A Country Nurse

by Thea Hayes

Our next plan was to travel through North Queensland, giving book talks in as many towns as we could visit. We joined Farm Sitters and Aussie House Sitters; arranging to look after houses and properties; contacting libraries and markets in the towns we were staying. We did eighty-four book talks and markets on our trip, met so many great people and caught up with many Northern Territorians who had retired to Queensland. We travelled as far as Laura, north of Cooktown, before returning to Straddie for another Christmas.

  The next year, the Outback was calling.

  Knowing that we would be in the Northern Territory at the time of the ‘Gurindji Freedom Day’—the fifty-year celebration of the walk-off in 1966—we decided we would have to go to catch up once again with my old Aboriginal staff members.

  But hearing that 10,000 people were expected, we changed our minds. Sometime later I had a phone call from my old friends Andrea and Vince Fernleigh. They told me that when they were travelling through Kalkarindji (the old Wave Hill Settlement) they had met some of the old Wave Hill Aboriginal house-girls who said, ‘Tell that Missus Ralph to come back here for ’dat Gurindji Freedom Day.’

  After hearing that, of course, we had to go. I wanted to see my old mates again and this might be the last time.

  After book talks in Mt Isa and Cloncurry, Bob and I parted company. I flew to Sydney to look after Sam, Harvey and my beautiful new granddaughter Darcey. Bob drove to Alice Springs.

  I was to meet him later in Alice as we were very keen to join a unique group of like-minded people, including ornithologists, naturalists, botanists, zoologists, entomologists—the Desert Discovery Group—to tour for three weeks in the Gibson Desert in Western Australia, at Kiwirrkurra, the place where the last Aboriginal people came in from the desert. We had joined the group after meeting members and friends Jan and Garth Strong at Narrandera. Every second year the group would drive in their camper trailers to a remote part of the Australian desert and spend three to four weeks researching and identifying the flora, fauna, birds and reptiles of this specified desert area.

  We were to leave from Alice Springs, planning to go in our caravan. However, a few weeks before, on hearing that the tracks hadn’t been used for years and were reportedly overgrown with shrubs and trees, we were advised not to take our caravan.

  Bob decided that we would buy a tent and sleep in a swag. No problem?

  For three weeks? In the winter!

  ‘I am not camping in a swag for three weeks in the desert,’ I said.

  So, I proceeded to Sydney to kid-sit, and Bob drove to Alice Springs with our caravan, not knowing what the outcome would be. Surprisingly I found a six weeks’ house sit in Alice Springs at the time of Bob’s expedition. It worked out well. I had company when Bob was away as Patrick’s mother, Penny Too, came to keep me company.

  Arriving in Alice Springs, I was reminded of my first visit in 1960 when, feeling very apprehensive, I caught Connell’s mail plane to Wave Hill Station to take on the job as station nurse, where my life was changed forever.

  Penny Too and I visited the Australian Aviation Museum to see the remains of the Kookaburra, which I had last seen when Dick Smith found it in the Tanami Desert on Wave Hill country in 1976. There is also a Kookaburra Memorial at the Araluen Arts Centre dedicated to Keith Anderson and Bob Hitchcock, who died after the Kookaburra was forced to land in the Tanami on 10 April 1929, while searching for Charles Kingsford Smith.

  Bob returned from the desert very enthused about the time spent with fellow birders, with large numbers of bird species identified, and the discovery of several bilby colonies in the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts. But he was horrified at the huge number of feral cats everywhere in the desert. The five bird teams in the group completed sixty surveys a day for a thirty-day period.

  Our friends Margaret and Vince Bettington from Straddie were planning to be in Alice at the same time to walk the Larapinta Trail in the West MacDonnell Ranges, so we were very pleased when they agreed to come with us on the trip to Kalkarindji.

  We said goodbye to Alice Springs and Penny Too as the next part of our journey was about to begin—the visit back to Wave Hill.

  49

  Back to Wave Hill

  We drove in convoy 900 kilometres up the Stuart Highway again to the turn off to the Murranji Track.

  At the end of the Murranji Track is Top Springs roadhouse. At Wave Hill, we would call the roadhouse, ‘the watering hole’, the place the stockmen would escape to, when their ‘hides were cracking’. We stopped for a meal and I recalled many of our visits to Top Springs, passing through on our trips to Katherine and back.

  Only 147 kilometres to go to Wave Hill Station—my old home and all its memories. My excitement built the closer we drove. Nothing much had changed since our last visit. Netta and Greg McInnerney, the new managers, were very welcoming and happy for us to camp in our vans. They directed us to a site near where our swimming pool had once been—Lord Sam Vestey had agreed to have a tank installed as a swimming pool for the pleasure of the staff, but the pool was now gone.

  We joined the staff of mostly young jillaroos and jackeroos for drinks at the old bar in the recreation room. It was just the same as it was thirty-seven years before—even the propeller was still on the wall. It had been sent to Wave Hill from a plane looking for Kingsford Smith in 1929.

  Dinner was served with the ringing of the bell from the kitchen, just as it used to be. We dined with the staff in the main dining room. It was just the same too. The bain marie, the three long tables, and the dining room leading off to the large kitchen hadn’t changed at all. The only real difference was that there were no Aboriginal women helping the cook to prepare the food, taking the plates from the table or washing up.

  The next morning, we walked around the garden while I described to Margaret and Vincent the orchard we had had, with the trees planted in circles and a sculpture made of machinery parts in the middle. We had had the best, sweetest grapefruit I had ever tasted. There were no fruit trees anymore, no flowers or flowering shrubs, no sculpture. There was nothing in the vegetable garden on the other side of the homestead, which would horrify Cudabiddie, the Aboriginal gardener. The six-foot high hedges that had surrounded the homestead on three sides, religiously trimmed by Cudabiddie every couple of weeks, had also disappeared.

  I walked past the small corrugated iron hospital, where the injured stockmen and the Aboriginal mothers and their babies used to sit on the lawn and wait their turn to see the nursing sister. It looked so deserted. No happy chatter from outside the laundry where the house-girls would gather while waiting for the Mrs Pott’s irons to heat. No laughter from the Aboriginal children running around, always curious at what was going on at the station. And no Aboriginal stockmen in their R M Williams gear, arriving back to the station after six weeks in the stock camp, so proud of their amazing skills with cattle and on horseback.

  Netta McInnerney questioned me about the orchard and the vegetable garden, saying that after seeing photos of the station in the 70s, she would endeavour to grow similar trees and plants.

  The following day we took off in our caravans to Kalkarindji for the Gurindji Freedom Day. I wondered why Kalkarindji was to be the site. Wattie Creek, now called Daguragu, was the place that the Gurindji people—the 250 Aboriginal stockmen, house staff and their families—had walked to in 1966. Kalkarindji was then called the Wave Hill Settlement or the Wave Hill police station and now is a large town with up to 450 inhabitants. Daguragu is eight kilometres away and has a similar population.

  On the way we decided to call into the Jinparrak—the old Wave Hill homestead site. As before, I couldn’t place anything. I found the grave of the child whom I think was the daughter of one of the Wave Hill managers before our time, and the remains of the bases of some Aboriginal houses. And just across from them, a shade construction had been put up at some expense, and there on the walls were plaques stating the dreadful things that the Vesteys and others had done to the Aboriginal people, saying we fed t
hem ‘only bones’. It angered me to see these plaques, as their words were so far removed from my own experience at Wave Hill.

  We left Jinparrak and the plaques behind and continued on to the site of the celebrations.

  50

  The Gurindji Freedom Day

  On our last visit to Kalkarindji, we had noticed hundreds of beer cans and wine casks on either side of the road at the entrance to the no-alcohol community. But when we arrived this time, in August 2016, it had all been tidied up. The site of the celebrations had become a tent city, which stretched before us, from the store to a concert platform just visible in the distance. Marquees had been set up as information booths beside the Kalkarindji Art Centre building, which was holding an exhibition of Aboriginal art with more of Biddy Wavehill’s paintings.

  After setting up our caravans among the hundreds of campers, we walked up to the information centre. Hundreds of people were milling around like us, wondering what was going to happen and when. The media were everywhere.

  In a tight circle sat the few elders who are still with us, who fifty years ago were part of the walk-off from Wave Hill Station. Jimmy and Biddy Wavehill, Ida and her husband, Topsy, Gus, and Michael George plus several Aboriginal people I didn’t recognise.

  Bob and I walked over to greet them. We had last seen Biddy and Jimmy Wavehill in Canberra several years before. We greeted one another with hugs and exclamations of welcome. They don’t forget. Topsy wept on my shoulder for five minutes.

  There were about 2000 people present, not the 10,000 predicted. Aboriginal and white, people of mixed backgrounds, unionists, communists, politicians and tourists turned up from all over Australia.

  The dignitaries took their places, near the oldies. I spotted the Labor leader Bill Shorten and his wife Chloe, and the main speaker Warren Snowden, the Minister for Lingiari. We had only recently seen him at the Alice Springs Agricultural Show, where he was campaigning with his daughter, and insisted on us meeting her. We were like old friends.

  The formalities started with Vincent Lingiari’s daughter speaking to her people, followed by women from Daguragu who were not happy with the site. Wattie Creek is at Daguragu, as they said, but they all commended the walk-off of the Gurindji tribe led by Vincent Lingiari. The day that changed their world and their lives forever.

  Warren gave a speech reminding those present of their forebears, and the progress of the Aboriginal people from the walk-off to now. He congratulated the different tribes.

  He then said, ‘The Aboriginal people never went back to work at Wave Hill Station, after the walk-off.’

  I couldn’t believe it. The meeting between Ralph and Vincent Lingiari resulting in 100 Aboriginal people going back to live and work at Wave Hill Station is recorded in my book. It is also recorded in Hansard when Ralph’s death was recorded in parliament. I wanted to cry out, ‘That is a lie!’ But I didn’t, and I have regretted it ever since.

  Sadly, Ralph’s ‘walk-back’ was not sustained. There were no winners, no mutual understanding and Ralph would not have wanted that for his Aboriginal brothers. When we left Wave Hill, we believed that the Aboriginal community would continue to live there; working in the stock camps or around the station; embracing their culture, their corroborees and their initiation ceremonies; as well working with the whites, respecting each other and finding common ground.

  So, what did happen to the 100 Aboriginal staff after we left Wave Hill?

  The Aboriginal community were still at Wave Hill Station ten years later, when we left the Territory in 1979, and I have been told by a reliable source that there were still Aboriginal people working at Wave Hill Station in 1985. All the Vestey stations had Aboriginal stockmen and their families contributing to the upkeep of the cattle stations at that time.

  In Queensland I heard that after the walk-off the government transferred all Aboriginal people off Queensland stations and moved them to settlements near the towns. Would they have been content away from their tribal grounds, where they had lived and worked all their lives?

  On our travels through the Northern Territory, we were shocked by the situation in which some Aboriginal communities were now living. In Alice Springs, old women would bring their art to the markets and sit on the grass outside the church, looking forlorn and lost. There were a few old Aboriginal men still proudly wearing their denims, Akubra hats and high-heeled boots, but that wonderful life I remember on the cattle stations has dramatically changed, and it will never be the same again.

  Before we left, I found a book for sale in the information centre—YIJARNI: True stories from Gurindji Country. It was edited by Erika Charola and Felicity Meakins, who transcribed stories from the Gurindji people, oral accounts of events that Gurindji elders witnessed or heard from their parents and grandparents. I was horrified at some of the accounts of massacres and cruelty in their stories but pleased to see a passage in the book saying Ralph and I were remembered fondly by the Aboriginal people at Wave Hill, both before and after the walk-off.

  51

  Where to now?

  After leaving Kalkarindji, we toured through Victoria River Downs country, before going on to Timber Creek and Katherine selling books. We stayed with Miriam and Alan Hagen and did a stint house-sitting in Darwin. We farm-sat a place at Fly Creek, forty kilometres outside of Darwin, with millions of flies—we hardly moved from our air-conditioned caravan.

  At Kakadu we studied Aboriginal cave paintings, learnt how to make a bracelet out of Pandanus leaves and took a flight over the Twin Falls and Jim Jim Falls—they were utterly magnificent. Then we drove back to Queensland on the Stuart Highway via the Painted Desert, down the Oodnadatta Track and the Strzelecki Track to Innamincka, east through Queensland and thence to Straddie.

  You won’t be surprised to hear that on returning to Straddie we soon became restless.

  Was it that wandering spirit or just that we missed being in the bush? I had been brought up in the city of Wollongong, worked in Sydney and London, Toowoomba and Brisbane but that time—that twenty years—in the Outback at Wave Hill and Gordon Downs made me a real country girl. Bob, of course, has always been a true country lad.

  That wandering spirit pushed us on to even more adventures.

  Tasmania was always beckoning, so we decided to travel again, finding farms in Tasmania through the Farm Sitters website.

  The first was a Murray Grey property at East Ridley, near Burnie in Tasmania for three weeks. Plenty of work with my favourite cattle, the Murray Grey, which required feeding with hay and frequent shifting to fresh pasture. Some of the calves developed pleuropneumonia and had to be treated with antibiotics.

  At Burnie we saw the adult blue penguins arriving to feed the babies after their day at sea feeding. Travelling up to the north west corner of Tasmania we found Stanley and climbed to the top of the Nut for 360-degree views. Further south we visited the very productive dairy farming area and in between saw temperate rainforests with streams and waterfalls abounding.

  Next, we headed down south to Broadmarsh to stay at a piece of heaven high up in the mountains near the spectacular Mt Dromedary Nature Reserve. Our duties were hardly onerous, consisting of feeding six sheep and dozens of pet wallabies that bounded out of the bush each evening.

  Bob with his binoculars would watch the platypus in the farm dams below.

  Our third farm sit found us back in the north of Tasmania, near Launceston.

  While selling my book at a market in Katherine, Northern Territory, the year before, I had met a group of ladies who were travelling around the Outback with their husbands. What made this cavalcade stand out was their mode of transport—sixty-nine Citroëns—2CV (two horsepower).

  Bob and I have often talked about how supposedly ‘one in a million’ chance meetings quite regularly unfold on the road and this was no exception.

  It turned out that one of the Citroën aficionado couples owned a holiday house on Straddie and a property in Tasmania and they were looking for someone to
farm sit their property in order to do a Citroën tour around Tasmania.

  An email arrived asking us to farm sit, and we accepted.

  After our farm sit in Burnie we drove to their lovely home on a few acres with a small lake on the edge of Launceston with individual vegetable gardens—what a good idea! They had a one-acre vineyard and had just recently invited friends to assist in picking, crushing and bottling their first wine. On their return from the tour we joined them and their friends for a celebratory dinner, and to taste their first vintage.

  Penny, Patrick and the children came over for Easter and we toured some of the many wineries in the district.

  After the farm sits, which had enabled us to spend ten wonderful weeks working and sight-seeing, we went touring to see the rest of Tasmania: Tamar Valley, Huon Valley, the Gordon River, Maria Island, and the Bay of Fires, Freycinet.

  After returning to the mainland we flew to Los Angeles from Sydney to visit my brother and sister-in-law Tim and Faye in Santa Barbara. My brother Tim sadly suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, but we spent three weeks catching up with family, with a quick trip to Yosemite National Park, in the Western Sierra Nevada of Central California, with its towering granite monoliths.

  Back in Australia, we drove home to Straddie via Melbourne, before returning to enjoy the whales at Straddie in August.

  Our Toogoolawah book club was still in operation but instead of entertaining one another at our homes it was easier to meet for lunch in the city of Brisbane.

  I think it was the September book club at Coppa Spuntino, that Betsy said, ‘I’m going on a trip to India.’

  ‘That’s one place I’ve always wanted to see,’ I said.

  ‘Well, why don’t you come?’

  ‘I just might do that.’

  So, I booked the very next day with Paddy McHugh’s tour to India.

  We flew to New Delhi, population twenty-eight million. There were eight of us, including five females, Paddy McHugh and his wife plus our Indian tour guide, Ram. It was Diwali—the festival of lights in India. Ram had decorated our bus with lights and decorations with all our names written on the outside. Ram and his lovely family welcomed us at the hotel and later at their home, having dinner and meeting all their neighbours as we danced in the street to incredible music.