Daughter of the Territory

by Jacqueline Hammar

  High above, too high to be heard, flies an aeroplane bound for foreign places over the sea, its wing lights flashing on and off. Imagine real people within those flickering lights, seated in warm comfort and companionship—before the plane disappears into the night.

  Alone is not good for too long. I could handle solitude better than most, I think, but I have seen women crushed and defeated by the isolation of bush life, and it can create strange behaviour in men. Tommy Ryan comes to mind. His was a busy teamster’s life, out of Borroloola. Then, one day, he turned his team loose and settled in a small hut at a place called Tawallah, way off the beaten track.

  With a small herd of goats to give meat and milk, he settled into a solitary bush life. He rode occasionally into Borroloola until the last of his horses died of walkabout disease, his goats eaten by dingoes. He was always alone, never ventured to where a traveller might pass. One becomes more introverted as periods of isolation lengthen. Thus are true hermits born.

  Far out on Grasshopper Plain one day, deep within a smoky curtain of shimmering heat haze that rose upwards in waves, two smudges wavered into form, dissolved and floated together again, like figures deep under water. Two people on foot were advancing slowly from the direction of the river.

  Our boys and lubras watched and speculated with the trepidation they always had for the unknown, human or otherwise. Ready to run, prepared to hide, they whispered, watched and wondered, ‘Who that un, who im?’

  The figures were a married Aboriginal couple, Fanny and Brown, who’d come from Rose River Mission Station on the coast—quite a journey on foot. Fanny was Roy’s aunt, and one of the relatives who had left the boy with Ken all those years before. The mood became jubilant with much excitement at new people, news to hear and questions to be asked about relatives at the mission.

  Next morning Fanny came to the kitchen door, her great mop of wiry hair and smoky dark skin glistening with the liberal application of dugong oil. ‘Me Fanny, Missus Ken.’ We were friends from that moment, and she stayed on—as the fairytale ending goes—for ever after.

  Fanny was a truly remarkable person. Aged around thirty-something, she was thin, wiry, strong as a man, and could ride and work cattle. She was quite fearless—brave as a lion, really. Her mane of hair grew straight outwards like a halo of teased wool.

  Fanny’s husband, Brown, was very much older than her, and she fetched and carried for him, saw to his comfort and food. Brown wasn’t too fond of work and was not a brave man. He had no need to be brave, for Fanny was there to face all dangers for him.

  With Fanny’s arrival, much of my concern regarding the children eased. She had no children of her own and took delight in fishing with Dominique and Kurt, and taking them to collect lily roots, crocodile eggs, konkerberries and bush plums. She told them stories of animals, real and magical; of debil-debils and bush blackfellas—all much more comforting, instructive and exciting to a child of the bush than stories of unfamiliar fairies, elves and such.

  Fanny walked beside Dominique’s pony and ran fast as a wallaby to head it off whenever it bolted. She carried Kurt everywhere on her hip. If a snake or danger presented, her voice calling ‘Dominie, Ket-Boy!’ to draw them close could pierce eardrums of leather.

  She spoiled Kurt. When he gave vent to a tantrum, she would stride fully clothed into the nearby waterhole with him perched on her hip—as effective a way as any to restore good spirits in a fractious child.

  CHAPTER 51

  Twenty-Chebbin Dog Johnny

  An Aboriginal family of four emerged out of haze on the plain one day, obviously having lived off the land and walked on foot for some time. The leader of this little group was a tall, thin man walking ahead of the rest and carrying only his spears. He came forward very purposefully and with a somewhat imperious manner for a bushman who’d been living lean for some time.

  His name, he said, was Johnny. ‘You know that un gotta dog.’ And gotta dog he certainly did: around him milled a veritable flock of dogs, in all colours, sizes and sexes, all skinny and in varying states of health.

  We knew who Johnny was because Ken had actually brought him into the country years before from Mainoru Station, but had lost track of him. He was known as Twenty-Chebbin Dog Johnny—although whether this was a true summation of his dog numbers, I never did discover; it was close enough. Johnny was well known among coastal tribes: he was unpopular and somewhat feared.

  In his wake trailed his small family. At a respectful distance came his brother Sam, a spectacularly unfortunate person who flapped along on feet encumbered with fully webbed toes. Far from bright, Sam’s main function in life was to follow his leader in a subservient manner, carrying Johnny’s didgeridoo on his shoulder.

  Bringing up the rear were Johnny’s two wives, saddled with all their belongings. His older wife, Ebly, carried her baby. Mary, who was little more than a child, had a sullen expression, to which she was quite entitled and some sympathy as well, given the treatment she received from the others.

  They asked for work—though probably the tobacco and abundant supply of beef on a station after a long period of bush goannas was more of an attraction.

  Johnny’s orders to poor old Ebly and to Mary came with a sharp word, a gesture toward the billy-can when required, or an impatient wave of dismissal. He was domineering and demanding, rather like that outsize cockatoo of old bush lore. This mythical parrot was a mighty creature: 7 feet tall, no less. He would fix his beady eye on his keeper, lean way down from his perch, and demand in a menacing parrot voice: ‘Polly wants a biscuit, right fucking now!’

  Johnny too was to be obeyed without question—and right now. And he was not a man to transgress for any reason. Poor Mary once undertook the risky business of making off with a little of Johnny’s tobacco. When this daring theft was discovered, she took refuge high in a tree where Johnny, expert spearman that he was, impaled her leg to a branch.

  We gave Mary work in the Aboriginal kitchen, while Ebly remained in camp with her baby, Johnny did general station work and Sam was assigned the simplest tasks possible, such as delivering wood—already cut by others—in the wheelbarrow to the kitchen. Invariably he wouldn’t show up, and if one had the audacity to suggest he do his work, he sulked and was to be found in his swag, blankets over his head, out in the hottest midday sun.

  Johnny was the didgeridoo puller—he who makes the didgeridoo sing is a puller, not a blower—and Sam was the carrier. It was Sam’s duty to prepare the instrument for concert, so to speak, and he’d liberally pour water through it to improve its tone before each performance.

  When Johnny made corroboree, Sam had to sit forward of him and take the weight of the didgeridoo’s great length on his shoulder. It was an unusually long instrument, wider at the end than most, rather like a long trumpet; the usual method with a shorter instrument is for the puller to spread his big toe and balance the weight of the didgeridoo between this toe and the others.

  When Sam was asked why he hadn’t shown up for work, his excuses were vague and unimaginative: ‘Too much corroboree,’ or, ‘Didgeridoo too heavy, shoulder bin bugger up. No bin schleep (sleep) long time.’

  Perhaps a sleepless night might be true. Sitting all night by the fire to avoid falling afoul of the terrifying Aboriginal goombidigdig women may well have tired him. Though desirable, these women were unkempt and horrifying, with long, sharp fingernails and hair falling to the ground. Compelled by insatiable sexual appetites, they roamed the night to capture a sleeping man, for what purpose Sam was only too aware.

  They were to be avoided at all costs, for they were death to the unwary. This was possibly not such a bad way to go, in the opinion of some men, but such an end was far too frightening for poor Sam to imagine.

  During Johnny’s absence from the station while out working with the men, his dogs grew out of control, devouring everything in sight, stealing food, fighting, fornicating and multiplying. They were a threat to stock and to those in camp—Fanny had been bitten
quite badly by one of them—and it became clear that this mangy, diseased flock needed at least to be culled.

  Around that time we heard about lubras on a station near Borroloola who’d gone fishing, leaving a baby boy alone in camp. On their return, they found a hungry camp dog had chewed away the boy’s scrotum. With this story still fresh in my mind and with the men away, I decided to shoot the lot.

  I began determinedly, but some way through I gave the rifle to Brown to continue the cull. The very thought of shooting even one of Johnny’s dogs generated a palpable terror in Brown. Only after I’d assured him several times that he was to tell Johnny the Missus had shot them, would he carry on.

  They were all shot, every last one, which improved the hygiene of the camp. And without the dog fights and their loud howling throughout the night, peace came too.

  Some days later, when the stock camp returned, Brown lost no time informing on me to Johnny. Late that night, when all was quiet and the house in darkness, I heard a sound outside by the kitchen door. In the pale shadows of moonlight, I saw a figure, just a shadowy outline, and heard the special clack of spears, old language of menace from a spearman and meant to threaten.

  A pistol was always by the door, which I picked up on my way out. ‘Who there?’ I asked.

  ‘Johnny.’

  ‘What you want, Johnny?’ I asked, although I had a pretty fair idea.

  ‘You bin kill my dog.’ This a statement.

  ‘Uwai, too much dog, they must go,’ I replied.

  He clacked his spears again and shuffled his feet nervously in the dust. He was alone without his family, so he had serious intent. He came closer, raised his arm, moved his spear closer to my chest. He was taller than me, naked, and very black beside me in my white nightgown. Suddenly he gave forth a furious tirade in his language.

  I knew Johnny was a volatile, impulsive person, and raised my shiny silver Colt .45 with its 15-centimetre barrel, six bullets nestled within. As I put firm pressure on the trigger, my uppermost thought was that if he thrust his spear, I would involuntarily pull the trigger—so if I went down, he would too.

  In the shadowy light we stood close together, his pungent bush smell hanging heavy between us as we stared at each other.

  ‘You’re not the first man I’ve shot,’ I lied, holding my heavy pistol with both hands, finding it hard to keep it steady. I was doing my best to give weight to my threats, in spite of the tight ache of fear in my throat, and my less-than-fearsome appearance in fluffy slippers and frilly nightgown.

  Then, abruptly, he dropped his arm and strode off into the night.

  After he’d disappeared I sat in the dark, desperately quiet, with my pistol. The house had no lock, no lights that didn’t take a while to put on; the night was still, with only an occasional heart-stopping rustle when the breeze fluttered the canvas curtains on the gauze windows. And so the night passed.

  In the morning Johnny and his family were gone. Ken was fencing some kilometres out and saw Johnny circling in the distance. He had an idea the man was up to no good, and sent word that if Johnny wasn’t gone by evening, he would come out after him. But we never saw him again.

  Many months later, just before sundown, the lubras came to tell me there was a stranger to see me.

  ‘Who stranger? Blackfella?’ I asked.

  ‘Uwai, blackfella.’

  He came forward and said, ‘I go long mitchen [mission] see my lation [relations]. One rain time [one year] then nudja rain come, I never see my mother longest time now.’ He was on walkabout to the coast.

  ‘What you want?’ I asked.

  ‘I bring you present, Mighus Ken,’ he replied and unfolded a dirty cloth to reveal two beautifully carved pipes, the bowls perfect buffalo heads with carefully crafted horns and a hole in top for tobacco.

  ‘Who bin give me this present?’ I asked.

  ‘I bin carry im ghish un longest way for you. Twenty-Chebbin Dog Johnny, he bin talk, gibit ghish un long Mighus Ken, gibet long him pinger [into her hand] Johnny bin make him himself.’

  I still have them.

  CHAPTER 52

  Along the Old Coast Track

  The Northern Territory government, in collaboration with the Lands Department, had decided to open the vacant miles of northern country to pastoral lease, incorporating the existing grazing licences with new boundaries and conditions.

  Early in 1960, Brian Egan of the Northern Lands Branch had come down from Darwin to work on this project, mapping and drawing up the new blocks. Brian and Ken were old friends from way back to their Gatton College days.

  As Ken had worked the Limmen grazing licence for some years, the court granted our lease and we returned to a station with entirely different borders. Where we had roamed virtually free of boundary restrictions, we now had neighbours and mustering was restricted—even though we were many kilometres apart—to within our own borders. As they say, good fences make good neighbours.

  Our station at Bauhinia Downs was about 4000 square kilometres in area. It was 50 kilometres wide from east to west, and 80 kilometres north to south, with the Limmen River flowing diagonally across it.

  Over the northern boundary lay the newly formed Nathan River Station, within the Valley of Springs. On our western boundary was Tanumbirini Station, where Hurtle Lewis lived his solitary life in a little iron house perched on a stony hill. Tawallah and Balanbirini (later renamed Balbirini) stations bordered Bauhinia to the east and south. Both were created from country resumed from the wandering miles of the huge McArthur River run, where Ken and I had made our home a few years earlier.

  Our station at Bauhinia Downs shares its name with the bauhinia tree, whose tiny butterfly-shaped leaves flutter frantically with every gust of breeze, as if to launch themselves clean off their branches into flight. As to the ‘Downs’, there was no real downs country, as on the Barkly, only wide plains stretching out from the riverbanks.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, Alf Scrutton, already an old man, had settled a camp there, after years riding the wilds of Cape York with the Jardine expedition.

  Ken knew this country well; he’d ridden over every one of Bauhinia’s wide miles, knew every spring, every ancient art gallery, every bone-littered cave hidden for aeons past. Ken was an excellent bushman who could, as they say in the bush, ‘track a duck through water’. Dan Sprig, the police officer at Roper Bar, pronounced Ken the best bushman he ever knew. Old Don, a bush Aboriginal, said of him, ‘Can’t lose im that young pulla, im proper longa bush oright.’

  Ken and I decided to move our household from Grasshopper Plain, although it was still within our boundary, and settle on the better homestead site of the old Bauhinia Downs. Of the little that had been built there, nothing remained except a few scattered, overgrown graves of men of the old bush that lay forgotten under the spinifex grass—no one to visit them with a prayer or a flower, no one to mourn them. Bauhinia was vacant land with a name and wild cattle, nothing more.

  Ken and the boys set off with the first load to build a small temporary house. The old Blitz girded its ageing loins and made several trips through bush from Grasshopper to Bauhinia. One entire load consisted of huge drums planted with trees I had grown in anticipation of our final settlement, including my much-travelled tamarind tree. Some trees were well advanced by then, but overhanging limbs snapped the tops off the taller plants, so they arrived all pretty much the same height. They were to be the foundation of my new garden.

  Time came to make our final trip from Grasshopper Plain. We had the usual big load with the addition of several lubras, four-year-old Dominique, nine-month-old Kurt, dogs and a brolga, who squawked piteously when he thought he was to be left behind, but refused to fly along and had to be lifted onto the truck, where he fluffed his feathers and settled quietly for the journey.

  As we moved off, our little house on the plain looked small and forlorn with its vegetable garden of beans and sweet potatoes, and a wild growth of pumpkin vines. No water would
come its way without rain, so the green lawn would shrivel and die. That little house could tell some stories of one woman’s lonely life in the Territory’s far Outback.

  Our friend in his grave under the laundry floor could lie quiet again with no children’s laughter nearby, no lubras shouting to horsemen, no more ‘trousa’ to be washed above him. We had come there clattering noisily out of silent bush and after a couple of years we just as noisily departed. Now he could settle down to another hundred years of peace and silence.

  It was almost Christmas when we left Grasshopper Plain. Storm clouds were gathering out beyond the hills, and heat pressed down around us like a warm, damp sponge. With our high load crashing through low branches, we travelled on slowly.

  When there were some miles still to go, the thrust bearing on the Blitz overheated and seized up. We knew we had to get through the bush road before it rained or we could expect to stay out there—with a long walk and possibly a swim ahead if the creek came up—so Ken kept the old Blitz ploughing on.

  We and the rain arrived at Bauhinia together. The debil-debils of bog and disaster had been foiled once again. In places far distant, people were preparing to celebrate Christmas.

  Our new house stood on a hard stony ridge that looked impervious to holding moisture, but the continuous rain seeped silent and unseen down through the depths of the high escarpment. When walking upon its deceptively firm surface, one could sink to the knees with every step.

  We woke one morning to find our beds had sunk into the earthen floor. Kurt’s cot was a slippery slide and he lay curled asleep in a ball at the lower end. While busily preparing tea on a stove angled drunkenly in its alcove, Fanny was ankle-deep in the ground.

  We weathered that first wet on Bauhinia as we had others.

  With two good men—Jackinabox and Jimmy Gibb Johnson—Ken went out on horseback. In good time he threw 40 big, solid scrub bulls, tipped their horns and walked them 225 kilometres to Cresswell Downs Station, where he sold them for £8 per head, less than the price of a kilo of steak today. That grand sum kept us going for twelve months.