by Don Watson
‘To make or “roll up” your swag,’ Lawson advised, ‘lay the fly or strip of calico on the ground, blueys on top of it; across one end, with eighteen inches or so to spare, lay your spare trousers and shirt, folded, light boots tied together by the laces toe to heel, books, bundle of old letters, portraits or whatever little knick-knacks you have or care to carry, bag of needles, thread, pen and ink, spare patches for your pants and bootlaces . . .’ Lawson forgot to mention flour, tea and sugar. The billy – or quart pot – was carried separately, like a little tin handbag, containing possibly the baking soda or cream of tartar which, according to Mrs Gunn, had become a standard ingredient in a bushman’s damper by 1900 or so. The swag might have been less surrogate wife than mother.
Lover, mother or mate substitute, it was all the traveller had in the world – and all that he lacked. It was his home and the home he didn’t have. Swagmen were absentees; they carried absence. ‘Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving and we don’t know where he are’, Paterson’s ballad goes. The narrator is absent from his mates. In Lawson’s short story, the drover’s wife battles nature while her husband is ‘away with sheep’. He is present with sheep and absent from his wife and child. She wonders if he will ‘forget sometimes that he is married’. Even so, chances were the drovers would return eventually, whereas to go ‘on the wallaby’ was a course with an indefinite end.
If the bush was a nursery of the national type, just as typically it served as a vast quotidian flophouse for all the varieties of human character and ambition. The jolly swagman might have been any one of Furphy’s or Lawson’s or Baynton’s characters, or any of a million itinerants, including one of the relatively few who left accounts of their lives and travels.
Variously a drover, prospector, itinerant labourer and pastoralist of sorts, Arthur Ashwin could have stepped out of The Treasure of Sierra Madre. He was the inveterate wanderer’s impossible combination of pragmatist, philosopher and dreamer. He was also a memoirist. In a life which, starting in the 1860s, spanned half a century and the whole continent, he met a great assortment of travellers, one of whom, a horse tailer, went on a spree, got the horrors, and was found in a waterhole with a stone tied round his neck, his feet just below the surface.
Ashwin was born in North Adelaide in 1850 and spent his early childhood there. He claimed Adam Lindsay Gordon had been a friend of the family and, as one would expect of the legendary equestrian, often jumped his horse over their front fence. He remembered ‘the largest muster of blacks Adelaide ever had’ on one Queen’s Birthday. In Melbourne he remembered seeing Burke and Wills depart and the return of their remains. He reckoned he saw their bones in a glass coffin.
These things Arthur Ashwin recorded in his memoirs many years later. How much can be believed of his heroic, strange and often sinister odyssey no one can say, but he said it was all the ‘plain truth’, albeit he had to ‘leave out a lot of the truth’ to protect certain reputations. ‘I could write a good book on the dark side of Australia’, he wrote, ‘but it would not be alowed to be printed because it would show up some of the leading familys.’ He spent half a century plodding over the continent in search of gold and work. He held onto the reins and let his horse tow him across flooded rivers; he braved crocodiles to get the cattle across, endured the attacks of mosquitoes and sandflies, the fever and the atrocious heat. He lived on ‘meat and cold water’ for months at a time. He saw the ‘nigger proof’ depot Burke had built on Cooper Creek, and Poole’s grave at Sturt’s Depot Glen ‘where I got the first colour of gold in 1881’. He reckoned he knew where Leichhardt’s bones were. His Reminiscences leave the impression that wherever he went in the bush he never lacked for the company of men who thought much as he did, whose cravings and obsessions were much the same, whose ‘ordinary’ lives were as remarkable as his. ‘Plain truth’ or not, at the very least his memories shine a light on the nature of the man and the world in which he moved. Arthur reckoned men like him opened up the country, and he was not altogether wrong. They were driven, and tough beyond understanding. These days very likely we’d think them psychologically damaged, but frontiers need fanatics.
Arthur’s father was a professional man and when the family moved to Melbourne he sent his son to a small private school. But the boy was ‘self-willed’ and an inveterate truant and he became ‘case-hardened with floggings’. Once, his father half killed him but it was a beating he deserved, he said. His father at last stopped beating him and instead gave him a lecture on the perils of lying, and Arthur declared he lived by those instructions for the rest of his life. He remembered a lie a teenage boy told the boss on a station: that he had checked a windmill and tank when he hadn’t, and two days later over a hundred cattle were lying dead from thirst. (Along with birdsong and room to roam, it is one of the privileges of a country childhood to live in permanent fear of a biblical drubbing should one neglect to shut a gate or turn off a tap.)
In the course of Arthur’s life, a ‘good many wilful lies’ of the kind cited had come under his notice, and he reckoned they should be made criminal. When he was fourteen he took to smoking a pipe, and for what he insisted were its healthy fumigating effects he maintained the habit throughout his life. In a studio photograph taken when he was fifteen, he holds a stockwhip. It must have been around then that he bought the necessities for life on the wallaby, rolled up his swag, and at three o’clock one morning left the family home and set out for the bush. It seems possible that, despite living by his father’s principles, it was his father he was fleeing.
He headed west and did a bit of prospecting, then further west, where free selectors were moving in on the big squatters’ fabulous leaseholds and the squatters were employing various tricks to thwart them. Near Camperdown Arthur and a friend milked cows and ‘kept the house in game’. It was rich land and the lagoons were thronged with ducks and swans, and the creeksides harboured feral hens and roosters. There were ‘numerous skulls all over the plains’, from which he deduced there had been a ‘big fight’ between the settlers and the Aborigines. Here and in the Wimmera, Arthur got jobs droving sheep, shepherding sheep and washing sheep. Then he went to Adelaide. When he joined the Milner droving expedition to Port Darwin in 1870 he was a bushman, expert with horses and dogs and ‘used to bad niggers’. The party comprised nine white men, three black boys and a gin (‘which ran away’), 7000 sheep and 300 horses, bullock teams, drays, wagons, carts, ten sheepdogs, fifteen staghounds and greyhounds, and a few goats ‘to lead the sheep’. The goats did well for a while but ate poison bush (possibly Gastrolobium grandiflorum) and most died, as did a thousand sheep. The surviving goats may be among the ancestors of the millions that thrive in places where cattle would starve (not to say, places where they would not), and, for all the damage they do, provide a living for the people who sell them to the great goat-eating countries of the world.
Seven years had passed since John McDouall Stuart’s final successful expedition to reach the north coast of the continent. The Milner party followed his famously accurate map. On one of his earlier expeditions, Stuart had run into violent resistance from the Aborigines at a place he called Attack Creek. The Milner expedition met the same trouble. One of Stuart’s men, John Woodforde, told Arthur they had used guns and cutlasses on the blacks at Attack Creek. He reckoned he did his best to persuade John Milner, one of the two brothers leading the expedition, that any ‘wild nigger’ was a ‘bad nigger’ and shouldn’t be allowed near the camp. But Milner would not be told and a bad one killed him. Arthur shot the assailant twice at close quarters, and Milner’s staghound locked onto him, but by Arthur’s account he managed to get away. One night not long after the Attack Creek mishap, he heard Aborigines close to his camp and let the dogs loose. They came back bloody and next morning, some 400 metres from the camp, they found ‘a nigger laying dead and his throat torn out’. And soon after that, with two other men he stole up on a group ‘corroboreeing and getting fresh pluck’ and ‘dispersed them’. ‘Disperse’
, as the pioneer Korah Wills wrote, ‘was a name given for something else not to be mentioned here’.
Near the northern end of the Ashburton Range, Arthur came upon what he called a ‘niggers township’. About fifty small mia-mias surrounded a storeroom 2 metres high and 5 metres in diameter. The store held ‘large bundles of spears . . . and large wooden dishes, 4 and 5 feet long, filled with grain seed as large as rice’. He guessed there was ‘about a ton’ of this seed, in seventeen dishes all of them covered over with paperbark. As well there were ‘a lot of netted bags with red ochre and plumbago and white chalk and lots of flint stones’. Here were no ‘birds of the air’ – they had a storehouse and barn. Arthur Ashwin gathered up their tools and weapons and burned them.
Beyond the Roper River, in the wet, they met a half-starved party of white men working on the overland telegraph, and sold them the sheep. The white men were ‘all Queenslanders and some hard cases, good men in bad nigger country’, and Arthur went on to describe a variety of incidents, both in the Territory and later on the Palmer River goldfields in Queensland, which amply illustrated what he meant. Without the killing, one settler said, ‘it would have been impossible to settle the country’.
In the four decades before 1910 more than seventy Europeans and Asians were killed in the Northern Territory, and murders continued well into the twentieth century. That was a much higher death rate per head of population than in Queensland, where no fewer than 850 ‘Europeans and their allies’ were killed between 1840–97. Some of the victims might be regarded as casualties of a war of resistance to European occupation, although few fell in the course of battle. The figures speak for the guerrilla forms of Aboriginal resistance. But the motive for at least as many killings was abuse of one kind or another. Very often they were prompted by revenge, or by the theft of women or the use of them without the necessary or agreed compensation. A fellow drover told George McIver that on three occasions he had shot dead Aboriginal men for no other reason than to take their gins.
Killing them aside, settlement of the dry inland would have been impossible without the Aborigines’ water. Thomas Mitchell was ‘disgusted’ when he came on wells which cattle had found first. Their ‘cloven feet’, he said, ‘literally destroy the whole country for the aborigines’. But once started, the invasion was never going to stop. R. G. Ramsay spent much of the 1891 Elder ‘Scientific’ Expedition from Adelaide to the Murchison River, Western Australia, following ‘nigger tracks’ in search of native wells from which to draw water for the men and animals. ‘SUNDAY. Mr Lindsay held service after which we proceeded up a gully . . . [to] . . . the native well which had previously been cleaned out and then watered the camels.’ This was muscular Christianity: a thirsty camel can drink 200 litres in half an hour, a rate at which they soon emptied the wells. There are now 600 000 feral camels in Australia, eating up to 80 per cent of all plant species in their habitats.
On the Palmer, in addition to treacherous natives, Ashwin had to deal with his hated Chows. Arthur reckoned two-thirds of the Chinese in Australia were ‘the scum of China and nearly all criminals before they left’. Yet on the goldfields the Chinese were essential to local economies, and, as providers of fresh food, probably to public health. As the goldrushes faded, the great majority of them returned to China. The few thousand who remained either moved to city Chinatowns or found niches in the rural economy. Hardworking and resilient, experts in irrigation, terracing and horticulture, long after the goldrushes were over, Chinese gardeners grew the bulk of the vegetables and fruit for many country towns. On a station west of Charleville in 1881, Robert Watson saw a ‘luxuriant’ Chinese garden with ‘peaches, grapes, melons, cabbages sweet potatoes, etc.’ He believed the Chinese proved that the land could grow anything, and that with the right amount of capital, labour, patience and industry, farming would flourish.
In Queensland the Chinese were the first to grow rice, maize, peanuts, pineapples and bananas and for years they dominated the business. They grew coffee, cotton and sugar cane. In north-easternVictoria Chinese farmers pioneered tobacco growing and at one stage employed 1500 men. ‘Remove them tomorrow and residents of Palmerston [Darwin] would be left without fish, vegetables or fruit, to a large extent without meat, without laundries for their washing, neither would there be any tailors, cooks or domestic servants,’ a Palmerston customs officer declared when anti-Chinese laws were introduced in the late 1880s. In other parts of the country they worked as navvies, scrub-cutters, ringbarkers, fruit pickers, wool washers and cooks. But prejudice against them on the goldfields spilled over into the broader economy, and particularly into the labour movement, which saw them as a threat to jobs and wages. In country towns larrikins, including Ned Kelly and his sidekicks, abused them for sport. Not all the motives for anti-Chinese legislation were as vicious as Arthur Ashwin’s prejudice, and not all European Australians feared and loathed Chinamen as he did, but fear and loathing were at the heart of it. Who knows what the Chinese would have done to the economy and the environment had the ways been opened to them. Eric Rolls reckoned the Northern Territory could have surpassed all the other states in agriculture if the Chinese had been left alone.
Ashwin lost a diary and ‘a lot of little notebooks’ in a flooded creek on the Palmer goldfields. Some of his papers were destroyed in a 1972 fire. Perhaps in the lost papers he mentioned that five of his siblings died of diphtheria in the space of a fortnight, or that in 1879 he married Annie Campbell and had two children with her. Perhaps he related the circumstances of their separation, or that their son, Alfred Croydon Ashwin (‘first white child born in Croydon’, Queensland), fought in France with the AIF and married a Frenchwoman. A reader has no trouble imagining the frustrations and physical strain his travelling and working caused him, but nowhere does he so much as hint at the ordinary ebb and flow of human feeling. He had no language for such things, and the bush made no call on them.
Early in the twentieth century Arthur invested money he had recently made from mining in two stations near Lake Darlot, Western Australia, hard dry country 160 kilometres north of Leonora. One of the properties he later handed over to the Repatriation Department for soldier settlement. On the other he ran cattle and horses, watering them through the long dries with bore water. It was from Lake Darlot that his son Alfred left for the European battlefields in 1916. The loss of a station hand did not leave Arthur short. He had, he wrote to his one surviving brother, ‘a pretty good mob to help me they all look after me wants’. It was a mob of Aborigines – niggers, half-castes and quadroons, as he called them. There is something very like fondness in his description of these people, together with a hint that he saw these last years as a fitting reward for a life well lived.
I haven’t got to bend my back to pick up a tool or anything there is always one of them watching to do anything for me. Tom Cooper is a Half Cast but is exempt from the Aboriginal act he Married Trilby & they have two youngsters both girls . . . Jack is 19 & looks after the Cattle with a black fellow Tomey Mason a old sensible niger & good at all round Station work. Winnie is 24 years Old now & has made two slipps & has two quadroon children Bella Dun & James Yelma Richards. She does the cooking & Trilby helps her & they both do a lot of mens work also. Eve Xmass as she is called looks after the Goats & Milks the cows & is good in the saddle she is 13 years old now & is going to be a lot of trouble flity a good quick worker & verry strong. Ida is 9 years old & is nurse girl to Winnie & Trilby Mrs Cooper there Old Mother comes with her Niger Tom & works for 3 or 4 months then goes for a trip back amoungst the Blacks.
In addition to the two borne him by Annie Campbell, Arthur had at least two children with a woman named Tulpa (or Talpa or Woniton) who already had a child with Harry Fisher, Arthur’s mining partner. Trilby was Arthur’s daughter, and it is possible that Eve and others were too. Arthur owned to those he knew to be his, apparently, and looked after those whose paternity was in doubt.
Suffering from cataracts, he got around in motor goggles for
the last two decades of his life. Drought descended on his land, and a tumour pressed on his bladder. Old and ailing though he was, he ‘could not live in a town now’, so he stayed on his flat, baking station, growing larkspurs and roses (pink ‘minyonette’ was a favourite) in sheep and goat dung, and enjoying the company of the Aborigines and their children. The banks ‘closed up’ on him. He shrank to a pitiful skeleton and died in the company of the faded tribe.
By his own account, before he made some of them his servants, mistresses and close companions, Arthur Ashwin killed many Aborigines. No doubt he believed his own race and culture were superior, and that it was in the nature of things for a stronger civilisation to overtake a weaker one. But he did not say that. What he did say was that in various parts of the country the Aborigines were ‘bad’, or had been until they were dealt with. This fell short of being a moral judgement: bad meant troublesome, as one might say the flies or the dingoes were bad. It meant they threatened the comfort or interests of white settlers.
Arthur exemplified a frontier attitude – to Aborigines and dingoes – that roughly paralleled the law forbidding the use of firearms in seventeenth-century Massachusetts towns, on ‘any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except an Indian or a wolf’. ‘Bad’ meant they must be dealt with as any other threat must be. What counted in the bush was what was useful or practical. That was Arthur Ashwin’s code. He might have thought his rights derived from his racial or cultural superiority, but it was superior force that determined the issue, and which in itself was proof of the rightness of his claims.
