For 30 years we lived in the beautiful Bauhinia Valley with its myriad geological wonders, until one day around Christmas time—the same time of year we had driven in with the wet season’s storms close behind us to start a life there—we drove out through the garden lush with recent rain, past Juno’s grave among the cashew trees, and on under the cassia trees, cascading yellow summer flowers, that I’d planted years before for Dominique’s future wedding day. Out over Ballingarra Creek, where Willie had saved me from drowning.
Someone once said: if you must leave a place you have cared about, a place where all your yesterdays were played out, and buried deep, leave quickly, don’t look back, never go slowly; and so we went quickly and were gone—forever.
All that remains of my wonderful garden at Bauhinia Downs Station is the tamarind tree I grew from a seed that I carried in my pocket throughout the months of muster on the Limmen, 60 years ago. It lives on through fire and flood as we did, and hopefully will live beyond our time, for the tamarind grows for hundreds of years.
The Aboriginal stockman is no longer the mainstay on the Territory cattle station. Our old blackfella of the far bush is gone now.
‘Blackfella!’ my city friends huff with disapproval and pursed lips. ‘Say “Aboriginal person”.’ What do they know, who have only seen him pale-skinned in city clothes on their television screens?
‘Can’t call you blackfella now,’ I say to Olman.
‘Waffaw no more blackfella, you whitefella, ent it?’ and he is much amused by these people of a city he has never seen, for we are old friends who have shared much in good times and not-so-good times.
Kurt remains a true son of the old Territory. He is 6 feet 5 inches of amiable, successful bushman, and is known, as was his father, by a variety of Aboriginal names and several others as well, none critical. Through a lifetime’s understanding of Aboriginal people past and present, he almost exclusively employs Aboriginal stockmen in his cattle-mustering camps and works successfully beside them.
The name Kurt Hammar has an immediate familiarity from the tropical country of the Limmen River to the rugged Kimberley. Along the Gibb River Road in Western Australia and in isolated areas of the Kimberley there are a number of undeveloped cattle stations, some owned by Aboriginals, some by Europeans. With his ‘Hammarco’ operation, Kurt musters cleanskin shorthorn cattle, and ships bulls to markets in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Hammarco, worth some hundreds of thousands of dollars, is an entirely mechanical operation. Helicopter pilots locate cattle, men in stripped-down Toyota LandCruisers—called bull buggies—race in full throttle, knock down, leg strap and tip the horns of bush bulls. They feed hay to these beasts and provide them with water in troughs, and they adjust to captivity before they are shipped out from Darwin, Broome or Wyndham.
Over the years Kurt has developed uniquely successful mustering techniques and become the country’s leading exponent of this type of cattle trade. In the last fourteen years, Hammarco has exported upwards of 89,000 head of scrub bulls, and that’s a lot of cattle by anyone’s reasoning.
Although lately Kurt’s work has him located in the west, he and the love of his life, Meghan, have made Katherine their home for the last 24 years. They have two fine sons who will undoubtedly follow in their father’s Territory footsteps. They can tell, as the old bush nursemaids would tell, ‘His father, belong father, belong nother long time father—this im country!’
The old roads that meandered through interminable Territory bush aren’t there now. These roads—old cattle pads or forged by wagon wheels—would begin wide and encouraging to the outback traveller, but after a few miles they would grow indistinct and lose themselves in a tangle of spinifex and overgrowth. With what seemed too much effort to carry on, they gave up entirely and it was for you to make your own way on.
If for whimsical reasons you took out a map, ‘UNSURVEYED’ was emblazoned there, which you fancied had an apologetic or perhaps a defensive air to it, but it did not deter you and you pushed on in your given direction with all the optimism of a Leichhardt or a Stuart.
Dominique has travelled those roads.
When she was a small child, we took her in the old Blitz truck to places a white child had never ventured. Later in her life she travelled outback roads through bush that advanced further into more bush.
Dominique has had her own adventure with life. Her own Territory.
After years of city boarding school, she returned to a nursing career in Darwin. When she was 21, she met Milton Jones, a bush-hardened eighteen-year-old Territorian.
Together, with all the uncertainty of a new undertaking, the two of them went bull-catching to make their fortune. Back then bull-catching was done in an open, cut-down bull buggy and a truck. Dominique was Milton’s strapper, so it was she who, when the bull had been run down and held by the vehicle, leaped out to strap its back legs together before it was pulled up a slide onto the truck and unstrapped.
Though bull-catching could be an adventure, it involved hard physical work and living in swags in all weather for long periods. It’s a nomadic life—dirty and dangerous, with discomfort in vast proportions. It was not the life we’d envisioned for our genteelly raised daughter, who had modelled high fashion in the insouciance of city life.
Dominique and Milton were married on our wedding anniversary, 14 August, in Katherine, with all the usual festivities of a country wedding, in a town where everyone knew most everyone else.
Milton acquired Coolabah Station—a small station by Territory standards—right on the main Western Highway, and this became their home. They farmed crocodiles, so collecting crocodile eggs from riverside nests became a necessity for this faint-hearted female. It entailed trudging through tall, steamy river grasses, confronting a crocodile in maternal protective mode, then departing on foot clutching a large box of eggs at a speed loosely compared to lightning. This was how it was done then, in the days before a helicopter was used to lower the egg-thief in relative safety.
Then Dominique and Milton purchased two cattle stations, Bedford Downs and Lansdowne, in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, as well as a meatworks and a helicopter business, and managed several cattle stations for American businessmen. The two of them had a long hard road to success, and no story of Milton’s life can be told without telling of Dominique’s encouragement and steadfastness with every endeavour he undertook.
Altogether it was a joint effort, but someone once said that Milton would have succeeded without help from anyone, which is a placatory and easy thing to say when the happy state of success has long been reached.
Life with a young man unable to read or write, with few social graces and no money at all, could only be challenging. It can be said that Dominique shared Milton’s life with grace and fortitude for 21 years. Business success does not necessarily ensure a harmonious life and so, after many adventures, much adversity and success, they went their separate ways.
Dominique and her two children, Beau and Alix, live in Katherine, although the children go to boarding schools as we all did. Dominique’s house is surrounded by a beautiful tropical garden she created herself. Ken and I spend time there every year, for the Territory will always be home to us too.
Dominique has battled feral bulls, crocodiles, fire, and flood that inundated her station homestead; been discouraged by adversity, and blessed with success and good health; and remained as strong, durable and feminine a Territory woman as I have ever known. Perhaps she will one day tell her own story.
I have always felt a certain disquiet with the term ‘passed away’ or ‘passed on’. It has a whispery indefiniteness to it; the connotation of a gentle, restrained exit.
This could never be applied to my mother’s exiting anywhere, and she certainly called a thing as it was. I am sure she would prefer I said that she died—and she did, three years after my father. Their relationship had faded to a vague friendliness, and they lived their lives apart from each other.
I
sometimes think of the women of early days in Territory bush, who receive little recognition today for their hospitality to all who travelled bush roads, and for their caring and comfort in sickness. They brought order and gentleness into the rough and lonely lives of bushmen.
With the white woman there came onto the isolated cattle station of those early times a linen tablecloth, china tea cups, a bedspread from a trousseau, and flowers and shrubs planted in painted flour drums. These small things—nothing in city life—were immeasurably uplifting in the far Outback and gave meaning to that quote from an old Territory newspaper: ‘A far greater need than Railways, Naval bases, Gold and Garrisons is the Territory’s need of white women.’
My mother was never your regular motherly housewife—a dimity-aproned mother producing cookies in the kitchen she definitely wasn’t! This upset me not at all. She was a good friend, good company and had a great sense of humour, which was essential to survival in the old Territory.
Homely, nurturing—never. There wasn’t a maternal bone in her body. But she was dutiful in every way. I was educated at good schools and never wanted for a thing. I prefer her as she was. She did a great deal for people, especially in the bush. She just had no aptitude for close relationships, no skill for family life. She lived life as she wanted it and deserved the good life she worked hard for.
After her death I opened her crocodile-skin suitcase with its great claws across the front—that croc had taken my father’s best shooting horse out in the buffalo camp on the Alligator River. Inside the case were old photographs of daring young men on horseback, famous aviators of the 1930s, a chemist’s blue bottle of quinine, Aboriginal artefacts that were gifts from patients past, old business letters that must once have held importance, and letters from bank managers signed, if you can believe it, ‘Your humble and obedient servant’.
My father was a hard man of the old Outback: capable, inured to harsh living, carefree and popular—and brave, something I am old-fashioned enough to expect in a man. His life held many adventures. Who could tell first-hand today of a life as thrilling as he could? He made molehills out of the mountains he climbed, never regretted his losses, never boasted of success. It fell to others to tell of his exploits, and for men to write of them too.
He did not share my mother’s ambition for wealth and success in business, although he worked along with her and helped her achieve her goals in life.
He and I were not to meet for some time after my birth, for he was away dealing with the murder charge. With his name cleared and pure as a snowflake, I’m told he gazed long and hard at this infant, and told her, ‘I am your father,’ and my father he remained. He looked upon fatherhood as companionable and enjoyable, and I never heard him say, ‘Don’t do that,’ or ‘You mustn’t,’ nor anything in a censuring way—it wasn’t in his vocabulary with me.
He spoiled me outrageously. Without my mother’s good sense, the aspirations of the Anglican nuns to make a ‘lady’ of me, and the even firmer hand of Sister Annunciata and the Catholic Sisters of the Darwin Convent School, I may have become a first-class brat.
My father rarely presumed to give advice, so when he did, you tended to remember what he said. The tenets of his council were simple: ‘Never underestimate a small amount of money. Never judge anything—man, dog, horse or situation—by its appearance. And lastly, learn to keep your mouth shut. Better people should wonder why you don’t talk, than why you do.’ All good council I continue to benefit from.
We had a great rapport, my father and I; we talked together about many things. Once when someone we knew died, I asked him casually if he would like a big funeral, expecting him to say something like, ‘Just wrap me in my swag and bury me out bush.’ So I was surprised when he said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind a big funeral, and everyone would say, “There goes old Jack. He wasn’t a bad poor old bastard.”’
As it was, his funeral took place in a chapel by the sea, in a southern place, where no sun-baked old Territory bushman should finish his days with his boots off. The last post was rendered by an army bugler, which is always painfully moving, and the thought came to me: ‘There goes old Jack. He was a great old bastard!’
He was my father.
The first ten years of my life were lived in the final chapter of the frontier Territory. Tribespeople roamed the bush and cattlemen rode the lonely miles of vast cattle stations. Northern Mounted Police lived dangerous lives, and my father hunted buffalo on horseback in ‘no man’s land’ of Arnhem Land where few white men had ventured.
Dear, blowzy, tarty young Darwin of the 1920s and 1930s, with a bottle in her hand, always had a ribald quip for the bawdy company she kept. Tolerant of society’s rejects, she wore a tiara of gold, pearls and rubies tipped rakishly on her forehead. Triumphantly she had overthrown all who’d sought to improve and polish her.
Then came a devastating war; the world heaved, settled, and was changed.
Darwin has matured now, grown up, smoothed down her skirts, straightened her tiara, adding to it diamonds of rare colour and beauty, discarded her bottle—well, not entirely!—and taken her place with dignity and grace in the modern Australian family.
In most ways the Territory has changed for the better. Chinatown emerged from the years of war clean and renewed. New residents came to Darwin: respectable, unencumbered with eccentricities. No more dare southern journalists write, ‘Darwin the damned. Last resort of the Australian derelict.’
It is indeed a changed world.
Who now truly knows the hard sun-browned men who subdued the wilderness with packhorse, swag, rum bottle and Old Gulf Cure. Yesterday’s adventurers are today’s curiosities. If remembered at all, they will become tomorrow’s history, or perhaps just ‘Post and Rail’ graves out in the dry spinifex.
It pleases me that I knew the last of these conquistadors of a frontier land and, with a young man of equal pioneering spirit, I followed their path. We should all be so fortunate in our lives to have created things we are still talking about today, a hundred years later.
There’s a land where the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And deaths that just hang by a hair; There are hardships that nobody reckons; There are valleys unpeopled and still; There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back—and I will.
ROBERT W. SERVICE
A young soldier, my father Jack Sargeant, just before leaving for France in 1916.
My father took this photo of the camel train he travelled with as he rode into the Northern Territory in 1919.
My father’s police camp at Tanami in 1925. He is in his police uniform.
My father in the centre, preparing for a long patrol.
The Territory Police Force in the 1920s with my father at the extreme right front row.
My father taking the police car across the McArthur River.
My father’s truck returning through the bog from the buffalo camp. Everyone had to join in to pull it out of the swamp.
My father took this photo of Aboriginals from Alexandria Station.
My mother, Valeska Marie Sargeant (nee Hese). The Missus.
The grog truck in the early 1930s.
From left, my mother, myself, Lady Somers and local nurse girl with Lady Somers’ plane in 1931.
The first ‘Pioneer Tours’ in Australia taken outside the store at Pine Creek in the 1930s.
My mother, myself and an Aboriginal girl being pushed across the floodwaters.
The nurse girls had a great time dressing me as a young child. What a sight to behold!
Our store in Pine Creek in the 1930s.
Aboriginal tribesman like these often wandered into our store at Pine Creek.
Me and my pet brolga in 1932.
This is the old ‘Leaping Lena’ leaving the Pine Creek railway station in the 1930s. I could quite possibly be on it.
Eileen G and me at the Darwin Convent School, 1930s.
Darwin jetty
in the late 1930s.
Here I am soon after arrival in Brisbane, following the outbreak of war, complete with sandshoes and koala.
Following the end of the war, my family headed to north Queensland.
Newcastle Waters pub in its heyday in the 1950s.
Me outside the pub in Newcastle Waters.
Ken riding at the Warwick Rodeo in Queensland in 1947.
Ken and me in Newcastle Waters, 1951.
Jack Bailey’s grave on the road from McArthur River. The road had to detour around the grave as he was buried in the centre of the road.
Our first bush house at Bauhinia Downs with Ken reclining out front, early 1960s.
Fanny with Kurt and Dominque all dressed up at the Borroloola races in 1967.
Ken escorting his daughter down the aisle for her marriage to Milton Jones of Coolabah Station, NT.
My family in 2012: from left, Kurt, Ken, Dominque and me.
Acknowledgements
It can be a lonely project writing a long story when most everyone in the tale has long departed this life; so I give thanks to Ken, my husband, for keeping me ‘at it’ when I tended to flag.
My thanks go to Louise Thurtell, publisher par excellence, for her interest and firm hand.
Daughter of the Territory Page 33
