by Arthur Groom
Mrs de Conlay chattered on, breaking off now and then to talk to native women who padded in and out. Then she went and stood in the doorway, and watched my camels squatting near an isolated mulga a quarter of a mile away. ‘Your boys all right? I’ll give you some fresh beef for them. Got a killer in a couple of days ago. Had to. Natives on walkabout hopped in and pinched most of what I had the week before. Poor beggars. They go walkabout from station to station, and you feel you must give them some sort of a hand-out. Don’t know that it does them any good, though.’
Mrs de Conlay asked me to stay the night; but time was too limited, and all hope of getting quick transport to Alice Springs was vanishing. She continued:
‘I wondered why more natives came in this morning. Seem to know your boys. Quite a pow-wow going on. Trouble is, where tucker’s concerned, they’re likely to help themselves. There’s another way you can go, if you don’t reckon on going to Erldunda – by the mail track up to Angas Downs, fifty miles by old camel pad and sixty miles round the motor track – up there past Mount Conner.’ She pointed to the north past Conner’s great, flat-topped red mass. ‘A lad from here rides it up and back every fortnight for the mail – leaves here Sunday morning, gets back Wednesday night if he’s lucky. Connellan’s mail-plane lands at Angas Downs next Tuesday week and you’d get a lift straight into the Alice. Plane was a week late last time. Lad had his ride for nothing. The plane set out and had to go back – landing grounds too boggy. I’ll call a boy in to point out the proper way for you. What about staying the night and going on in the morning?’
Once again I declined her invitation. The urgency of contact with Alice Springs was paramount; but the next few minutes dragged on into an hour, unknown and unnoticed, as I persuaded Mrs de Conlay to tell me more of her story.
Paddy and Phyllis de Conlay took up the Mount Conner lease in October 1943, when they were both forty-five years old, and set out in an old camel-buggy from Mr H. J. Kitto’s Mount Cavanagh Station. They travelled ninety miles a little west of north and reached Aneri Soak on Christmas Day 1943. No water was visible, so they dug frantically down several feet to a vile-smelling liquid. Paddy de Conlay dug on through the night, and early next morning, with his wife bumping up and down on top of endless petrol-drums placed to hold back seeping sand, bottomed on a bed of limestone and struck good water.
Then they celebrated their Christmas dinner one day late, of tinned foods and a bottle of beer given them as a blessing by Mrs Coulthard of Kulgera Station.
Building materials were out of the question; and during the heat of January and February the de Conlays decided to go underground, and in four weeks of hard work the two of them had excavated a small room fifteen by ten feet, with an approach, in light limestone. They then carted mulga saplings in the camel-buggy, built a frame above the open cut and piled three feet of grass on to it, over which they packed a six-inch coating of clay from a nearby clay-pan. They then fitted the drive with a heavy bush-timber door, and dug a fireplace in one end of the so-called all-purpose room, Mrs de Conlay cooked under the open sky in camp-ovens. They locked up their few possessions, and went off in the camel-buggy for a better transport system, returning some months later with a borrowed donkey team and wagon loaded to the hilt with a windmill, pump, stove, and general supplies. Three weeks later they turned south-east to Kulgera Station, broke in a plant of stock horses given to them by Messrs Kitto and Coulthard, and then proceeded to Alice Springs to purchase a small herd of cattle.
In their absence wandering natives broke into their store and took £50 worth of supplies. It was a hard blow.
Mrs de Conlay dreams of the day when a proud homestead will have Mount Conner as its background. Her present iron shed dwelling is hot and stuffy in summer, cold and exposed to desert winds in winter. The Andrews family are the nearest neighbours, twenty-five miles north-west by bush track. The nearest radio transceiver is at Erldunda, ninety miles away, and the nearest telephone two hundred miles away. No one lives to the west or south-west, for hundreds of miles, and the nearest township, Alice Springs, is ‘about two hundred and fifty miles by road’ – a road that begins as a desert track, continues as one through soft sand for more than a hundred miles before it jumps up on to rocky hill country, rough, slow to travel on, lonely, sometimes a week or fortnight passing without being travelled over.
One place in Australia still to be conquered.
CHAPTER XXIII
NORTHWARD TO
BILL LIDDLE’S PLACE
The boys were not anxious to continue without a couple of days’ ‘spell’. Their desert friend from Weetabilla, and other natives, were busy bartering knives and oddments for some of Tamalji’s pituri, and for a few minutes it looked as if Tiger’s requests to Tamalji and Njunowa to ‘go fetchem in camella’, would provoke a blunt refusal; but they got up slowly with heavy scowls and grunts, and went towards the soak, while the strange natives stood muttering and making signs of extreme annoyance.
Within half an hour we were heading north, past the western overhang of Conner, silent and moody perhaps in the hot afternoon sun; and it was not until well towards evening that Tamalji gave a great, prolonged grunt of disgust, then a loud sigh of acceptance. It was as if he had cast off his moodiness like a cloak. He suddenly put his head back, commenced to laugh loud, and then louder, into his terrifying, bloodcurdling scream.
It was a great relief. From then on the three men were in laughing mood, chattering, and full of humour at the smallest incident. In reward we feasted that night on tinned fruit, seeded raisins, and routine meat, damper, syrup, potatoes, and onions. Their musical ‘Xanku – good tuckout that one,’ fully forgave me for driving them so hurriedly from Aneri Soak.
Ol’ Man Camel was tiring and developing a bad limp. His original load had lessened considerably. It was not now necessary to carry more than ten gallons of water, and the tucker-boxes were dwindling day by day. Tamalji’s bundles of pituri probably weighed a hundredweight. They were strewn all over the camels like a green market garden. Lady-in-Waiting was causing some concern again; but still there was no calf to greet the early-morning camel boy.
East and north of Conner there are salt-pans, clay-pans, and small salt lakes, surrounded by acres of salt-bush camel herbage. Most of the pans had already dried and caked into mud and brine.
The day after leaving Conner we moved along sandhill crests running north. The camels, four in line, padded in silent silhouette against a changing, troubled, wispy sky of cirrus clouds. At midday I pointed to dark smoke-signals northward of our route, crossing in from the west. The boys became excited again, pushed and coaxed the camels, and sent up answering signals; but the mystery travellers ahead were in a hurry, and passed about three miles ahead of us. We crossed their tracks – two horsemen, heading east.
Tiger turned the camels over a big sandhill, and up beside a lake about five miles long. Its shallow waters, gathered during the recent rains, were fast receding, gleaming in the sun. I walked cautiously over a perfect beach fifty yards wide, onto clean yellow sand, wet and hard, and out into the ruffled water, which might have been in any sheltered inlet on the coast of Australia. There I set a small stick, and watched the water recede fully twenty feet within half an hour. It was difficult to realize that it was the centre of Australia, and that within a week or so the sheet of water stretching away several miles ahead of me would evaporate down to a vivid-white salt residue, hot and barren, glaring, ugly, and treacherous. Myriads of minute creatures like pin-head tadpoles live in the clear, greenish water. The natives know them as ‘Pupilja’. In a few more days they would be burnt by the heat of the midday sun, but no doubt leaving behind them some connecting link in the chain of life to emerge in their millions next time it rained and flooded the country.
To the north-west the low, long Basedow Ranges, named by W. H. Tietkins in 1890 after the anthropologist Herbert Basedow, M.A., M.D., Ph.D., B.Sc., etc., gradually rose from a dark-blue line on the horizon.
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�We catch Wilbia Wells just off that point.’ Tiger pointed to the eastern end of the Basedow. ‘Road from Andrews’s country must come in that way. We catch him properly. Long time ago this country belong to Bill Liddle and Snow Pearce – they have plenty sheepee, but pappy-dawg eat sheepee and native shepherd lose too many. All cattle country now; and some country – nothing.’
But there were many more sandhills and troughs, and mulga, mallee, and desert-oak thickets, with a few isolated clumps of gidyea; and some miles of rabbit warrens, dangerous to the camels. It was good witchetty-grub country, and Tamalji and Njunowa knocked low Acacia Kempeana (witchetty) bushes over, and pulled from the fractured roots white grubs as big as a man’s finger. Their appetites were insatiable. They ate grubs and wild fruits during the day, and consumed all the meat, damper, and vegetables I gave them at night.
We crossed Andrews’s bush track near Wilbia just after sunrise on the third morning from Conner. The main well was beside an old deserted bough-shed, and water was fifteen feet down in solid rock. It stank and was covered with scum. The place was depressing and indicated loss and failure.
‘This water no good,’ Tiger announced. ‘Make you guts ache properly. Runabout all day. No good! Think we go quick for Bill Liddle’s place. Catch him tonight – sun about there.’ He pointed to four o’clock sun position in the western sky. ‘Maybe have properly rest at Bill Liddle’s. He got fresh meat, nanny-goata and bullocky. Maybe you get truck for Alice Springs. Aeroplane come next Tuesday. Mail-day then for everybody.’
I left the camels and moved ahead on a defined track, and within three miles met a string of well-bred horses, driven by several natives and a well-spoken half-caste who introduced himself as Arthur Liddle.
‘Keep straight ahead,’ he informed me. ‘You’ll find dad and my brother Milton well-sinking this side of the homestead. It’s our eighteenth hole without striking water.’
The camel pad joined a sandy motor track that wound in and out of the sandhills. It was tough going, hot, monotonous, with the Basedow dropping behind and a few isolated hills rising northward; but even at its worst the desert country seldom remains without interest for long. On the crest of a very ordinary sandhill I rested before a very ordinary view, and heard a tiny bell-like note. A small crimson chat, blood red with light-brown wings, came within a few feet, dropped its wings and fussed. It obviously had a nest close by, and I spent nearly half an hour searching every bush and clump of spinifex without success while the bird kept within a few feet. Other small twitterers of the interior came round. Goodness only knows where they get water, or how they live through the heat of summer except by sucking at any morning dew. A brilliant golden bird of the same size flew past, followed by several others – the golden or orange chat.
The top of the sandhill for nearly a furlong was teeming with life. I walked slowly along it, accompanied for some distance by agitated feathered friends, until I found a small Moloch horridus about five inches long, with all his spikes and horns, lying doggo at the base of a small bush. Known as ‘Entarkuma’ by the natives, the Moloch lives out in the open barren rocks and sandhills, sleepy and tame, living on ants, coloured to the background he moves in. I picked up Mr or Mrs Moloch horridus and put it on my knee for several minutes while I sat and watched it feign sleepiness and unconcern; but every now and then it opened one small pin-head black eye, to take a cautious peep at its captor.
I placed Moloch at the base of a flowering bush and walked off, passing a deserted shepherd’s camp two or three hours later; and continued, mile after mile, until I topped a rocky ridge. Within a hundred yards, Pioneer Bill Liddle and his half-caste son Milton were sinking a bore with a plant driven by motor-truck. They had chosen a place where, to the inexperienced, all sign of water was as far away as the moon.
We drove along a narrow valley between sharp ridges, through a gap, and up to Angas Downs homestead with its barn-like iron buildings and outsheds, windmill, troughs, stockyard and goat-pen; and small vegetable gardens cared for by half-caste women, and full-blooded natives and half-castes walking and standing about.
I sat with my hosts late into the night and pored over maps and photographs, and discussed the native question, particularly the problem of the half-caste. The Liddles, father and sons, are fierce barrackers for full recognition of half-castes as whites; but they could not see that although many white people are prepared to treat the unfortunate people of the third Australian race as ‘brothers’ in Christianity, they are not prepared to accept them as brothers-and sisters-in-law. It is one simple fact so often overlooked, which is an obstacle against a policy of breeding the black strain out of the half-caste on into the white race, rather than encouraging the white strain to fade slowly back into the black.
Liddle, sen. had wandered far and wide, and built homesteads, yards, and tracks for others who had failed, leaving him as the one remaining far-out pioneer of a large area. He was proud of his landing field, and of the fact that Connellan’s planes landed there and left mail-bags for the Andrewses and the de Conlays. He is one of Central Australia’s best-known bushmen, and knows the Centre far and wide. Old Bill Liddle, as he is generally known, is now standing by in the hope that his sons may be allowed to carry on as Australian citizens.
CHAPTER XXIV
DESERT WALK
There was little hope of any lift into Alice Springs, except by plane on the Tuesday. It was now Wednesday. Liddle had one truck away stranded, and the other being used as the power unit for well-sinking. He explained that Andrews had ‘gone in’ over the sandhills in a small truck to rescue a larger one that had broken down in the desert. There might be a truck in from Tempe Downs, sixty miles to the north, a good two days’ hard journey by camel over the roughest, softest desert road in the Northern Territory.
Maps showed Henbury Station on the Finke River, sixty miles a little north of east by direct air-line across a terrible wilderness of sandhills without order, and occasional stone ridges. From Henbury it might be possible to intercept a vehicle on the rough southern road to Alice Springs.
‘If you go by Tempe and Middleton Ponds, it’s about ninety-five miles,’ Liddle explained. ‘If you go nearly back to Wilbia Wells, and then follow Andrews’s desert track in – but that way’s rough – it’s about eighty-five miles.’
‘And what if I go straight across country?’
‘What – walk?’
I nodded, and explained that I did not want to take the camels any farther. One had a sore back, one was lame, and Lady-in-Waiting might prove a burden. The suggestion rather overwhelmed Liddle and his son. Eventually, Bill Liddle answered: ‘Don’t think you’d do it much under eighty miles; but come outside awhile. We’ll have a look round.’ We scrambled over a low ridge of vertical sandstone to a jagged rock about a hundred feet above the surrounding country. The ridge continued on beyond the gap close by, rose to about two hundred feet and ran off into the east. Northward of it there was a great sea of thick mulga forest, with the darker domed tops of desert oaks here and there, and patches of pink sandhill crest like the patches of foam on a choppy sea. It was a tumbled mass of sand, waterless, but supporting a tremendous amount of tree- and plant-life that would only add to the difficulty of locating landmarks.
Old Bill Liddle turned and cupped his hands. His enormous voice boomed up the hillside.
‘Pakunja! Pakunja!’
Within a few minutes a young native came running, barefooted, over the rough stones.
‘Pakunja!’ Liddle thundered. ‘One time you take cattle to Henbury Station, thataway. Remember?’ Liddle pointed to the east.
The native grunted and nodded.
‘Good. Well, show me where Mount Ormerod is.’
Pakunja paused. He stood silently for fully a minute looking over the vast sea of deep green now tinged with colour from the setting sun. The ridge we were on flared in the red light and disappeared over the horizon like an ancient wall. About twenty miles to northward a line of deep-blue pyramids pee
ped above the sandhills; and about sixty miles to northward the red ramparts of the James Range stood up in a thin purpling line above the green. Pakunja was a little puzzled. Eventually he raised a hand high, and slowly brought it down on stiffly extended arm towards the north-east.
‘Maybe that one Ormerod.’
A long way off a tiny blue point rose over the trees.
Liddle’s voice thundered again.
‘Maybe be damned! This man might go walkabout that way. You must be sure. Is that one Mount Ormerod?’
‘I think that one Mount Ormerod all right,’ Pakunja answered.
I left several parcels with Liddle to put on the Tuesday plane, and promised to send a note on the plane with an account of the journey. He explained that the timbered desert continued east and north to the Palmer River, and was bisected at an angle by ‘Andrews’s track’ which went through the long wall somewhere between fifteen and twenty miles dead east, and then continued north-east over rough ground to Alf Butler’s Mount Quinn homestead on the Palmer River. ‘Three miles west of Ormerod. Keep your eye skinned for Ormerod, and you won’t go wrong,’ he advised. ‘You won’t mistake it. It’s like a tiered pyramid facing the west, standing up close to the Palmer River. That map you’ve got shows it twenty miles south of the river. That’s all bunk.’
I filled two water-bottles and a quart billycan, discarded all unnecessary items to reduce the total load of food, cameras, and water to about forty pounds’ weight, then went out and camped beside Tiger and Tamalji and Njunowa, who were sleeping in the sand near the camel-boxes. It was difficult to sleep. The walk ahead would be a fair test for the physical fitness I had gained during the past few weeks. Memory of the amazing scenery, and the story and work of the missionaries, of the Chalmers and de Conlay pioneers, kept crowding in. Sometimes a long walk is the best aid to clear thought.
Thus, at the faintest sign of grey light down in the east, and with most of the stars still bright and clear, I rose. Tiger stirred immediately and sat up to waken the others. I packed quickly, took my sleeping-bag across, dropped it at Tiger’s feet. It was a tribute to his faithful service; then, on the spur of the moment, I took off my old sandshoes, in which I had walked to Ayers Rock, and while I stepped into new shoes, passed the old ones over to Tamalji. He grunted; and to Njunowa I passed over a bundle of clothes. Those three natives, one a baptized Christian, one a savage myall, and the other a fat, giggling irresponsible youth, moved in close in that dark hour before the dawn and shook hands. Not many words were said. We were all perhaps a little sorry to part.