by Arthur Groom
We drove west again from Mangaraka, along the narrow sandy track so seldom used. We were more than two hundred miles dead west of Alice Springs, more than half-way to Western Australia, heading into a land of crumbling mountains aged and shattered beyond all knowledge. Plant-growth lessened, trees were scarce; and immense boulders had rolled from the treacherous heights on either side, out onto the level. It was all disorderly, yet peaceful now after the tremendous landslides that once must have echoed in terrifying force from mountain to mountain. We passed Blanche’s Tower, twin-peaked and crumbling, arid and barren, the remains of a great mountain. Beyond Blanche’s Tower, Mount Palmer came up squarely, still in defiance of time’s edict that all mountains must crumble and die. We passed Palmer and went on, twisting in and out between the fallen rubble; and late in the afternoon turned towards a strangely smooth southern wall of the valley, and walked up to a narrow crevice of red. Water had been rushing from the hills at rare intervals over millions of years. This was Tallaputta, the location of an important spring. The rocks were smooth, and we scrambled over boulders of mauve, grey, and purple, with the red long ago scoured out. Cypress pines and ghost gums found sustenance. No doubt their probing roots had followed cracks to moisture many feet below. Tallaputta Crevice ended at a spring running down a red wall some twenty feet high, in a grotto of ferns and moss and clear running water. Nosepeg rooted out some witchetty grubs from the base of a witchetty acacia, and ate while we hungered willingly.
We drove to the north and stopped before the glory of distant Mount Liebig beyond Ianchi Pass**, with the evening light hitting it in an incredible depth of purple. The pass curved before us as a frame; then several miles beyond that another nameless ridge dipped in a curve of brown and red, to frame the broken, saw-toothed peaks of Liebig lying across at right angles. Sunrays and shadow moved slowly across and gave life and warmth to the incredible colour.
_______
* Yes.
† Okay.
** Also known as Berry Pass.
CHAPTER IX
RETURN TO ALICE SPRINGS
The Reverend F. W. Albrecht lay propped up beside his wife on the floor of the Mission truck. Half a dozen natives sat watching an injured girl of about twelve. She had fallen from a swing, and internal trouble was suspected. She lay on a mattress, with blankets, sheets, and pillow. Someone else was going in for dental attention, and members of the Mission Board had completed their active inspection of Hermannsburg and its outposts.
At Jay Creek I said good-bye to them all, and left the truck. Mr and Mrs Ringwood wanted me to stay the night at least; but I moved off across Jay Creek towards the hills, and turned towards the sunset gleaming on Mount Conway, which stood up prominently as the main peak amongst its rugged group. I did not know then that an old native, almost exhausted and breathless, was telling Mr Ringwood of his great worry at ‘poor ol’ feller go walkabout wrong way for Alice Spring – me go catchem horse – fetchem back!’ But Mr Ringwood managed to persuade the old warrior that I was walking on a planned though roundabout route.
I camped beside a shallow sandy gully, and continued at break of day, up beside a running stream of mineralized water that smelt; up into the vivid red of Standly Chasm, ten feet wide, several hundred feet deep, smooth-walled, with bright shadows and towers of red and pink rock jutting up to the north, framed by the walls of the chasm. I went slowly through, then up into the little Standly Chasm, higher and higher, up and on over smooth worn boulders, through crevice, crack, hole and cavern, and out into the sunlight of a suspended valley running east and west. From the higher crests above that again, some time later, I looked back and down the Standly watercourse and across the parallel ranges to the Missionary Plain a long way south. The chasm had been named in honour of Mrs Standly, a past Alice Springs schoolmistress, who taught white children and many brown children. Originally the lower end of the chasm had been known as Gall’s Springs, after Charles Gall, of Owen Springs Station, south-west across the Missionary plain at the base of the Waterhouse Range.
The Macdonnell Ranges about Standly Chasm have kinked out of line into a wrangle of peaks and ravines. I went back through the Standly, and then eastward along the rough base of a red crumbling range. There were terraces, broken cliffs, narrow canyons and caves up to the left, and every few hundred yards a rocky gully emerged to cross the mulga plain before joining a main watercourse down towards Jay Creek Depot. Rough razorbacks of vertical sandstone jutted up sharply. They were piled on edge in long bows up to a furlong in length, rising from nothing up to fifty feet above the surroundings, continuing along the valley like the scaly back fins of a great dragon. An oncoming cold made hard work of the rough going, and the load was well over fifty pounds in weight with cameras and water-bottles. Jay Creek meandered down out of the main ranges several miles ahead. I set a course across rough low ridges to intercept it, and at sundown reached the Jay Creek Fish Hole, a favourite hunting and camping spot, and painting ground of Albert Namatjira. The deep red so common in the ranges had given way to granite walls of light pink, grey, and banded grey and white, about a deep clear pool. There were no birds, and the silence was strange and eerie. A sleepless night with a temperature of 102, and a packet of aspirin did not break the cold; and at daylight I put on double clothing to induce perspiration, and headed away slowly and shakily at first, up through Jay Gorge, and out onto rocky country to northward, and then east along an east and west valley through brittle bushes and dead trees. The cold came out in sweats and grunts. After about ten miles the ranges commenced to break up; and an old track led south-east through a low gap in which there was a small spring. A large euro attempted to escape up a broken cliff, turned again and shot past at full speed, then paused on a ridge silhouetted against the sky and snorted loud defiance. I found out later that the place was known as Spring Gap, the head of the Roe River, which I followed, scrambling across its many bends and over the intervening spinifex ridges, which seemed interminable. The high northern face and peak of Mount Gillen was a good guide, and the walk to it straight but tough and rough, hour after hour. A third pair of heavy brogue shoes in a few days of hard walking were falling to bits. The way led on through a wide valley of vertical bands of stone, horizontal bands, tilted stone, curved stone, and immense piles of slabs without order. I passed by the deep shadows of crumbling mountains about Simpson’s Gap, and on into Alice Springs to end a tiring forty-mile walk for the day.
The cold had broken up completely.
It was good to see the Alice again, and enjoy a hot bath and lie flat out on a soft bed and stretch away. Old Gran the cook had to have her ‘pitcher’ taken, with four pet Moloch horridus lizards suspended like a necklace on her ample bosom; and several dear old souls newly arrived from Adelaide wanted to know ‘all about the Macdonnells’; whether they would be able to walk through the ranges. And were the savages really wild? And had I a gun? Goodness! Why didn’t I carry one? Were the missionaries exploiting the natives? And did Albert Namatjira do his own paintings or were they done for him? Could they get a pet kangaroo somewhere? And, perhaps best of all, almost word for word: ‘Where might one purchase aboriginal weapons? My husband is most vitally interested in the aboriginal question. He already has several boomerangs and spears from the Nullarbor Plain, and is particularly anxious to get a big collection before these unfortunate people are allowed to die out. I do hope the authorities really do something about it all.’
The Adelaide business-man told me of the cornet-player, and how several worried people had entrained him for Adelaide. He had played a departing ‘Alice, Where Art Thou?’ as the train pulled slowly away from the platform; but the cornet-player had travelled only a few hours before bursting into tears. He left the train fifty miles down the line and persuaded a trolley-man to cycle him back; and Alice Springs had wakened to his wailing trumpet up on Billy Goat Hill just before daylight.
Then two Melbourne business-men with English wives drove into town, and went rabbit-shooting
to Simpson’s Gap, twelve miles to the west of the town. The women brought in two badly mutilated rabbits at dusk, and went through the dark interior of the hotel, calling: ‘Chef! Chef! I say, Chef! Where are you?’ A bleary individual stood before them. ‘Oo y’ lookin’ for, the berlanky cook?’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t call the silly ol’ beggar “Chef”. ’Taint a ’im; it’s a ’er; and jus’ call ’er “Gran” – see!’ Eventually they located Gran, who glared at the rabbits. ‘I say – Cook,’ one of the ladies said. ‘Do you prepare rabbits?’ Gran’s reply was very slow. ‘Hmph! How do you like ’em? Baked, boiled, or just plain bloody like you’re givin’ ’em to me?’
Alice Springs has a certain amount of modern night life. Some of the cafés keep open until well past midnight. People who set out to travel in from places hundreds of miles out often arrive in the early hours of the morning, cold and hungry in winter, hot and thirsty in summer. The sandwich bar had a temporary girl who stomped about heavily from the hips down and threw her arms round like a body bowler in action. ‘What’ll yez all ’ave?’ she asked, while she chewed rapidly, leant on our table, and crossed her hefty legs.
‘Ham and eggs!’ We all ordered the same. At the next table a reveller had fallen asleep with his bearded face sideways, resting gently on a plate of steak and eggs.
She went away, returned, took up the same position, and quickly informed us: ‘They haint no heggs for none o’ yez. Yez’ll ’ave to ’ave ’am with somethin’ helse. What’ll yez ’ave?’
She kept on glaring at us at intervals over the modern counter. She did not like our laughter; and we were annoyed to see the tough-looking guy with his face bogged in two eggs. We got out before he lifted his face from the plate.
I stood before Simpson’s Gap, slashing several hundred feet down to sever the high red range to its base. The place was beautiful; and from a bank of sand I saw not so much the grandeur of it all, but empty beer-bottles in shallow water fouled by stock, empty tins, and a gallery of names painted in large white lettering on the smooth red rock. A white ghost gum had been shot at. It was all evidence of vandalism – following upon road access from Alice Springs.
I walked out to Emily Gap, six miles east of the town, crossing the golf-course en route, set out on sandy clay-pans. The aboriginal totemic rock paintings are prominent well inside the gap, and so far no one has mutilated them. They were painted well before the coming of the white man, and look as though they will remain for centuries as an important relic of the native ceremonies for which the gap was once famous. Several hundred feet up on the western side of the gap, large caves, reputedly holding the spirit bodies of the dead, look out to massive red walls less than fifty yards opposite. I climbed up. The rock was smooth and polished by thousands of native feet, and the soft feet of scurrying rock wallabies. It was easy to see these rock wallabies from any high point, as they emerged timidly, one by one, from dark cracks, to sniff and peer for the suspected stranger scrambling about their cliff haunts. The range on both sides of the gap is about a quarter of a mile through at the base, several hundred feet high, with flat plains dotted with mulga and watercourse gums to north and south of it. I went striding and hopping from rock to rock in the spinifex along its crest; it was like moving on top of a giant wall separating two worlds of North and South. To north-west, Alice Springs straddled the Todd River, with roofs and tall trees in mottled white and dark green. A large plane droned up from the south over unlimited space and distant low hills. It landed at the modern landing field, glistening silver against the sun, refuelled in a hurry, rose, circled, and came straight towards me on that narrow wall, which seemed to be marching across a continent. Within a few minutes the plane had vanished towards Darwin, nearly a thousand miles beyond the rim of low, irregular hills to northward.
CHAPTER X
EDDIE CONNELLAN’S
DRAGONFLIES
Eddie Connellan is one of the best-known men in the Northern Territory. Not yet forty years old, he gave up jackarooing, High School teaching and radio work, and in 1938 flew forty thousand miles over the Northern Territory in an amazing and exhaustive aerial survey in an old plane. Then, in 1939, he purchased two Percival Gulls, and at the suggestion of the Hon. John McEwen, Minister for the Interior, he contracted to carry ordinary mail by air from station outpost to outpost, in place of the slow, costly camel, packhorse, or motor-truck method. His first aerial mail-run was from Alice Springs via Mount Doreen and Tanami, both beyond the end of anywhere, then via Victoria River Downs to Wyndham and back to Alice Springs. It was pioneering in every sense of the word. He had to pacify those who thought he was mad, and gradually educate those who treated him with indifference. Landing grounds were crude, and in many cases non-existent. Between scheduled mail flights, Connellan gathered a few enthusiastic supporters and worked to build new airstrips and improve the few existing ones at places hundreds of miles apart, bumping over rough desert tracks with heavy loads of equipment and tools in an old Rolls Royce. It was a colossal task; and some hardened old pioneers bitterly resented the innovation until determination and grit and the full value of aerial service, which began to save lives, time, money, won most of them over.
Jack Kellow was Connellan’s first assistant pilot; and Connellan and several of the ground staff worked day and night to keep him up in the air, until war broke out and most of them joined up. The proposition reverted to something close to a one-man show. Few of his original staff returned; only two of his early helpers, Damien Miller and Sam Calder, came back, both with the D.F.C. Eddie Connellan’s own war service was not officially in the R.A.A.F., but it was certainly all round it and with it. His rapid organization of aerial mail routes and great knowledge of the Northern Territory was much too important to be lost; and he became an important courier and adviser to and from army camps and commando units, and helped the Americans to survey important landing sites, besides running regular mail services in all directions under tough conditions.
In July 1943 the Postmaster-General’s Department increased his annual subsidy to £5800 and asked him to organize a new and comparatively small fortnightly mail-run over the Hermannsburg, Tempe Downs, Angas Downs, Mount Irwin, Kulgera, Erldunda, Henbury circuit, to replace a number of costly ground contracts. This was the aerial run I badly wanted to travel over. By 1946 the subsidy had been increased to £10,000 to help him carry his mail deliveries and friendly service to lonely outposts, over the border into Queensland as far as Camooweal. It increased his fortnightly aerial mail routes to more than seven thousand miles, with at least seventy regular landing stops.
Connellan has gone on increasing his remarkable mail service, striving steadily towards his visionary ideal of linking every settlement within the Northern Territory. His fleet consists of two Dragonflies, a Beechcraft, an old Percival Gull, a Hawk Moth, and a closed Tiger Moth for aerial ambulance work under contract to the Flying Doctor Service, by which he covers the Northern Territory half-way up to Darwin. Perhaps the most amazing feature about his aerial services is that he operates at a considerable financial loss, and finances the loss from income received elsewhere; but Connellan has implicit faith in the future, and is organizing tourist flights and facilities wherever he can. Whatever the future may hold for him, his name will never be forgotten in the Northern Territory.
I walked out to his aerodrome, a mile from the town, and arranged to fly over the Hermannsburg to Mount Irwin mail-run. An opportunity to look down over the rugged land I had walked and scrambled on was too good to miss. A blitz-wagon called for me at sunrise and bundled me off to the large landing field south of the ranges; then the little single-engined Hawk dropped down over the top of the red wall, and I met Sam Calder, D.F.C., and a mechanic named Knight. Up we went and flew west at about seventy-five miles an hour. The plane was obviously old, but I had faith in it and the pilot. At five thousand to seven thousand feet it was possible to see the whole east–west system of parallel Macdonnell Ranges, and the watercourses cutting straight th
rough ridge after ridge. Mountains and valleys were all on the march; from east to west was the order. The Roe River, Jay Creek, the Hugh, the Mueller, the Ellery, all slashed through hundreds of feet of red rock, and headed off southward, always south. We flew north of the Waterhouse Range, and south of a large dam on the Hermannsburg Mission lease, filled with water. Thousands of budgerigars, visible even from the plane’s height, swept across the dam, turned and banked, and rose and fell. Then we saw the James Range pierced by the wild canyon of the Finke to south-west; and the red, mysterious Krichauff masses beyond; and the western Macdonnells away to the north-west with jagged peaks towering up. Good old Sonder! A grand old landmark, unmistakable, jutting up bold and blue in the morning light. Sam Calder circled the plane a few hundred feet above the Hermannsburg Mission, then landed two miles to the northeast, threw out the mail to a deserted landing field; and off again, southward above the broad Finke between its deep red canyon walls towering above the white sand winding through the spinifex-topped plateau ranges. Calder signalled and pointed, then banked away west to Palm Valley and the Amphitheatre. The massive sandstone below was gashed with long box canyons. At that time I was far too excited to think of possible engine failure. That thought came later in retrospect. Every second of time was too important to waste, and the floor of the little plane was being littered with film-pack tabs. The plane seemed so much at home that the danger of flying over such a wilderness failed to dawn on me. There were razorbacks and peaks, rock monoliths, curved domes, slits and crevices; and hollowed-out pounds surrounded by red hills on every horizon. We turned south again, once more over parallel ridges; not straight in line like the Macdonnell ridges, but curving over many miles; convex, concave, scalloped, and straight up on edge or tilting over, in an unbelievable maze through which the deeply walled watercourses had somehow carved a way.