by Arthur Groom
‘In 1939 I made over the cattle to the two lads, Malcolm and Donald, with a share for their two sisters.
‘Today we own four thousand cattle and six thousand sheep, and breed Arab and Percheron horses. The family are all married and comfortably off, and I have them with their properties adjoining mine. What more could a dad have?’
And that was the simple story of C. V. Chalmers, the man I had wondered about for twenty-four years. Time did not allow him to answer many more questions. Ossie Wallent was back and ready to go, and I had to find out from others how the Chalmers family – parents and young children – had arrived in a land they had never seen before, and wandered with their small stock from water to water, fighting against terrible odds, until eventually the water problem was overcome and they were able to build their own stone house out of the rocks of the earth.
CHAPTER XII
ON FOOT THROUGH
THE MACDONNELLS
I left the Ringwood’s home at Jay Creek Aboriginal Depot at mid-afternoon, loaded with shoulder-pack and sleeping-bag, water-bottles, cameras, and films. The day was bitterly cold and raw, and an annoying wind rustled up dust out of the west. A broad easy valley lay ahead beneath a cloudless sky. Large black cockatoos circled and screeched in annoyance at the invader of their wilderness. They kept passing over in platoons towards the setting sun until dusk. The cold blue of Conway* and its surrounding peaks, and the Paisley and Brinkley Bluffs, changed to deep mystic purple, then transformed slowly into liquid gold beneath a strong moon. The cold was penetrating, and the restless breeze cut through my heavy clothing. I lit a big warming fire of old mulga stumps and grilled a pound of steak, and emptied one precious water-bottle to make a quart pot of strong tea. It was a comforting and fortifying feast, so much that the cold of the night seemed to vanish, and the thirty-five miles of dry going to good water in the Ellery Gap little to bother about.
I walked on in moonlight. Half a mile south a range ran parallel, with its bared rock strata gleaming in the moonlight, and its sides seared with deep shadow. Ten to twelve miles northward a procession of peaks went relentlessly into the west. Startled cattle and horses bolted over stony ground. They were invisible, and their first sudden noise always startling, echoing against the ranges.
At midnight I stopped beside a dead mulga and lit a large fire, with the heavy roots placed to burn some hours; and wriggled into the sleeping-bag. It was a tight fit for a fully-clad man, and uncomfortable; but the drowsy warmth sent me to sleep until nearly daylight, when I woke to a shivering cold and a realization that the fire had dwindled to embers.
That morning I reached the north side of Ellery Gap, forty miles from Jay Creek. The cold wind had dropped and the sun was warming up. Tired feet and limbs demanded at least a few hours’ rest at such a perfect camping spot, with clean water, firewood, and soft dry sand to sleep on. The gap had the same din of excited birds that I had heard twelve months before from its opposite end, and there was a boom and echo of distant high wind. Wedge-tailed eagles soared some hundreds of feet above and disappeared beyond the high cliff crests, returning across the narrow strip of blue sky. There were divers, shags, and a pair of comical ducks turning over and over in the water with their feet where their heads should be most of the time. Peewits, kitehawks, falcons, mickies, pigeons, grey butcher-birds, swallows, parrots, and white-shouldered martins passed in and out of the gap in urgent swiftness.
To watch a grand sunset below a sky of mackerel cloud, I clambered up a big landslide of broken sandstone east of the gap. A deep crimson crept over the sky, then quickly clamped intense shadow and temporary darkness before the moon, over the land.
Late that night I heard the restless high wind once again. I had heard it the year before. It appeared to have no direction, and it seemed as if the rocks and hills and trees were gasping in a frantic struggle for life. The calls of the birds in the gap ceased. No cattle moved in to water. This strange, whirling, unseen power of the heart of a continent is beyond understanding; it is awesome, bloodcurdling, yet inspiring.
At daylight the gorge and hills and broad valley were all utterly still and clear like a coloured painting beneath its protecting glass. I walked northward to see the sun rise over distant Conway in the east, and the red glow creeping slowly along the range south of me. It chased the shadows from Ellery Gap. Someone had manoeuvred a vehicle into the valley. Old wheel tracks crossed the clay-pans. A dingo trailed me back towards camp, following along at a safe distance, dodging behind trees and rocks and spinifex, until eventually he got tired of it all, and went diagonally off to the east, looking back every now and then with head raised and paw up ready to dash away.
With fresh water for at least twenty-four hours in water-bottles, and food for several days, I decided to scramble on over the rough southern shoulder of the spectacular mountain about eight miles to westward, marked on one map as Mount Giles, and not even indicated on the others. Visibility was crisp, and the air clear and buoyant beyond normal; but every quarter of an hour or so it was necessary to pause for breath on the long rising bare ridges. Two hours of steady slogging got me to a spinifex plateau some seven or eight hundred feet up the side of the mountain, and far above cattle pads. Razorbacks and red bluffs, pitted with caves, towered high. To eastward, the full length of the grand valley curved right back to Conway about forty miles away. A dry gully started up in the spinifex and zig-zagged for the mystery mountain. I followed it, wondering just how and where it could go through, until a turn disclosed a narrow gap between the mountain and the southern range. Once again close investigation had proved that a distant panorama might hold an illusion. Here was a watercourse leading south from a plateau that, from a distance, appeared to drop to the north. The gap in the mountain shoulder was about three hundred feet deep, narrow, rough, and rocky, with smooth tracks of rock wallabies and euros in thousands of years of passing from the plateau to the southern valley now being disclosed. The watercourse was heading the wrong way for my planned route. I turned up a broad rock ledge that ran into a narrow corridor between high vertical walls of the main range, and thus I became imprisoned for the time being with only one choice of route forward. The disintegrating soil and rocks of centuries had crashed into that corridor, and mulga, ironwoods, and cypress pines grew in a matted network that made progress slow and painful, and unbearably hot. It was hours later that I rose above timber-line onto a narrow wall of rock that went zigzagging up the mountain-side like a snake. The total climb was no more than fifteen hundred feet to a point behind the mystery mountain nearly level with its highest crest. The big eastern bluffs were hidden; but the rear of the mountain split up and continued past me in three new and unmapped main ridges, divided by two narrow, parallel, hidden valleys. I was on top of the southern ridge; the other two were running east and west, each a quarter of a mile apart, and containing thousands of tons of broken rocks of all sizes and shapes.
I followed my crest westward. At first, it appeared to continue nearly level and unbroken for some miles, and promised good straight walking through stunted spinifex above all worry; yet within a few minutes I was looking straight down one thousand feet of sheer red sandstone wall into a river bed that had slashed its way through all the ranges. It came in from the north and cut straight through half a mile of walled canyon, then emerged from a dark slit between two hundred and three hundred feet deep, and no more than three feet wide. A large pool of shadowed water, nearly covered by tall leaning river gums, lay at the base of the slit. From that pool, the river continued nearly fifty yards wide, past me, but one thousand feet straight below where I stood in utter amazement. One step forward and the drop would be at least five hundred feet without touching the gleaming red wall; from there on to the bed of the river the cliffs were in terraces, each carrying a few vivid-white ghost gums, dark-green cypress pines, and the shining, green, restless fronds of the Macdonnellii cycad palm. My maps had no indication of the place. Rex Battarbee had mentioned the Serpentine at the
head of a mysterious and little-known left branch of the Upper Ellery. This must be it. I threw a large stone over and heard the rattle and plomp of several euros, and found one of their many tracks, which I followed cautiously over smoothed bare rocks jutting out above dizzy drops of hundreds of feet. It led over ledge and bluff, beneath overhanging walls, through caves and cracks, and continued by twist and turn. It was nowhere impossible, but a slip might be fatal. The track-pioneering euro of that massive red bluff of crumbling rock had undoubtedly found a way up and down where most experienced men would have searched in vain.
I lunched on biscuits, prunes, raisins and cheese beside the dark pool of mystery and depth. It was impossible to see more than a few yards into the slit, and even a light cough echoed loudly. Miniature pale-blue waterlilies floated at the edge of the pool, and flowering bushes with white bell-flowers grew in the deep shadows beneath the river gums. I went on downstream, through canyon after canyon, and beyond the last gateway of rock there were camel tracks and droppings, and the boot and shoe tracks of white people, obviously made by a rare camel patrol from Hermannsburg Mission. They evidently had entered the valley at Glen Helen some twenty-five miles or more to the west, and followed the valley over the watershed between the Finke and the Ellery, and then followed the Ellery out through range after range to the broad Missionary Plain, and so back to Hermannsburg.
I headed south-west and then west over low curving hills matted with spinifex. It was a long, hot, dusty walk. In 1927 the late Dr C. T. Madigan of Adelaide journeyed by car up the one hundred miles of valley from Alice Springs to Glen Helen. His car tracks had long since vanished, and only a comparatively disused camel and stock pad remained. His driver should have been decorated and then punished.
_______
* Iloata.
CHAPTER XIII
SECOND JOURNEY TO AREYONGA
Hermannsburg was in the throes of a drought. It was early August, with little chance of relief. I came down beside the Finke from the northwest, with a greeting committee of dogs in a long string for fifty yards behind. Old Abel came forward from a shady gum-tree and recognized me. Others followed and stared at this madman who travelled on foot; but there was many a friendly grin of recognition. I was quickly inside with Pastor Albrecht, Rex Battarbee, and Mr F. H. Moy, the new Director of Native Affairs, and his wife. I sat bolt upright, acutely conscious of torn trousers scarcely capable of holding together. Crisis and fatigue were hand in hand.
Mrs Wallent ordered a hot bath in a large iron tub, and said to a native woman carrying hot water: ‘You know this man come today?’ The reply was preceded by a broad grin. ‘Owa! I know him that one. Put him patch longa that same one trouser last year.’
Altogether it was a very homely greeting.
General rain had been well below the average eight to ten inches, and storms had been light and patchy; but the missionaries had coaxed large red juicy tomatoes, and lettuce, cauliflowers and cabbage to grow about their homes; and the big native-tended vegetable gardens were holding out under the supervision of Mrs Toysner, with the aid of water gravitated four miles from Kaporilya Springs in the Krichauff Range. Out on the cattle-run, sandy rivers, creeks, and rock-holes were dry, and the customary soaks unreliable. The Mission had sold its sheep, and was faced with the difficult decision to sell or risk keeping the cattle. A good friend of the Mission, Mr Wurst, was boring for water, voluntarily, as a holiday contribution, just north of the rock-walled Mission cemetery, using a boring plant lent by Bryan Bowman of Glen Helen. He had gone down seven hundred feet without success, and had run out of cable. Arthur Latz, the Mission stock overseer, was dejected. If miraculous relief did not come, further stock losses would be heavy. Pastor Albrecht was worried about his native pastoralists. It had been a long, almost hopeless task to set up the several chosen full-blood aborigines with small herds. It was a daring attempt to instil responsibility and sense of ownership and ambition into men whose forefathers had lived in hand-to-mouth fashion. The scheme looked as if it might fail before it got started. Mr McCoy, Deputy Director of Native Affairs at Alice Springs, and Mr F. H. Moy, were both at Hermannsburg to confer on the problems of drought and administration.
Pastor Albrecht had promised to organize a special journey, but the Mission camels were scattered, some of them in poor condition, and others with sore backs. He was troubled and anxious to organize something outstanding.
Pastor Sherer came in from Areyonga Depot. We sat on a woodheap and pored over maps. His own camel team was reduced to half its normal strength, and even those were not in good condition. He intended to return to Areyonga with urgent supplies, and hoped to go by the forty-two-mile camel route through the red hills of the Krichauffs. He too was worried by the drought, and wanted to patrol far afield from Areyonga and report on the condition of known waters and springs. I arranged to go with him and wait at Areyonga for whatever might turn up; but once again camels were a problem. We would have to walk and use the camels for essential loading.
Eventually four camels were got together. The first was a hairy, haughty creature. The second was quiet old Paddy, who had to be padded with a light load on a sore back; the third was a nervous, almost blushing young thing, and the fourth, brought in at the last moment, was a noisy, burbling cow camel whose health was causing concern to all, and which we quickly christened ‘Lady-in-Waiting’.
Pastor Albrecht instructed Pastor Sherer.
‘You’ve only got a scratch team. Walk as much as you can. Watch out for sore backs, and particularly watch that cow camel in calf. May God be with you.’
We set off, riding at least for the appearance of it, but the pitch and lurch and anatomical discomfort soon reduced me to ground level. Once we had crossed the gravelly Finke and were beyond view of the Mission buildings, Sherer’s two native batmen, Mainma and Wanginga, took turns at leading and riding. Natives started up from bush and tree, and walked a chain or so to one side. Somehow, some time, somewhere, they would make closer contact and negotiate for a hand-out. It seemed hard to have to turn them away; but there are always the parasites who find begging the easiest way to exist. Eventually a little girl was juggled up to ride at ease on the front camel with old Wanginga. A tall bearded native with spears and boomerang strutted ahead of his family and waved to us at every opportunity; then pointed to distant landmarks, laughed and giggled, and talked vaguely to the horizon and all in between. His wife followed him. On her back she carried a child of about two. On her head was balanced a large calico bundle with a branch of firewood on top of that. Beneath one arm she held a skinny hunting dog; and two pups trailed behind, whimpering and diving from shadow to shadow. She kept laughing and smiling like a child showing off, and that is a difficult accomplishment when the head and neck are held almost immobile. Eventually the pups refused to travel. The woman turned back and placed a big black foot across the nape of the neck of one pup, gave a quick jerk of her ankle, tossed the pup up and caught it in her hand. She tucked it beneath one arm, and then repeated the performance with the same arm; after which she continued straight ahead into the west after her strutting lord and master – family baggage, youngest child, rations, dog and pups, strewn all about her – a strange, almost brutal picture with the inherited grace of centuries.
Wanginga sat the leading camel, apparently oblivious of time; and for some miles I watched him chant softly to the hills, his hands pointing and beckoning in graceful motion to valley and cave in recognition of childhood adventure, or native myth or legend. Lady-in-Waiting commenced to show some signs of distress, and we decided to leave her near a large red sandstone monolith. The shadowing natives stood aside in the spinifex and sand, gesticulating with expressive, begging hands, until they gave up the idea of a wholesale handout and wandered away in search of lizards.
At sunset on the second day the three remaining camels padded slowly and somewhat furtively through the wild and rocky Amulda Gap and moved silently down through the darkness to Areyonga.
The inbred inability of the Australian native to help himself causes him to develop a craving for any available white man’s food in the same measure as he loses appetite for his own bush tucker. It is a problem not understood by casual white observers. There are many other features that upset and unbalance him; and if his desires are not understood and he is not helped at this critical stage of his transition, then he is quickly doomed. Many of the primitive wanderers in the vast desert and hill areas west and south-west of Alice Springs were faced with such a condition when, in 1941, large military camps were established all along the overland route from Alice Springs to Darwin, with an abundance of food. The news travelled like magic; the echo of a far-distant war reached out across the desert, and natives commenced to drift in from hundreds of miles out, even from the little-known Petermann Ranges. Many of them, squatting without food or shelter, were totally ignorant of the white man’s wiles, and strangers to their own inherited weaknesses; knowing only that some food might be had for little or no effort.
The authorities became worried over the problem, which, if unchecked, could assume disastrous proportions. At the suggestion of the Hermannsburg missionaries a solution was found by setting up the Areyonga and Haast’s Bluff Native Depots, to be built by the Government and supervised by the Hermannsburg Mission. Over seven hundred natives, still mostly in small family groups, were persuaded to turn back towards their own wilderness. Their family life was retained, and they were not disintegrated. It is the future of these seven hundred, and of a few more primitive natives still scattered thinly at far waters out across the great distances, in which the Hermannsburg missionaries have become deeply interested at Areyonga and Haast’s Bluff. High-pressure civilization, which has taken white man twenty centuries to build, is too much of a shock for nomadic wanderers who had never known that water would boil.