Daughter of the Territory

by Jacqueline Hammar

  The bloodwood, another stalwart of the plains, takes its name from the dark red sap that runs in clumped, jelly-like cascades down the rough bark of its thick trunk. At that time of year in the dry season, bloodwood are heavy with creamy flowers, the branches alive with flocks of parrots—their raucous voices deafening as they argue while feasting on the honey-rich blossoms.

  Then there are messmate trees, the stately broad-leafed Leichhardt pine, the pandanus palm, and the poisonous, round-leafed ironwood.

  Of all the trees, snappy gum was the preferred firewood in camp. It burns with a fierce heat and produces the kind of glowing coals best for bread-making in a bush camp oven.

  One day we came onto a large, serenely beautiful spring. It was set, partly shaded, beneath a high rocky outcrop and fed with a waterfall.

  The air above the water was thick with thousands of yellow butterflies, providing a dense cloud of hovering wings. Displaying a singular lack of imagination, I bestowed it with the name Butterfly Spring—well, it could hardly have been called anything else.

  The cartographers entered this name on the map and it remains today.

  Toward the north, a spiral of feathery smoke on the horizon gave rise to much speculation. Who could be riding out in this country? We kept a close watch and waited.

  Two days later an old Aboriginal man and two lubras—one young, the other quite a bit older—rode up to our camp, driving their packhorses ahead. The man’s name was Undai. He lived on a coastal mission station and made this trip every couple of years with a view to doing a little business in the bride trade.

  He unpacked, settled his camp nearby and came over to see our Aboriginal boys. He displayed his wares, our boys showed some interest, but the price was high and Undai wasn’t about to waste time on insolvent wishful thinkers. Nothing doing in our camp, so next morning he moved on down along the river.

  News later filtered through to us that he’d sold both women and made a nice profit of a horse and other sundry items. The older of the two went to Tom Hume, a well-known part-Aboriginal man; his father had been a white teamster in the old days and Tom was born beside a wagon on the road to Borroloola.

  It could be said that Tom and his bride lived quite happily ever after. Tom’s son Percy, who was close to being a full-blood Aboriginal, took the younger one and didn’t do so well in the deal. She proved to be a regular virago, making his life quite miserable before running off to greener pastures.

  CHAPTER 39

  My ‘Get Up and Go’ Had Got Up and Gone

  After four months’ mustering along the Limmen, and with several hundred head of mixed cattle in hand, we decided to call a halt.

  Jim was anxious to return to work on Bing Bong, while Ken had been working with a wooden stake deep in his hand, becoming more painful each day. Removing it would entail heavy bush surgery, which temporarily would do even more to restrict his ability to throw cattle and hold the reins, so there the splinter remained. Gloves were unknown out bush—if skin became dry, rendered beef fat was rubbed in; for a cut or injury, tar was applied.

  Jim had a contract to supply the Aboriginal Welfare Department in Borroloola with fresh beef and a delivery was about due, so it was decided that Ken and I would take six fat cows into town, while Jim with the stock camp and cattle would return to Bing Bong.

  We put together our riding horses, exchanged our mules for two packhorses, said our goodbyes, and the camp split up. The pups now made a dog pack, trotting with lolling tongues behind Dinah’s horse. Colin was still perched before Bessie’s saddle, but the duck-patterned hat was long gone. The stock boys were happy to be heading back and waved cheerily to us as we made off in different directions.

  Our clothes were ragged and, with the men’s heavy beards and pistols low on their hips, we looked like an outlaw family group on a wanted poster of old bushranger days. Some were without boots. In fact, Ken often rode and threw bulls over the roughest country barefoot, as there were no replacements for worn-out shoes, so the soles of his feet were as calloused as any bush blackfella—he could strike a match on them!

  Borroloola was a six-day journey from our present camp. Ken and I took Jim’s big packhorse, Sputnik, who was an equine disaster—sway-backed, with a large and ugly head, ears flopping every which way. Ken found something disparaging to say whenever he set eyes on him, mumbling insults along the lines of ‘He belongs in a dog-food can.’

  But worse was to be revealed: Sputnik was entire! It seemed unbelievable that he’d been left a stallion. Most likely Jim had trapped him with brumbies and somehow he’d been overlooked, his manhood remaining intact before he was hastily broken in to carry packs. At least Sputnik was strong, carrying our swags and all our tucker bags—and anyway, we were stuck with the poor old fellow.

  After a couple of days, Ken and I came out onto the main Anthony’s Lagoon–Borroloola road. From here we had the use of small, permanent bush yards. Each night we hobbled out our horses and made camp.

  Just on sundown one evening, the familiar jingle of hobble chains carried around the necks of travelling horses drifted towards us on the still evening air. Hurtle Lewis, brother to Elmore and George, rode up, on his way to Borroloola. He managed Tanumbirini Station, a lonely back-of-beyond place in those days. As was usual when meeting someone after a long period of isolation, we sat around the fire well into the night.

  Although he was a white man, Hurtle was sun-burned a deep mahogany. Unlike George, whose hair was silvery white, Hurtle was dark and surprisingly sprouted a thick, bushy, dark red beard. He was perhaps 50 years old, but I don’t believe he was sure just how old he was.

  Hurtle looked out from his insular, illiterate world with limited knowledge and understanding. His conversation was sprinkled with malapropisms, and he had an odd and humorous way with words. Around the fire one night, when our talk drifted to war in foreign parts—jungle fighting with guerrillas attacking unarmed villagers—Hurtle’s heated rejoinder was: ‘Gorillas, eh? Well, what did they expect givin’ them big monkeys guns?’

  When his attention was drawn to a word he hadn’t heard before, Hurtle was impatient to use it himself, often quite out of context. Some of his quaint words have taken permanence in our family vocabulary, and an odd look comes our way at times when we refer to polar bears as polo bears, drakes as grakes, a flop-eared spaniel as a water Spaniard, and so it goes on.

  One of Hurtle’s favourite words to throw into conversations was ‘superstitious’ when the appropriate word was ‘suspicious’—and, indeed, Hurtle was ever suspicious of people’s motives, especially in horse-trading and cattle-dealing. If he received a letter or an account, which he rarely did, he would ask you to read it for him, then slyly take it to someone else. It would secretly make the rounds of the camp until he was satisfied he’d learned its true contents.

  Hurtle’s affairs were handled for him by a Darwin solicitor, Brough Newell, but Hurtle had it firmly in mind that the man’s name was ‘Bluff Mules’. When someone said, ‘No Hurtle, his name is Brough Newell,’ Hurtle would testily reply, ‘That’s what I said—Bluff Mules.’

  Hurtle was a keen racing man and usually brought a good horse to bush meetings. On this trip he had among his horses a fine thoroughbred mare, Maggie Jane, of which he was very proud; she was his most successful racehorse to date.

  When we moved off camp next morning, driving all our horses together, Hurtle’s eye fell upon Sputnik—who, in spite of his heavy load, had developed a spring in his step. His floppy old ears were making a valiant effort to prick and his woolly neck was arching quite youthfully in the direction of Maggie Jane.

  ‘Jeeze Cris, he’s a stallion!’ Hurtle bellowed, and for the remainder of the trip he travelled with his horses well apart from ours, with a watchful eye on Maggie Jane. He feared that for all her aristocratic breeding, she wasn’t averse to a bit of rough trade, as they say—but his chaperoning paid off and Maggie Jane’s virtue remained unsullied.

  One night, after setting up ca
mp, we realised that from here on into Borroloola there would be no place to yard the cows, so we decided to make a long day of it and avoid a night watch.

  After leaving around three the next morning, we reached Borroloola that afternoon. We delivered our cows, then dropped by with bags of salted beef for Roger and Co, as it must have made a welcome change from fish and wallaby. Afterwards we settled our camp once more under the mango trees.

  It had been a long hard day, the last day of a hard four months. Although the muster was a success as far as cattle numbers went, there would be no sale until the following year. It was already August; the first storms would come soon. The cows would be kept as breeders, while the bullocks would have to be walked about 300 kilometres up to Anthony Lagoon on the Barkly Stock Route, where two or three buyers came through each year in the dry season.

  This was the only market for us—you either sold them, or walked right back and held them for another twelve months. There was, of course, some collusion among these buyers. You could be sure that if you refused the first buyer’s offer, any subsequent offer would be lower. Little wonder some gave up and simply walked off their grazing country.

  I was sitting on my tightly rolled swag, which had just been unpacked from Sputnik, when Hurtle, spurs clanking, led his horse into camp. ‘What’s up girl?’ he asked me. ‘Where’s your get up and go, eh?’

  My ‘get up and go’ had long got up and gone. I was thin as a starving whippet. My clothes were threadbare and I was burned black as any bush lubra.

  ‘Consider your looks, avoid the sun,’ the good books and our mothers warned us—how quaint! Four months with only a hat between you and the sky, and your complexion is the last thing to consider. Anyway, we had no mirror.

  In camp I sat gazing into the fire. I had seen Borroloola, travelled the Old Coast Road, ridden the wild Limmen country. I’d come for the adventure and now I was all set to return to a touch of civilised living. I would fly out on the first plane, go south, eat ‘proper’ food, wear ‘girl’s clothes’, lie on the beach in a snappy bathing costume and get used to a roof over my head. That all takes some doing after months of waking at night to an expanse of sky aglitter with stars that were now as familiar as the ceiling decoration of a city bedroom.

  CHAPTER 40

  ‘With All My Worldly Goods I Thee Endow’

  It must have occurred to Ken that if I left on the plane, I would likely never return.

  The fortune and cattle-baron status he’d deemed essential before he took on the responsibilities of married life had not yet eventuated, and his future was bleak financially, and he wasn’t a man of the pencilled-moustache, ‘come with me to the Casbah’ type, so his marriage proposal went thus:

  ‘I reckon we should get married right now. What do you say?’

  ‘Umm . . .’ I replied.

  ‘You might show a little more enthusiasm,’ he huffed, and with that went off to see Mervyn the missionary.

  So ended any daydreams of snappy bathing costumes and a lazy life on southern beaches.

  It was Mervyn’s first marriage service and he took care to see that everything proceeded in an orderly fashion. ‘You must have a witness,’ he said, ‘and I’ll apply to have a licence sent down from Darwin—so remember, stand by when the mail is sorted and make sure Mull’s goats don’t eat it!’

  ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow.’ A couple of saddles, pack-bags, the odd mule and some horses were the sum total of worldly goods in this union.

  The bride wore red—a blinding red dirndl skirt, patterned with large, vivid yellow trumpets, the fabric purchased from Jack Bailey’s little store. Jack was a good-looking, silver-haired man whose age was a little north of 50, as they say in the bush. During our absence from Borroloola, he had opened a bush store with a small stock of sweets, drinks, fishing lines, fabrics, et cetera. It proved a popular gathering place for the local Aboriginals, and promised to be a successful venture.

  My skirt was made from the least dazzling fabric of his stock at ‘1 and 6’ (15 cents) a yard. You may wonder that if this was the least dazzling, what dazzle the remaining stock offered—considerable, I can assure you! And any lubra will tell you she’d take any colour as long as it was red.

  I had a shirt less ragged than the rest, which would do, but footwear posed a problem—riding boots with a skirt was definitely not on, and as the happy era of the sixties had not yet happened, bare feet and bare elsewhere weren’t yet the order of the day for women. Ken solved this problem by placing my foot on the leather flap of a mule pack and cutting around the outline; straps from a camera made thongs.

  Duly shod and gowned, I was for better or worse.

  Ken and I had known each other for eight years. Although we’d spent little time together, we’d expected that one day we would marry, but those were hard times for cattlemen in that country. Grazing properties were larger, but the sale of store shorthorn cattle wasn’t a profitable business. Most could only battle on from year to year, gradually building up their herd and hoping for eventual prosperity.

  At 8 p.m. on 14 August 1958 we collected Roger and Biddy from their tank home. It was a courageous effort on Roger’s part to venture out at night on our behalf, as over the years he’d absorbed the Aboriginal fear of what darkness held, but the desire to support bride and bridegroom, and Biddy waddling along in the rear, secured his presence as witness/best man to this little ceremony. Biddy was to be my attendant: huge and as black as the night outside the shed where Mervyn lived, a wad of chewing tobacco bulging her cheek.

  Mervyn was standing by, his wife’s wedding ring to be borrowed for the occasion. A night breeze fluttered over the bridegroom’s tattered trousers and bare feet; glinted over Roger’s long grey beard. He appeared gravely imposing, standing supported by a stout wooden staff. With his sandals of greenhide and clothes he had sewn himself, he appeared to have stepped out of a biblical illustration—a splendid patriarch leading his people through the wilderness.

  All went well after a fairly nervous beginning, and Mervyn was close to concluding the service when Roger, ever mindful of his duties as supporter and witness, held up his hand and called ‘Halt!’ He and Mervyn then entered into a long theological discussion that threatened to stray, in a casual conversational way, into areas other than the subject at hand.

  ‘Are we married yet?’ I whispered.

  ‘Shh, getting there,’ said Ken.

  Bearing in mind why he was there, and satisfied that all was understood and in order, Roger, with a wave of his hand, gave an authoritative: ‘Proceed.’

  With a grand flourish, Mervyn pronounced us wed. Biddy grinned and spat a stream of tobacco juice on the earthen floor, then I returned the ring. There was a glass of cordial for all, followed by an entertaining hour of picture slides, and Ken and I began married life in the Outback of the Outback.

  We collected every last penny of cash we had, which amounted to a grand total of three pounds, and presented it to Mervyn for his services; although he asked for nothing, his need was certainly greater than ours. We had then truly joined the bush brotherhood of old Borroloola. It was a common adage that if the residents were all upended and shaken, not a penny would fall from their pockets.

  After delivering Roger and Biddy back to their tank, and ensuring they were well secured against the darkness, we walked hand in hand back to camp, where we woke up Hurtle, who was unprepared for such happenings as weddings in the night. He rattled about preparing a billy-can of tea, and we sat around the fire until late in the night.

  Next morning I gave my eye-blinding skirt to a camp lubra, who was delighted with it. Roger presented us with a double-sized mosquito net as a wedding gift, very practical and well received—the mosquitoes were voracious by the river and came buzzing in their thousands late in the afternoon, just before dark. I’ve seen them land so thick on a man’s back that a slap would leave a blood-stained handprint on his shirt.

  That morning Ken and I borrowed a native dugou
t canoe—a long, hollowed-out trunk of a Leichhardt pine tree—and spent the day paddling miles down the lonely deserted McArthur River. Depending on the skill of the paddler, a dugout can be hard to balance. In crocodile-infested waters, great care has to be taken not to initiate a roll. Ken’s years among the coastal Aboriginals had honed his paddling skills, so I merely sat quite still with a good grip and an eye peeled to the distant bank in case we had to swim for it. The big saltwater crocodile plays a cunning, silent waiting game, ready to attack anything careless enough to venture into his territory.

  We returned just before nightfall. The glare off the water had left me with a headache of rock-splitting ferocity, and I sported a heavy coating of sand-fly bites. The honeymoon was over.

  When our families eventually received news of our bush nuptials, they celebrated with champagne and a fine dinner at a grand city hotel—certainly a contrast to our corned beef and billy-can of tea.

  There’s an old adage in the Territory: ‘If you wish to taste your own beef, go dine with your neighbour.’ With no money due from cattle sales until the following year, we had to consider our options. Food was no problem—there was an abundance of fish, and we killed our own beef (or someone’s beef). There would be cattle work after the wet, but that was six months away.

  We were giving thought to what we should do, when one day a dusty Land Rover pulled into camp. It was Jack Travers, a well-known and popular stock inspector. He had news that Bill Sharpe, my old boss drover, had 1500 bullocks in hand on the way into Queensland.