast and frolic.
But Mother never in her life let her standards of genteel existence slip. I still have a small brass bell she used at the dinner table; it was an ornate replica of Nelson’s flagship Victory in full sail. It was not pretentious in those times to have staff serve at table, even in the most modest of bush homes, and colonial traditions persisted as they did in India and other far reaches of empire.
There was no shortage of household help; Aboriginal women were curious about working in a house. But it was a doubtful blessing, for with them came numerous relatives—mothers, sisters, an assortment of piccaninnies—and in the early days they could be unreliable. If the mood took them to go bush, off they went without thought; it was quite beyond them to understand the endless futility of work that occupied white people. My generation had the early Missus to thank for the competent house staff we inherited.
In the colonial household, children were fed their meals separately until of an age when good table behaviour was observed. Usually we had our own child-sized table and chairs, with meals supervised by a nurse girl. I went on to continue this tradition with my own children.
The lubras vied for table duty, which entailed no more than removing dishes and serving the following course. On big stations the uniformed staff stood throughout the meal, in the fashion of an English country house, so wild kids of the old Outback grew up with exposure to certain refinements.
The Missus was head of the household—her word was law—and it was expected she do no wrong. House staff everywhere looked to the Missus for their care, to sort out their problems, settle arguments, attend their ills. They brought new babies up to the Missus to hear their white-man names. The Boss might get drunk at the picnic races, and cavort in a less-than-dignified manner if he was so inclined; the Missus—never!
In the constant rain of the wet season, life within the walls of our bark dwelling was damp and uncomfortable; still, when the occasion arose Mother entertained with great verve. Once with cans and basins placed to catch rainwater dripping through a leaking roof, she gave a creditable dinner party for Lady Somers—the wife of the Victorian governor—and the pilot of her plane. In fact, they had such an enjoyable time that they stayed on a further few days.
Lady Somers and my mother went riding in the huge station horse paddock. They were disinclined to have an Aboriginal groom ride along, so my father locked the paddock gate with instructions not to go out—what a national disaster if the wife of the Victorian governor had been lost in the bush while in his care.
Beginning around April, when rains had cleared, drovers passed through the Ridge, heading west to take delivery of cattle. They restocked their tucker bags at our store, which had flourished since my parents had bought it.
Apart from the usual liquor and canned goods, the store stocked clothes, saddlery and a strong cotton fabric called ‘turkey red’ which was popular. Boiled sweets, the only kind one could expect to find in bush stores, came in 10-pound tins and were doled out into paper bags. In the heat they tended to stick together in hard lumps and needed a good deal of thumping to separate, and the Aboriginals loved them.
No R.M. Williams boots in those days—the Johnson boot was first choice of the ringer, and the Koorelah was popular too, with elastic sides that were prone to sag with age, hence their nickname ‘laughin’ side boots’.
Capstan tobacco came in round pocket-sized tins, as well as a dark square plug called AZ—‘nigger twist’—which was moist and strong-flavoured, and stamped ‘Fo
r Aboriginal Use Only’. The Aboriginals chewed it, formed it into marble-sized balls, rolled it in ashes and settled it in the mouth along the back of the lower jaw, which bulged the cheek and caused much objectionable spitting of tobacco juice; when not in the mouth, it was often carried behind the ear. Sometimes one or two of these ‘wannoo’ were carried about in a small tin of powdered ashes—metal wax match tins were popular for this.
The Aboriginal people newly arrived from the inland Territory bush would advance carefully and full of wonder into the store; naked, or girt with a thin belt woven from human hair, from which often hung a naga (loin cloth), lean-bodied, with stick-thin strong legs, peg in nose, carrying their spears, two or three in the left hand, woomera (throwing stick) in the right. They had not a word of English. If I placed my small hand on their arm or hand, as our house lubras said I should, they erupted with loud, delighted laughter, their nose pegs stiffening upwards with their wide smiles until their eyes disappeared into folds of flesh. They pinched my ribs to indicate I was in good condition, and mimed that I might make a succulent meal, with great humour and nods all around.
They gazed in awe at this Aladdin’s cave of goods—axes, red cloth, knives sharp and shining—and they offered carved weapons, shields, spears, ornaments of dogs’ teeth and coloured seeds, and cleverly woven hair and grass armbands, in exchange for sugar, flour and tobacco. If careful watch wasn’t kept, small items disappeared into mouths, hair, and a favourite hiding place, the armpit.
Within their tight small tribes, no half-caste nor mixed-blood person had a remote chance of acceptance, and the welcome mat wasn’t put out for visitors from other tribes either. Apart from an occasional exchange of goods and the ‘dancer man’ who travelled about demonstrating his new dances, the tribes kept a wary and possessive eye on their territory.
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