by Arthur Groom
We passed above Tempe Downs Station, and did not land. Calder informed me that the landing field was out of order and difficult to maintain. The Palmer River twisted down from the Krichauff ridges like a snake, then struck off dead straight to the south-east. The Tempe buildings were so close beside the deep-green trees lining the bank that, from the air, they seemed part of the dry, sandy river bed.
We continued on with the Krichauff hills dropping away to northward, and desert sandhills in waves beneath us as far as the next line of hills straggling about Angas Downs. There we landed, and met W. H. (‘Old Bill’) Liddle, sheep pioneer of the desert’s edge, and his two half-caste sons. Liddle took up desert and plain country between the Basedow and Wollara Ranges, and brought his sheep across country from Oodnadatta. Dingoes raided them day and night; native shepherds lost some; and many died from eating poison bushes. Wool had to be camel-packed nearly three hundred miles to the Oodnadatta railhead. Liddle gave the sheep up, and soon saw other sheep pioneers east of him give up the impossible fight. He handed the management of the property over to his half-caste sons, and changed to cattle. Up to 1947 Liddle had put down nineteen bore-holes without striking good water. He hopes to continue until he gets it. Angas Downs is a mail centre for a few far-out people who come a long way in. The de Conlays of Mount Conner Station, sixty miles south, send a native boy up with packhorses once a fortnight. It is a journey from the Aneri Soak, round the shoulder of Mount Conner, up beside salt-pans and dry salt lakes, across fenceless, lonely country watered by one doubtful well at Wilbia (Wilbeah) Wells. ‘Andrews’s place’ is south-west from Angas Downs, away in the desert, the farthest out of them all. Andrews’s has pioneered a desert track over sandhills and valleys like the high sandy wastes around hundreds of miles of Australia’s coastline, for nearly a hundred miles from his home at Curtain Springs, past Wilbia Wells, to the Palmer River.
A cheerful greeting at Angas Downs, and on again into the air, minus a few mail-bags, and plus a list of shopping to be done, and sundry messages in the name of goodwill and friendship. The Connellan aerial mail delivery is not a service merely of cold invoices and payment for all services rendered. It is a friendly, helpful, and almost philanthropic assistance and salute to pioneers.
Sam Calder pointed out Mount Conner, the ‘best aerial landmark in the Centre’; flat-topped above its crumbling cliff-sides rising well over one thousand feet above the surrounding desert; red; gleaming in the morning light. Far away beyond it, like the top of a man’s bald head, deep blue and hazy, Ayers Rock stood up above the light-red sand; and away to the south were the faint blue peaks of the Musgraves.
At Mount Cavanagh a man said: ‘I wouldn’t go up in one o’ them things for fifty quid.’ I replied: ‘It’s worth fifty pounds of anyone’s money,’ and was the subject of a long lingering look of pity until we left. We turned back at the aerial mail terminus at Mount Irwin Station, South Australia. There it was windy and cold, blustering up from the south over hundreds of miles of unpopulated gibber desert. At Kulgera Station, back in the Northern Territory, we taxied up to the stone homestead, and swallowed cakes, scones, and tea in a modern kitchen. The little old plane went up again, and I reflected on someone’s comment at Alice Springs; ‘Ten miles or a blinkin’ thousand – it’s all the same to Connellan’s grasshoppers.’ I had got to such a stage of faith in this man and his pilots and machines, that I would have set off readily round the world in our little Hawk.
Long tendrils of cirrus cloud had spread from north to south, and moving rays of fanning light crossed the desert. Down again, and up again. This time it was Erldunda Station, the property of Mr and Mrs S. Staines; then over a hilly wilderness of rocky colour flanking the Finke. Far beneath us a sandy track battled towards Alice Springs – the main overland route from Adelaide. We circled above Henbury Station, set down between its flanking sandhills above a permanent, gleaming water-hole in the Finke. Two native stockmen on lively horses gave and received mail; then, off again across the landing ground, a swirl of wind and up over the rich-green river gums of the river, over the mulgas and desert oaks of the sandhills, and northward over rocky pinnacles, small plateaux, canyons; red, brown, light blue and grey, all spectacular; and each feature with individuality and character. Here was a colourful miniature of all the larger hills and valleys I had seen.
Late afternoon was tipping the Macdonnells with red and mauve, and the emerald green of the spinifex on the southern slopes of Mount Gillen stood out clearly. A few minutes later the flight was over.
I received word that necessitated a quick return to Brisbane. Some of my questions would have to continue unanswered. At least a great work was being done by a faithful band of missionaries, and by a wise Native Affairs Administration, which had combined to arrest the death-rate of aborigines in some areas; and there now was some hope of continued survival and even increase, and hope of the successful transition of the world’s most primitive people out of their past of dreaming and ceremony and witchcraft, towards an ultimate state of civilized living acceptable to the white man’s Government and creeds. But it seemed as if some of the greatest problems had been faced one, two, and three generations ago; and the early work of the pioneer missionaries who had translated the difficult dialects of the different tribes, thus providing a working foundation for the later missionaries, anthropologists, and medical men, had at last achieved some definite result.
I would be back again, somehow, to find answers to many more questions that had presented themselves; and possibly to locate the man who had crossed the desert in 1923.
CHAPTER XI
ONE YEAR LATER
On Saturday, 26 July 1947, a Qantas plane rose from Archerfield, near Brisbane, at break of day. A ground mist broke up in curling plumes, and we headed into the west with a crimson sunrise over dark sky and ocean behind. Captain Cook’s spired Glass House Mountains jutted up forty miles northward. We flew 425 miles straight to Charleville and landed in a cold westerly wind. Heavy rain had fallen over most of the 242 miles between Charleville and Longreach; and surface water in bore-drains, dams, and natural watercourses glinted like flashing mirrors. From Longreach we circled above the Thomson River and its big lagoons, and followed the railway line to Winton. A motor vehicle buzzed about on a bush track like a fussy beetle, and then vanished as suddenly as a rabbit into its burrow. The land had drab pattern and a grey sameness; and there was little colour until we passed above the tiny settlement of Kynuna. From there, a vast sea of pink Flinders grass went on over the horizon to the north-east.
North-west of Cloncurry bare rocky hills ran in parallel. There were vivid patches of red earth and clay-pan, and the first green patches of spinifex; and watercourses leading off to the north-east. They started as black threads, twisting and turning, joining and thickening into deep-green processions of trees marching off beyond all visibility.
At 4.30 p.m. we dropped down over anthill country, swept above a large green lagoon, and landed at Daly Waters, 1541 miles from Brisbane. The locality was explored by McDouall Stuart, who, with his nine men, passed that way in April 1862, on his sixth and first successful attempt to cross the continent from south to north.
Galahs, magpies, black cockatoos, and mickies screeched continuously. The country was well grassed, flat and sandy, timbered with stunted trees. A few natives had pitched their untidy wurlies two hundred yards west of the Daly Waters Hotel, which had a modern electric name-sign.
The people still talked of warplanes, of Japanese landing scares, and of Yanks who flew by school maps and landed on wrong landing strips; and they talked of Black Jack Walker, a famous Australian pilot; and of a new brewery that would tie up the Australian beer market; and of the tourist possibilitites of Mataranka. If only they could get Churchill out to Mataranka, it would boom. Their optimism was healthy, and it is just possible that Winston Churchill has even received an invitation from Daly Waters, Australia! The men I dined with criticized and commented on everything from peanuts ro
und Darwin to half-castes and the lack of doctors; and from the Tasmanian hop industry to a certain Brisbane barmaid whose favours appeared wide and varied. One by one they dwindled into the small stuffy bar, and I dwindled off to sleep like a top.
Jack Humphreys, the publican and local agent for almost everything, showed me McDouall Stuart’s exploration tree en route to the landing field. Two planes came in within a minute. My A.N.A. plane was bound a further fifteen hundred miles to Adelaide, and would fly back north over the continent tomorrow. If only the spirit of McDouall Stuart could see it! Yesterday’s Qantas plane had been serviced overnight at Darwin, and was now off on the long 1541-mile return to Brisbane. The A.N.A. plane hopped nineteen hundred miles right across Australia six times a week.
Above Daly Waters, and for many miles south of it, you look down on a broad ocean of stunted trees; endless and, curiously, blue as the sea shimmering in the distance; tremendous and still, and with a pincushion regularity of design on the red desert sand and clay. From ten thousand feet up it all had the grained texture of coloured mosquito-netting. My nose was pressed hard against the window as we flew down Australia’s centre line while most of the passengers from Darwin slept. We flew over Lake Woods with its light-green shore and marshes, and then above folded hills running east and west, and down to Tennant’s Creek, where every white iron roof is surrounded oddly by many rain-water tanks. The airport is ultra-modern by contrast with the untidy town. A few minutes and up again. South of Tennant’s Creek, broad bands of brilliant-red desert between green forests stretched over the horizon to east and west as if a mammoth brush had been dipped in blood and drawn clearly across a dull-green canvas.
Just north of Alice Springs there are hazy peaks and bluffs to westward, and a tangle of coloured hills to eastward, with the abrupt walls of the Macdonnells to southward. We landed at Alice Springs at 11.30 a.m. on Sunday, and I got out and looked once again at the big red wall to northward, over which we had just bumped and tossed. It was like shaking hands with an old friend.
Rex Battarbee and the Hermannsburg Mission secretary, Ossie Wallent, were in at Alice Springs with a truck. They had helpful sugggestions to take me straight out to Hermannsburg, but I had planned to walk right through the Macdonnells, and explained that I would be glad of a lift over the twenty-eight miles to Jay Creek. From there I would go on through the ranges alone. At 9 a.m. the truck was already overloaded, when Ossie Wallent received word of two men who wished to go to Hermannsburg to have a look at the natives. One of them was from Adelaide, the other from ‘somewhere up north’. Wallent introduced me to the two well-dressed men, Chalmers and Vyner. I looked hard at Chalmers, who was elderly, active, and white-haired. He might have been a bank manager, a scientist, a school-teacher, almost anything professional. A chord of memory went groping back a quarter of a century.
‘Did you,’ I asked with obvious excitement, ‘ever take sheep out across the desert country west of Lake Nash Station – about 1923?’
He straightened in astonishment.
‘Why, yes!’
He certainly looked astounded.
‘Well, you’re one of the reasons I am here,’ I explained. ‘I was at Lake Nash at the time, with the stock camp on Gordon’s Creek, as you and your family and caravan and goats and sheep and goodness knows what else went by. We all thought you were stone mad. Never heard anything more about you. You just vanished into the west past Aghadaghada Waterhole; and we didn’t know your name, where you were going, or what for. You left us completely dumbfounded; and I’ve been wondering for the past twenty-odd years what happened!’
We had a few minutes to spare. Ossie Wallent was loaded ready to go, but he still had to see about a pipe, and a bit of tank iron, and pick up a parcel from a shop and medicine from the hospital, and deliver a message or two and deliver this and that from anywhere, and perform a miracle of favours and service for all and sundry. Chalmers took me round to his modern Alice Springs home for a cup of tea; and briefly, and in simple language, told me his story:
‘Our trek took six months. We started from Mungindi on the New South Wales border, and arrived on the Sandover on 5 July 1923. Our homestead is now on the Fraser, a tributary of the Sandover, and 155 miles by road from Alice Springs.
‘The station is named after my two sons, Malcolm and Donald – MacDonald Station; and now that they have grown up, this unity and loyalty is as keen as the pioneering battling days.
‘The wife Cora, myself and four children, two boys and two girls, Jean, Malcolm Charles, Donald Andrew, and Jessie, made the journey. When we arrived Jean was nine, Malcolm seven, Donald five, and Jessie three years of age.
‘We made the journey in a covered-in van with a coop underneath holding five bantams. Besides these fowls, which incidentally were quite at home and laid many eggs while travelling, we brought with us seven horses – four harness and three saddle; two of the horses were good for riding too – that is, the harness horses – and we had three hundred mixed sheep, and thirty-five goats for breeding and milk on the road.
‘We got a bit of rain out on the desert. That was lucky, and I don’t think we had to travel more than twenty-five miles “dry”; but that was enough. It was several years after our arrival before the line between Oodnadatta and Alice Springs was built. During this interval camels were the chief transport. We used to get them to take our wool away and the loading of supplies back. The loading from Oodnadatta was £22 a ton, and £14 for the wool.
‘At this time there was a branch mail service by camel from Alice Springs to Arltunga, an almost deserted goldfield ninety miles away from our station. We sent in by packhorses for the monthly mail and purchased supplies from the store there, which was first started by a Mr Larry Rosenbaum, who ran it in conjunction with his cattle property. It served some of the settlers farther in, as well as gold fossickers and mica gougers.
‘Mail-day was a red-letter day, and the return of the packhorses was eagerly looked forward to – a six-day trip, three each way. Natives did most of this work for us, and we have found them loyal and reliable. George – his native name was Coominburra – and a good horseman too, was our mailman for nearly three years. We have always been on excellent terms with the natives and none have been sent to prison by us. Our success with them was due a lot to our being able to talk to them in their own tongue. Personally I can understand a lot of the language, but the rest of the family speak fluently. This knowledge was acquired in a kindergarten way. The game was to name all the plants in the neighbourhood of any place where the boys were working. Donald would have a couple of native boys, and Malcolm would have a similar side. They were all about the same age – all boys together. One side would pick and hide part of a plant, and challenge the opponents to guess its native name. In this way, in a few months, my boys got to know the native names of all the local plants; and not only the names, but the chief characteristics, for they would taste any portion being dealt with and smell it and memorize it.
‘This knowledge has been of great service in understanding them, and only recently when trucking a mob of fats, Donald gave his four native assistants their orders in their own tongue.
‘You can understand how pleased we were when our first road was made, and connected us up to the main North-South road leading to Alice Springs. It was like someone shaking hands with you. What a difference from no roads at all to a quick fortnightly air service now.
‘A bad drought was on when we set out from Mungindi, and to get camps with water and grass for our stock was a big problem; but I found drovers and teamsters most helpful with advice. On one occasion when we were having to go in sixteen-mile stages between water, we were delayed through purchasing a couple of nannies in full milk from a selector adjoining the stock route. We wanted milk for the children. Luckily a car came past, and I hailed the driver, who told me that if I followed a fence running at right angles to the stock route, two miles back, for four miles, I would find a windmill and tank. This was at sundown, and we
had to have that water. I took the horses and found the windmill, and got a good drink for them, and brought four gallons back for ourselves. I used the stars as a guide, and the laddies had a big fire burning to bring me in. It had been a very hot day, and a drink for the horses, particularly the two in the van, was essential.