by Arthur Groom
Yet a third time a missionary was to travel from afar to enter a strange land. The Reverend F. A. H. Kempe had worked from 1875 until 1891; Carl Strehlow from 1894 until his death in 1922; and now, in 1926, the Reverend F. W. Albrecht arrived from missionary studies in Germany, and learnt a great deal from Mr Heinrich, the Hermannsburg Mission schoolmaster, who had been sent up temporarily from Tanunda, South Australia.
With Albrecht’s arrival another deadly drought set in and threatened the whole native population with extinction. Precious waters, usually reliable, gave out and narrowed down hunting areas. Hot winds blasted the earth once again and burnt irreplaceable herbs and roots. Infant mortality rose to eighty per cent. Adult natives could not resist illness, and commenced to die off in groups. Pastor Albrecht was promoted to Mission Superintendent in 1929, and quickly brought the drought-stricken plight of the natives to the notice of Government authorities, and requested medical help and advice to combat the scorbutic conditions sweeping through the native camps. Many of the natives had become almost completely dependent upon the white man’s foods, and, quickly losing all desire for their own bush foods, found it easy to accept and beg for tea, sugar, white flour, and preserved meat. They had little alternative. Settlement and drought by now had split once-balanced tribal units into helpless minor groups.
The reports of medical men and scientists did not surprise the Reverend F. W. Albrecht. A great deal of valuable work was carried out by Professor C. B. Cleland, Professor Harvey Johnson, Dr H. K. Fry, and, later, Dr Charles Duiguid, all of Adelaide. It was obvious that the old aboriginal order of nomadic wandering and living could not be restored in toto. Memory of the white man could not be erased from the native mind. A transition was in force, and more than normal strength was essential to weather it. Fresh fruits and vegetables were necessary to replace native plant foods, particularly for nursing mothers and growing children. Ordinary white flour was almost slow death when stuffed in quantity into native organs. Limited wild meat would have to be replaced at least partially by beef, mutton, and goat.
The missionaries followed the matter up with relentless energy. Somehow, crops had to be grown and greens provided on a scale larger than had ever been considered before, but a giant garden could not be grown overnight. Schwarz and Kempe had failed mostly in their heartbreaking early experiments. Water, the lack of it, and scorching sun in summer, were still the main problems. Meanwhile the scorbutic scourge was sapping all power of resistance from men, women, and children. To combat it in the urgency of time, large quantities of ordinary dried peas were donated from various sources, soaked in water till they sprouted, and the tender young green shoots given to the natives to eat. It was a simple ruse that succeeded greatly. Hundreds of cases of oranges were purchased, many of them donated, and transported by every available means from the new railhead at Alice Springs, and distributed to the bewildered natives.
An odd aspect of colour and wild natural beauty entered into the fight.
Watercolour artists were attracted to the red hills and coloured valleys of Central Australia. They gasped in amazement, painted many landscapes; and returned to the cities to talk and show their pictures of a strange land where vivid colour ran riot. Two of these artists, the Misses Una and Violet Teague, travelled from Melbourne to Hermannsburg. On their return to Melbourne they and others organized a relief fund to establish a reliable water-supply. Today Hermannsburg has its gravitated water system, dropping 117½ feet through 344 chains of cement pipe-line from the Kaporilya (Kaparulja) Springs of 10,000 to 13,000 gallons daily flow into a main storage tank of 47,000-gallon capacity, at the Mission Station. The Melbourne artists and the public made the money possible; Surveyor Blatchford of Perth and Edgar Horwood of Adelaide ran the heights and levels down a wild rocky gorge, through sandhill after sandhill, and across the wide Finke River of sand and rare floods; Arthur Latz and six natives started digging with hand tools and pipe-laying in the sapping heat of 5 December 1934. On an average, eight natives assisted throughout the job, and nearly a year later, on 1 October 1935, clear spring water gravitated from an odd crack in a giant sandstone slab in the red Krichauff hills, out over the spinifex plains and shifting sandhills, beneath the sand and rock of the broad river, and flowed out at Hermannsburg, sixty years after Kempe and Schwarz had set out on their long, almost tragic journey to save a vanishing race.
Was it now too late?
It was an unforgettable event of great importance; a flow of sparkling water with a gleam of light and hope.
There is a very large vegetable garden now, tended by many native women. They are rightly proud of giant cauliflowers, lettuce, kohlrabi, carrots, large and juicy red beetroot, parsnips, clean large tomatoes, marrows, and even onions – grown in sand, thirsty, loose sand, feet deep. The daily vegetable requirements are large and increasing. Each picturesque old stone house occupied by the Mission staff boasts its own vegetable and flower garden, orange-trees, and small square of precious lawn. Water is laid throughout; heavy brush and wire-netting fences keep out plundering camels, goats, donkeys, horses, cows, dingoes, and native hunting dogs – so starved by their dusky owners to encourage them to hunt, that they will raid and eat anything soft enough to chew.
The large vegetable garden is a vivid-green oasis in a sandy waste. It consumes thousands of gallons of water daily, particularly in summer, when broiling heat and dry winds still parch many of the plants. To the casual visitor it is just a very large chequerboard of smaller gardens in the sand to one side of the Mission, west of where drifting sand has piled over the old cemetery wall; but to the missionaries and the natives it is practical salvation, and the barometer by which all health is judged and maintained.
At last the rot of scurvy was stamped slowly out, and the scales balanced again between life and death, survival and extinction. Missionaries, scientists, artists, and many other helpers had not failed. Government financial assistance, time and time again, had been liberal and quickly available. Since 1935, births have exceeded deaths and children are healthy. More than one thousand of the Northern Territory’s fourteen thousand natives may be found within the scope of Hermannsburg and its distant outposts at Areyonga and Haast’s Bluff.
Many of the older natives still showed weakness and inability to resist sickness. Tuberculosis claimed a number of them in the aftermath of the scurvy period, which ran from 1926 to 1930, when the disastrous drought terminated with a flood.
Superintendent Albrecht felt that the natives must be taught more industry and responsibility; and somehow, the tendency of more than ninety per cent to loaf at the fringe of civilization had to be overcome. It seemed a tragic waste of time, useless, and the forerunner of slow moral and physical death, merely to feed and clothe and preach Christian salvation to the unfortunate remnants of a nomadic race, unless the extremely difficult and important task of instilling at least a token measure of ambition was tackled also.
Thousands of years of wandering stripped the Central Australian aboriginal of independent ability to plan a future, and made him master only of the moment. His dwellings always have been temporary crude things of sticks and leaves and grass, built in a few hours and abandoned at the mystic call of far-away food, water, or tribal ceremony. He gorged himself today, starved tomorrow, and shared his temporary possessions. He believed in his descent from spirit and dream forms of totemic ancestors in an amazingly intricate and ceremonial network, which still baffles many of the world’s foremost anthropologists. A curiously talented race, with the minds of designing mathematicians yet little ability to count; whose great strength and past lay back in the ages of legend and decorative ceremony; whose future was never their own concern, but the pawn of circumstance; a people who could not think ahead, but feverishly worshipped the traditions of the past.
Time has now proved the location choice of Hermannsburg by the pioneers Kempe and Schwarz in 1877, to be a fortunate one, for the main administrative centre now stands in relation to the outposts at Areyong
a and Haast’s Bluff as a buffer between the civilized areas of Alice Springs and the far-out wilderness lands stretching beyond the Western Australian border; and the native may wander fully as his ancestors wandered, or turn to the Mission for help when he needs it.
But he must work when under Mission jurisdiction, for which he will learn the benefits and curses of money, what money stands for, and what he may purchase with it for his own good. At far-out Haast’s Bluff, and at Areyonga, with unoccupied desert for hundreds of miles to westward, these remnant people may now wander in and cash their desert trophies of dingo scalps and animal skins and hides for many of the comforts of civilization.
Disappointments, misjudgments, and some thankless treachery, at first were many; but one by one, industries have been established, and the inherent laziness is being slowly reduced. The natives have been taught to skin the kangaroos and euros they spear when hunting far out, and to exchange the skins for money. They have been taught to tan the skins, make harness, boots, shoes, rugs, useful aprons and bags. They may use modern machinery at Hermannsburg or work by hand far afield. Men who prove themselves capable and trustworthy with camels, horses, or cattle are given an opportunity to acquire a small herd of cattle under the control of a Board on which they have adequate representation. Known as ‘Native Pastoralists’, they graze their small herds far out at little-known waters and in hidden grassland valleys over the vast Aboriginal Reserve that is theirs to the exclusion of all white men other than missionaries and Native Affairs Patrol Officers. The Government has given strong encouragement by putting down a series of bores in distant places where grazing would otherwise be impossible.
Now and then a small mob of bullocks will be sold either through the Mission or to the Department of Native Affairs. Conditions are strict but fair. The way is wide open for a man who shows ambition; and late in 1948, none of the pastoralists was in debt.
Many of the native women do embroidery and rug work, which is sold through the Mission; but perhaps the most unusual industry that has been established is the Watercolour Art School, the prodigy of Rex Battarbee. Some of the students are already famous; others well on the road.
Battarbee was born at Warrnambool, Victoria, in 1895, and was badly wounded in the first world war. After a very slow recovery he commenced to paint in watercolours; and in 1928 he set out with a fellow artist, John Gardner, on a motor-caravan tour that eventually led them to the colourful hills of the Macdonnell Ranges. In 1934 Battarbee won a Commonwealth prize for the best watercolour of the year, and in that year he held an exhibition of his locally painted pictures at Hermannsburg Mission. It created extraordinary interest among the natives, and brought forth a frank request to the Reverend F. W. Albrecht by a full-blooded native, Albert Namatjira, that he be given an opportunity to put colours on paper just as the white man had done. Albert Namatjira’s request could not be overlooked. He had always been a conscientious worker, with more than average intelligence, and had spent most of his life in the colourful hill country round Hermannsburg since his birth on 28 July 1902.
In 1936 Rex Battarbee returned to Hermannsburg and found Albert waiting eagerly for him with striking examples of decorative colouring on paper and wood. Battarbee taught the aboriginal the technique of drawing and the use of colours for a short period of two months, and then stood by to watch an amazing progress that resulted in an exhibition of forty-one of Albert Namatjira’s paintings in Melbourne, late in 1938. They were all sold.
For Albert it was only the beginning. He has since held several exhibitions, and his pictures have gone overseas. He has no desire to see the capital cities where his exhibitions are held. Rex Battarbee believed that the trait of artistic expression was dormant within many of the natives, handed down through centuries of rock artists and body decorators, whose crudely expressive paintings are on the walls of many caves and cliffs; thus in Central Australia, the badly wounded soldier of the first world war also found his own future.
Battarbee’s Hermannsburg Art School is now a paradox. His pupils are individualists, not copyists, each one steadily developing a style; one bold in colour; one heavy in outline, another with extraordinary delicacy; all with astonishing perspective, and all linked by a recognizable aboriginal quality that always will be beyond the white man. In this the aboriginal painters are unique. Battarbee has given his services voluntarily and without stint in creating one of the most important Art movements in the world. Not only does it open up a new field for an ambitious native with more than normal talent, but it is building up an extensive and permanent record in colour of Central Australia. Three of the paintings are in the possession of Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth. Albert Namatjira has now been equalled, if not surpassed, by the brothers Otto and Edwin Pareroultja; while others who are progressing rapidly include Oskar Namatjira, Enos Namatjira, Reuben Pareroultja, Richard Moketarindja, Henock Raberaba, Walter Ebatarindja, and Russel.
And Battarbee? The master is now shoulder to shoulder with some of his own pupils, who are devoted to him. Few men have done more in life towards a common good.
While the Reverend Mr Albrecht told me the strange story of Hermannsburg, clouds blew up from the southwest and blotted out the deep red of the James and Krichauff Ranges, and a bitter cold winter rain settled in, swirled like ice through the stone-floored, gauzed verandas, and sent many natives to shelter round small campfires. There was some commotion outside, and the news came that Albert Namatjira had just arrived ‘in’ from a painting walkabout of the Palm Valley of the Finke, in the little-known wilderness canyons of the Krichauff Range. He would be going out again within a few days; but he had brought with him nearly fifty watercolours for display and selection that night before the Board of Management of the Hermannsburg Art Council.
CHAPTER VI
VOICE OF THE AGES
Twenty miles along the Alice Springs track, Pastor Albrecht dropped me, fully laden with food for several days, and water-bottles that might last twenty-four hours. He continued on through the scattered mulga, without any lights on the big truck, towards Alice Springs; thence to continue to Henbury Station to christen a native child. To Albrecht, an all-night drive after a day of hard work was merely an incident in a constant battle against time. In an hour of skilful driving through moonlight, this amazing disciple had told me quietly of his boyhood wish to be a missionary.
For a while I stood alone, unaware of the freezing cold, and knew that no words of mine could ever express adequately my admiration for this man, Albrecht, and his helpers. Time and fatigue, disappointment and hardship meant little. Their goal was selfless, and far beyond the understanding of ordinary man.
The noise of the truck died away, and I walked quietly on in the brilliant moonlight. Ten miles northward the Macdonnells ran at right angles, mysterious and rugged, and bathed now in a liquid white-gold that made the blues and reds of the day seem as an event of another age and place. I could hear the bellowing of cattle being held ‘on camp’ by native stockmen about three miles to the north. Albrecht had suggested that I walk out and camp with them; but I was fresh and eager to go, and turned away to the north-west, across clay-pans and stony ridge country, with mulgas and ironwoods scattered thinly and shimmering like silver; and vivid white river gums lining small, dry, sandy watercourses that all headed southward from the ranges. I headed through that brilliant golden night towards the Ellery River. I was not tied to camel pads and could set a line to any distant point and travel on towards it over country too rough to be penetrated by any other means.
By the following evening I had walked nearly forty miles, most of it up and beside hot, sandy river bed, through and round unbelievable rock terraces, razor-backs, and curved and exposed strata piled up and down in mammoth switchback formation, hundreds of feet high and hundreds of feet down.
Natives claim that a tremendous snake once slithered out of the west, heading towards the east, with long patterned body curved up and down along the ground. Its head was many miles
away towards the rising sun, ready to devour an unfortunate victim, when it was turned to stone. The simile was easy to recognize.
The temperature rose to eighty-nine degrees shortly after midday. That first midwinter daylight walk was a tough, tiring one; and my heavy walking shoes split and pulled apart over the sharp, abrasive rocks.
The purple cliffs of the chilly morning, fantastic in delicate light and shade, mysterious and intriguing, were red walls radiating heat at midday, and I had to narrow my eyes to slits beneath a wide-brimmed hat; but, in the evening of that incredibly warm winter day, the closed valleys freshened to a steady breeze, and the soft shadows of the hills returned at sunset to darken slowly beneath the dusk.
I camped at Ellery* Gap, where the river has cut through one of the main ranges, down and down through millions of years of time and hundreds of feet of red rock, until now this gateway through the mountain is nine hundred feet deep, a few yards wide, and about a quarter of a mile long. A deep, ice-cold pool fills the gap. You must swim through its gloomy depths or climb high over steep cliff and massive rubble. A loud whisper or cough echoes into startling return from wall to wall; and birds and bats whistle through night and day. Animals approach furtively to drink. Natives often camp well back from it, although it once was a favourite meeting-place and ceremonial ground of tribal wanderers. Every gash and cave in the hills, and every high rocky point, carries a myth or legend of the time when they lived as birds or animals, reptiles, or ancestral tribal forefathers in the ‘dreamtime’ of long, long ago.