Daughter of the Territory

by Jacqueline Hammar

  He took up residence in a small house close by the Aboriginal camp, and before long became known locally as the White Stallion, for obvious and not very priestly reasons. He held odd little services, uniquely orchestrated by himself; he served Holy Communion of Sao biscuits straight from the packet, and red jelly-crystal liquid because of the ban on Aboriginals drinking. When the store ran short of jelly crystals, canned beetroot juice made a richly red substitute.

  The piccaninnies came out of curiosity, and were encouraged to stay awhile for divinity lessons and to be read Bible stories. The ones that appealed dealt with gory sacrifice and desert people clashing about in ancient wars—they used spears too, didn’t they? Moses parting the sea wasn’t well received, for they couldn’t envisage a sea; the local creek was the largest body of water in their world, and it need not be parted to cross, one could swim it easily.

  They ate his Sao biscuits, and stole his jelly crystals and most anything else they could get their little hands on. ‘Ungrateful lil bastids!’ raged Charlie, and up on the Ridge smiles were suppressed as he raged and complained.

  Advents of special importance on the Christian calendar brought forth Charlie’s most devoutly eloquent sermons. I was told, by a person who was present, that on the eve before Good Friday a larger congregation than usual had gathered, and Charlie was inspired with special evangelical fervour. The Easter story and the religious drama of the crucifixion took hold, and he declared to his brethren in a loud, impassioned voice, ‘I am Jesus, I am Jesus!’

  A serious and concerned voice, one obviously familiar with the Easter story, spoke up from the congregation. ‘You is in for a real bad weekend, Jesus.’

  The novelty of Charlie’s services soon faded for the Ridge Aboriginals; they realised they would receive nothing more than gifts for their souls. So Charlie departed, in search of someplace with a more receptive audience.

  CHAPTER 31

  On the Wilton River

  Although it was to be two years before I was to see Ken again after he rode out to muster with Elmore Lewis, he had a hard two years on an isolated cattle run on the Wilton and in the Limmen country.

  The muster on Montejinni Station over, Elmore Lewis rode with the plant back to the Ridge and, with a cheque in his pocket, Ken Hammar did what most bush travellers did then and joined the convivial company in Katherine’s two hotels. Tim O’Shea’s Railway Hotel was a popular watering hole where one could find numerous cattlemen, bore drillers, miners and transport drivers, all exchanging the latest news and trying to find something to their advantage.

  The Katherine River, in its pandanus-bordered splendour, swept through the town and on through the grandeur of the river gorge. In 1862, McDouall Stuart named this river for Catherine, second daughter of James Chambers, a financial backer of his expedition. Catherine had sewn a flag for him to take on his travels, and he erected it in a tree by the great river he named in her honour. Over time, the first letter of her name changed.

  In Katherine, Ken met Freddie Ogden, who had taken up the grazing licence of Urapunga Station. Freddie had flown Spitfires during the war in Britain; now he flew for a local bush airline. They agreed to each take a half share in Urapunga, while Ken would run the station. He then flew out to Roper River, where the police officer, Dan Sprig, drove him out through bush to the station.

  A small iron shed with a bark meat-house out back was the homestead. Water was carried with yokes from the nearby Wilton River. The branded cattle weren’t worth counting—the big camp of bush Aboriginals settled there saw that the numbers were kept down. Ken faced an altogether disheartening picture: it was a station in name only.

  Ken put together a stock camp from among the encamped Aboriginals and they mustered for several months. Conditions were tough. He lived frugally out there, with little choice but to share the lives of the bush tribespeople. Soon food supplies tapered down to beef and bush tucker; boots wore out and they rode with spurs on the bare foot.

  Down on the river, a rogue crocodile was on the prowl. The grey-green monster had roamed for some time and taken two horses when they came down to drink. At night it circled the meat-house with its tantalising smells of fresh beef. The wily old fella was a humbug wandering silently at night; he was a danger to the camp people too.

  Ken thought it a good thing to be rid of him. Before leaving on the next muster, he gave old Mulldahowie, an ancient Aboriginal man, a .303 rifle and one bullet. His last words were delivered with emphasis: ‘Get him!’

  Days later, on Ken’s return, Mulldahowie beamed him a toothless grin of victory. He had the big croc’s hide pegged out, salted and drying—all 5 metres of him! He’d used his old donkey to help drag the croc up to the house for skinning. No doubt advanced age had endowed the beast with certain wisdom in evasive tactics, but he’d proved no match for old Mulldahowie and his one bullet.

  That night the old man held them all spellbound around the campfire, telling the long and graphic story of his success as hunters do everywhere. He had tied his dog close to the water’s edge, he said, and every now and then given its tail a painful twisting. Its yowls alerted the crocodile that an animal was in distress and perhaps a handy meal was close by.

  When at last the crocodile came cautiously up the slippery bank, Mulldahowie was waiting. One last vicious twist of the tail, a final yelp, and he quickly picked up his rifle, took a courageous stand just several metres from the huge creature, and shot him right through the eye!

  One day a stranger rode into Ken’s mustering camp, an unusual occurrence: a big, barrel-chested bear of a man, with a great bush of luxuriant, wiry red whiskers. Les MacFarlane, known as Mac, was travelling a mob of about 500 bullocks from his station at Mataranka to Boulia in Queensland. Several of his Aboriginal stockmen had deserted. The police officer at Roper Bar had suggested he contact Ken with a view to recruiting replacements from the camp by the river.

  Following a lengthy discussion with Ken, three men agreed to go with Mac. Two days later he was back; the new recruits had had a rethink about a long droving trip and disappeared in the night. After a long talk around the campfire, Ken offered to see him through as far as Borroloola.

  In Mac’s camp were Big Mouth Charlie; Don-Don, an Aboriginal boy; and a young white fella, Bill Morton of New South Wales, who’d come north seeking adventure—no doubt he found it on this trip.

  Due to drought conditions on the Barkly Stock Route that year, Mac decided to take his cattle through the deserted, untravelled Old Coast Road. When they reached the Four Archers, a group of hills near the Limmen River, they ran into good mobs of wild cattle, the descendants of those lost by early drovers.

  The Limmen was perhaps the first river in Australia to be named by Europeans. When the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman sailed the northern coast in the 1600s, he named this great river for his ship Limmen. Three hundred years after Tasman’s voyage, few Europeans had sailed its waters or ventured off the Old Coast Road to travel the surrounding country. It is officially called the Limmen Bight River but most people just refer to it as the Limmen River.

  All the country between the Roper and McArthur rivers was vacant Crown land, and the numbers of wild cattle there suggested it might well be worth mustering, so Mac and Ken decided to apply for a grazing licence. Their only map was an old taxation zoning chart; on that they drew their boundaries, a large rectangle taking in about 4000 square kilometres around the Limmen River.

  They could no doubt have drawn their rectangle much larger, and of any shape, but ‘one shilling per square mile per year’ was about as far as their limited finances would stretch. They erected a rough fence of bush timber across an area known as O’Keefe Valley, and there they let their cattle go. Mac returned to Mataranka and registered their land claim, and their grazing licence—‘Limmen Gate Pastoral Company’—was born.

  With this unusual and uncomplicated formation of a huge cattle station, so began a friendship that endured after their business partnership ended, until Mac’s d
eath in the 1980s. The long years of their association were filled with much that was humorous, hazardous and sometimes downright unbelievable—to write about it would require another book.

  Ken settled on the new station and worked their grazing licence. He built himself a paperbark dwelling on Eastern Creek of the Limmen, but it was a nomadic life covering this large tract of land with horse plant, working stock, and building yards and paddocks of bush timber that had to be cut down with axes and snigged along by horses, the holes dug with crowbar and shovel.

  On a map the word ‘UNSURVEYED’ spread over the Limmen country; in those days it was uninhabited, isolated, un-get-at-able. Helicopters hadn’t yet made an appearance and there were no roads. One imagines surveyors saying: ‘Oh, let the Aboriginals and horsemen venture there first. We’ll come in later.’

  The only wanderers were coastal tribes, who occasionally came through on walkabout: long lines of men and women slowly advancing and spreading out, retrieving every lizard, mouse and snake—anything they could find on ground they had burned. Into the coolamon or dilly bag it went. For beef and tobacco they sometimes helped with building a yard, before moving on.

  Two of these wanderers left a young boy behind, his European name Roy. He had his ‘grow im up time’ in Ken’s camp and took the name Hammar.

  There were only two other white men grazing cattle on the western side of the McArthur River: Jim Marshall at Bing Bong Station on the Coast, and Cecil Teece, who had a small place on Rosie Creek, bordering Ken’s country.

  Riding out one day, Ken stopped in his tracks, amazed to see a small bush home—with garden, chickens, dogs, children—settled about 15 kilometres inside his boundary. Cecil, his wife Lorna and their three children were happily settled within. But there was no argument about it: they maintained a good relationship and mustered along their boundary together.

  Cecil and his family had a hard life out in that lonely, unforgiving country, and it eventually got the better of them. Early one wet season—with long months of isolation looming, no markets for their few cattle, no roads, and the worries for young children out bush—they decided to pack their belongings and leave before the rains set in. They set off on horseback with their children on the saddle before them. Months later, during the following dry, Cecil returned to his little house and retrieved a few belongings. That was the end of another bush enterprise, undertaken with high hopes but doomed to fail.

  Cecil later wrote a very fine book, Voice of the Wilderness, about his time on Rosie Creek, and of the experiences he’d shared with Ken, his only white neighbour for hundreds of kilometres, when they’d mustered wild cattle on horseback through the remote country of the Limmen River.

  Over the years I saw Ken whenever he made trips to Moroak Station, where he trapped horses for work on the Limmen; Moroak had thousands of brumbies.

  On one of these trips, Ken persuaded Jack Gill to return with him for a season’s muster. Gilly was a white man, a good cattleman and handy with horses. Together they set off back to the Limmen with 50 horses.

  At Newcastle Waters I packed a small box of what would then in the bush have been considered luxury items: food, books and tobacco, and two long, fat cigars, each in its own aluminium cylinder.

  The package was taken bush by an old fella who knew where Ken and Gilly were camped. It was unpacked with as much delight as a parcel from under the Christmas tree. The cigars were carefully squirrelled away for a time when tobacco ran low.

  On another of Ken’s visits to Newcastle Waters, Polly took it upon herself to organise a corroboree for me and him, specially choreographed around our association with each other. We were to be guests of honour, so to speak.

  It was the wet, when violent storms can punctuate the humid nights with thunder, lightning and torrential rain, then be gone just as suddenly, leaving in their wake broken tree limbs and gushing streams of rainwater.

  Ken and I set off early to the corroboree ground, which was quite a way through bush paddocks and fences. We arrived to find the principal dancer dressed in an arrangement of feathers and plaited grass, but also wearing a large toy aeroplane upon his head. I took this to be an allusion to Ken’s arrival from distant places; although he had reached the Ridge by motor truck, the aeroplane was possibly too flamboyant a symbol of travel for the star to resist, so on it went—and very effective it was too, jiggling about in dance.

  When the festivities were over, Ken and I left to walk back just as a storm was breaking. Rain came down in sheets, lightning flashed about us, the thunder was deafening and in minutes we were drenched. It was the blackest night I can remember and we had no sense of our whereabouts. I was wearing a seersucker dress that grew longer by the minute, gathering a load of heavy red mud.

  The rain stopped. A log burning from a lightning strike revealed a paddock fence, and we got our bearings from that. We continued on through several fences to reach the road, with my skirt spreading way behind with its burden.

  ‘What in hell are you dragging?’ said my father.

  ‘The police tracker may have had to be called to find us,’ I said, which thoroughly miffed both men.

  ‘Tracked trickier tracks than you can make, my girl,’ said my father.

  Ken, with a bushman’s sniff, said, ‘Got you home through bush by the light of a burning log, didn’t I?’

  To Ken, money was some mythical stuff that other people had and was only given thought when rations had been ‘beef only’ for some time, or there was a dire need of necessary materials for station work.

  It was hard to build up a herd, as mustered cows needed to be regularly sold and wild cattle weren’t as plentiful as first thought. And horses died in large numbers from walkabout disease; Ken lost thirty in one year. Walkabout was found to be cirrhosis of the liver caused by eating Crotalaria, a weed with pretty bright yellow flowers that comes up prolifically after rain. With walkabout, a horse will wander in a hypnotic state, without eating, without drinking, grinding its teeth in pain. A slow terrible death—an awful disease.

  The need for funds loomed. With a mixed mob of about 400 head, Ken, with Gilly and Roy, started ‘on the road’, droving south toward the Barkly Tableland.

  He’d been offered a fair price for this mob before leaving the Limmen—but on his meeting with the buyer, the price took a dramatic plunge. With no competition at that time of year, the buyer expected there would be a certain desperation to sell, especially after the distance travelled; their only option without a sale might be a long return journey.

  Ken’s cattle were a good mob in fine condition—the amount offered by the buyer was paltry. He refused to take it and decided to battle on in the hope one of the stations along the stock route might buy.

  Burkie Cant, manager of Anthony Lagoon Station, was a great friend to the bush battler; he had been one himself, up in the hills behind Alexandria Station years earlier. It was Burkie who came upon Ken and Gilly droving their cattle.

  ‘Where are you off to, Ken?’

  Ken: ‘Travellin’ to sell this mob. Want to buy? All in good condition.’

  Burkie: ‘Sorry, head office said no more to be bought this year. Anyhow, let’s boil the billy, have a drink of tea.’

  Ken: ‘Got no tea.’

  Burkie: ‘Well, some damper maybe?’

  Ken: ‘Sorry, nothing.’

  Burkie: ‘Well, what have you got?’

  Ken: ‘Got some salt-beef.’

  Burkie: ‘What’s in your pack-bags?’

  Ken: ‘Salt, hobbles, surcingles.’

  Burkie: ‘Send the boy into the station. I’ll have the storeman fix you up with tucker.’

  Ken: ‘Can’t pay.’

  Burkie: ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Roy rode in and returned in high spirits with tucker, and even a shirt and trousers for everyone.

  ‘What will you do?’ asked Burkie.

  Ken: ‘Just keep travellin’ till we make a sale—have to do that.’

  Burkie: ‘Cou
ld be a long trip, mate.’

  With that, Burkie drove off. Next day he came out to meet them with the news that head office had approved the purchase—no doubt at his urging.

  Burkie was a great raconteur: one of his oft-repeated stories was of meeting these two fellas riding behind their cattle. They were bearded, with ragged clothes, no boots, nothing in the packs, and nonchalantly smoking big fat cigars like bloody cattle barons.

  The year 1957 came in without drama, until the rains began—a big wet, this one—and those living around coastal areas were unaware of what lay in store for them.

  Ken took Roy, who was then about eighteen, and they rode the 200 kilometres into Borroloola to meet with Jim Marshall on Bing Bong Station, and plan a muster on the Limmen and along the Old Coast Road.

  With rain pending, Ken cooked a big damper to see them through the next 65 kilometres. The horses were packed and they were about to leave, when the Aboriginal Welfare officer called into their camp: ‘Will you detour 26 miles downriver to the jetty?’ Word had been received that the Cora would be some days late, and Mick Baker (a resident of Borroloola) was waiting there alone.

  The small ship Cora sailed up the Queensland coast around Cape York, into the Gulf of Carpentaria, then about 20 kilometres up the McArthur River, there to unload at a rickety jetty. The bulk was for the Aboriginal Welfare Department; very little came for the other residents.

  With an uneasy eye on the gathering storm clouds, Ken and Roy rode off to give Mick the news of the boat’s delay. It began to rain, then to blow—the rain bucketed down, the wind grew to a fury. A cyclone was fast approaching.

  They made it to Mick’s small vehicle, but it was far from weatherproof. Soon they were marooned on a small triangular patch of land surrounded by floodwater. They lay in soaking swags; the big damper was their only food. For three days they sat it out while the cyclone of ’57 raged around them.

  The strong flow of water carrying logs and debris swept around the jetty, which threatened to leave its moorings. With a bronco rope they secured it ashore, but the flow was too strong and, with a creaking shriek of farewell, it swirled away and careered downstream, bronco rope and all.