‘Oh yes, you can ask him when he comes back in,’ Mum assured me, giving me a kiss.
When Dad came in from the stock camp at the end of the week, he was tired and dirty. He didn’t have time to talk and went straight to his office. I waited for him to come out, but I had to go to bed before he did. And the next morning at breakfast he was too busy talking to the stockmen, so I missed my chance then as well. When I saw him at smoko, pouring a cup of tea, I leaped.
‘Dad! Dad!’ I rushed up to him, waving my report card. ‘Have you seen this?’
Dad picked up the paper and looked at it. Then he looked down at me, with a smile crinkling his face.
‘Good job, Tanya,’ he said, handing me back the report. He gulped his tea. ‘Keep up the good work.’
Then he was gone. Cup back down. Striding off to his next job.
I held the report card to my chest and breathed in and out like I’d just run from Bond Springs to Witchitie and back, feeling the glow of Dad’s praise deep inside my heart.
I’d taken away the message that good grades earned Dad’s praise. So, I would do anything and everything possible to achieve good grades in the future.
Dad might no longer be there for picnic teas or games or to throw us up in the air, but I longed to know I mattered in some way to him. To grasp a short-lived but wonderful moment in which I could bask in his approval. It brought unfettered and complete feelings of joy.
Even at age five, it was a primal need.
6
Four Good Men
Mum and Dad had not been at Bond Springs very long when a number of government rulings awarded long-overdue rights to Aboriginal people across Australia.
In 1967, after ten years of campaigning by Aboriginal and social justice groups, a referendum was held to change the Australian Constitution. For the first time, Aboriginal people were included in the population census, and the Commonwealth was given the right to make specific laws for Aboriginal people, instead of the states. There was great celebration across Australia as its traditional people claimed an important moral and symbolic victory.
In 1968, there was also a Conciliation and Arbitration Commission ruling on equal wages for the Northern Territory cattle industry. This was the result of a long-fought battle by the North Australian Workers’ Union following the Wave Hill Station walk-off.
The background to this was long and complicated. Wave Hill was a huge cattle station in the far north of the Territory owned by British pastoral company Vesteys. It was also the traditional land of the Gurindji people, who had lived and worked there for many years under Vestey’s poor conditions and poor pay. They wanted change, equality.
In 1965, the North Australian Workers’ Union brought a case on their behalf for ‘equal wages for Aboriginal pastoral workers’ across the Northern Territory. At the time the cattle industry, for example, was not legally required to pay Aboriginal drovers much more than three pounds per week while white drovers were paid five times this amount.
In 1966, two hundred Gurindji stockmen, domestics and their families courageously walked off Wave Hill and went on strike. Vesteys wouldn’t negotiate initially, later coming back with concessions and offers, none of which were acceptable or accepted.
The Wave Hill walk-off went on to lead to important changes for Aboriginal people over the next decade. The Gurindji’s claim became about far more than just wages and living conditions. They wanted their traditional lands back.
It took nine years of negotiations but in 1975 the Gurindji were handed back a portion of their land by the Commonwealth government in a historic ceremony. It was a wonderful moment for the Gurindji, their supporters and their courage. Their case then went on to be a catalyst for the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. This was the first piece of legislation in Australia that allowed Aboriginal people to claim title over traditional lands.
At last, Australia was starting to make up for its wrongdoings towards Aboriginal people, but it had a huge, unexpected impact on the cattle industry. The cattle industry had told the Equal Wages court that they wouldn’t be able to afford to pay those award rates as well as support the Aboriginal communities living on the stations. And unfortunately, that’s what happened.
To put their concerns into context, in 1966 and 1967 (the years during which the case was being heard) Central Australia was coming off the back of the devastating ten-year drought. Cattle stations were still struggling to get back on their feet and rebuild their stock. By 1968, they hadn’t yet had sales of cattle to put money in the bank. If they had endured the drought, they had been able to do so for a number of reasons, including an arrangement with the Aboriginal communities on their stations. A large Aboriginal stock camp helped keep the station going and was affordable for the station because of the low wages. In return, the Aboriginal stockmen had a home base for their community of women, children and elderly. They were given a regular supply of food and clothes, medical treatment and other provisions. Supporting Aboriginal communities in that way was a legal requirement for all station owners and it mostly worked for everyone. At that time, it was an accepted way of life, for better or worse.
Aboriginal men’s ongoing cultural commitments also meant they often went away on traditional law business or walkabout. The cattlemen didn’t know when they would go or how long they would be away. That meant if cattlemen had to pay equal wages for all stockmen, they would now be more likely to employ white stockman who were there full-time. Thus, the decision to raise wages for Aboriginal stockmen, while so important and overdue, had what I thought were sad consequences. Over time, fewer Aboriginal stockmen would be employed by, and fewer communities would live on, stations.
Throughout the Equal Wages case, Mum and Dad looked at what it would mean for Bond Springs. There were still only four or five Aboriginal stockmen working there off and on, along with some of the women and community members, also off and on. Although money was tight, Mum and Dad were determined to find a way to pay all their workers properly. Dad believed strongly in the importance of the native stockmen continuing to work with cattle and stock.
However, fate and Northern Territory laws intervened.
In 1964, the Northern Territory Government had lifted restrictions on the right of Aboriginal people to drink alcohol. While that was clearly a long-overdue social justice right as well, alcohol had unforeseen and devastating consequences for many Aboriginal people in Central Australia.
Due to our proximity to Alice Springs, by 1966 the Aboriginal people had already started walking into town so they could get ‘grog’, as it was called—full-strength beer or flagon wine. They left the stock camp and the house. They went alone, in groups, then in droves. They walked to the road and hitched a ride. Eventually they started to vanish before our eyes.
The women first disappeared when the men were away at the stock camp. On returning to find their women gone, the men would front Dad and demand, ‘You take us to town, Boss.’ Dad would drive them in to Alice Springs in his little old green Land Rover. Then they would scour the creek beds of the Todd River. The women were scattered around the various camps that had sprung up to accommodate the increasing number of Aboriginal people arriving in Alice Springs for the grog, and it was often a long and fruitless investigation well into the night. Often Dad just had to leave them there and go back the next day.
It was a difficult position that Dad found himself in. If he’d said no—he wouldn’t take the men into town—he feared trouble. Or the men would simply have walked in and possibly not come back.
Before long Dad couldn’t hold the stock camp together. In a last-ditch attempt, he would drive into Alice before dawn to look for his stockmen. He’d go to the camps, opening up swag after swag along the riverbed in the pre-dawn light. ‘Tommy?’ ‘Billy?’ Bleary-eyed men would stare back at him, most mumbling, ‘No, Boss.’ If he got a ‘Yes, Boss,’ he’d ask them if they wanted to come back to work. Some would come but others increasingly staye
d in town.
Some of the Aboriginal men and women then started using taxis.
I remember waking up to the revving engine and horn of a taxi pulling up in front of the house about 4 a.m. Dad would have to go out and pay an angry taxi driver who was returning a group of loud and drunk people.
Before long the community drifted into town for good and we never saw them again. The call of the drink was overwhelming for people who had been denied legal rights for so long. The effect of alcohol was swift and devastating. Proud horsemen with cattle skills and a deep understanding of the bush way of life over the next few years became lost in a haze of alcoholism.
Within ten years, Dad’s four top stockmen were dead. Alcohol poisoning and alcohol-fuelled car accidents were the cause.
‘They were the best,’ Dad said sadly, angrily.
7
‘Delta Queeee-Bec Golf’
Dad made two important decisions early on. It meant spending more money, but by now he had become quite good at doing that, with the help of the Elders GM overdraft.
‘Sometimes you have to spend money to make money,’ he’d say, then add sternly, in case we got the wrong idea, ‘but only if you know that you can pay it back.’
First of all, he bought a beautiful thoroughbred stallion and several good mares. The idea was to breed foals so he would have good horses in the future to manage his new cattle herd. We only had a few bony old stock horses left after the drought, and some skinny, poorly bred brumbies. None of them were much good for stock work. The stock horses had been too knocked about by the drought, and the brumbies were wild and difficult to train. In one diary entry, Dad wrote about one of those brumbies being broken in: ‘Ross rode Toothpaste first time. Got thrown sky high first attempt.’
Dad’s big hope was that the new mares would deliver strong foals, and that the current old stock horses would survive long enough for the foals to grow up and take over. He wanted to avoid using brumbies wherever possible, especially Toothpaste.
Next, he thought we needed a better way to get around. We were wasting so much time on the road between South Australia and the Northern Territory (with this I agreed, heartily) and he wanted to get to places quicker and faster.
So, he bought a small plane, a Cessna 182.
Then he graded a dirt airstrip at both Witchitie and Bond Springs. He studied flying papers at night and practised with a pilot who had flown in the war. That pilot did loop-the-loops to thrill us all. ‘He was a hero in the war,’ Mum whispered to us. We thought he must have been too, as he dived all over the Witchitie plains like a bird catching the winds. We stood on the veranda, gazing up at the plane, awestruck.
Dad wasn’t interested in the thrills. ‘Flying is the quickest way of getting from A to B,’ he told us, and proved his point by flying back and forth between Witchitie and Bond Springs as soon as he got his licence.
‘Be careful, Grant,’ Mum would say, looking anxious, every time he climbed into the little cockpit. But Dad showed no fear at all, only his usual resolve to succeed. We thought it was the most exciting thing imaginable.
So began a whole new way of life for us. The dreaded four-day trips by car were replaced by eight-hour trips by plane. We would all squash in, and fly across empty landscapes and deserts, higher even than the eagles and hawks.
The plane’s call sign was ‘DQG’, short for ‘Delta Quebec Golf ’. Dad would call the air-traffic control tower over the plane radio and pronounce it ‘Delta Queeee-bec Golf ’. I thought he sounded so important!
I loved flying with Dad in DQG from the very first moment. I felt alive and happy up there in the clouds with him. I beamed with pride from inside that my Dad could be so clever, so strong, such a hero.
He flew through the air just like God.
It wasn’t so much fun for the others. M’Lis and Brett got airsick. Mum and Miss Clarke had to nurse either M’Lis or Brett, who usually got sick in their arms. And Mum was terrified we were all going to crash, sooner or later.
There were some things I didn’t like about flying. There was no toilet—only a tin—so we had to hold on, which we sometimes couldn’t do, and the plane was constantly filled with the stink of wee. Not to mention the sickening smell of vomit, and mutton sandwiches (if coming from Witchitie) or beef sandwiches (if coming from Bond Springs).
Luckily, I could hide away in my imagination (and a story book when I got older) and forget about everything as we crossed the wide, empty spaces below. From that moment on I only ever wanted to fly.
We would always land at Oodnadatta en route (Dad taught me this expression and I liked it a lot, because he said it was foreign). We couldn’t make the whole trip on one tank of avgas, so we had to stop halfway.
Oodnadatta was a place of shimmering silver and pink gibber plains. The heat rose in waves off the tarmac like it might melt before our eyes. As soon as Dad had landed and taxied up to the fuel tanks, we would tumble out and rush to the cracked, concrete toilet block on the edge of the airstrip. Mum followed us, usually carrying a tin full of wee to empty into one of the old toilets.
Then we would all stand outside and drink in deep breaths of hot, sandy desert air while Dad pumped fuel into the tank. Family friends the Greenwoods (such a beautiful and soothing name, I thought) would sometimes visit during our stopover, and letting them know that we were there was the best fun. Dad would zoom low over their house. The silver corrugated-iron roofs of the town under the plane seemed to blend into each other, so I was always amazed that Dad could pick out theirs from the air.
Dad’s strict instructions were to be quiet on take-off and landing, and diving (we weren’t allowed to distract him, otherwise Mum said he might crash) but we always forgot in our excitement.
M’Lis, Brett and I would squeal, ‘Ahhh!’ when Dad went into the dive and then as he pulled up out of the dive, we’d squeal, ‘Ahhh!’ again.
Dad would roar, ‘Quiet!’ and we’d push back into our seats, shutting our eyes.
I secretly wondered whether Dad was even allowed to dive over a town, especially to dive-bomb a house, but he did it regardless, and we loved it.
Once Dad had landed, we’d forget the trouble we were in, jump out and wait for the haze of dust as the Greenwood ute bounced down the road to greet us. Sometimes it would take ages for them to get there, and we’d hop up and down, hoping Dad wouldn’t say, ‘Oh well, they’re not there, climb aboard, we’ll head off.’
But they always came, even if it took a while. They’d bring cold drinks, which we’d fall upon, and after hugs and rapid conversations we’d depart with promises to ‘come and stay soon’.
If we had more time, we would stay overnight. Mum and Dad always had a happy time, then. We’d huddle around Mum’s legs and gaze up at the Greenwood kids, Billy and Lindy, who were older than us. We were mostly too shy to get words out.
‘Is this why Mrs Greenwood is called Mrs Greenwood?’ I asked Mum on one visit, gazing at the glossy green leaves of the beautiful plants and ferns that were growing around their weatherboard house. They offered blessed, cool relief.
‘No, darling,’ Mum said with a smile. ‘Mrs Greenwood and her green plants are just what is called a coincidence.’
I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I loved the word.
There was another reason Dad liked stopping at Oodna (as the locals called it).
A man called Peck was in charge of the airstrip and fuel, and Dad liked talking to him. Mrs Peck ran the local store. They were refugees who spoke broken English and who’d turned up in Oodna after the war. Dad was fascinated by their stories.
While Peck refilled the plane, he and Dad would talk about things happening in the big, wide world, mostly the wars that had been, or were going on now. I didn’t know a lot about them but I did learn very early on that there was the First World War, the Second World War and a Cold War. And other wars, further back in history. Dad had uncles and relatives who had been in both the First and Second World wars, and of course we kne
w that Papa Parnell had been a famous Rat of Tobruk. We feared not just the Germans and the Japanese, but now also the Russians. It was all very complicated.
After talking to Peck, Dad would often share stories and thoughts with Mum (and any other adults who were around). I would listen quietly, taking it all in. Dad said he truly believed that if people didn’t understand world history, it would repeat itself, and the world would suffer from ongoing evil, wars, droughts and starvation. For Dad, it seemed the greatest evil during his time was Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and communism and socialism in their many forms.
We may have lived an isolated life, with no phone and only letters, telegrams and the two-way radio to communicate with the outside world, but Dad taught himself everything by reading and talking to other people. He hated ignorance. He asked us questions constantly to make us learn and understand things, too. He knew that knowledge was power. I guess that’s why he had those twelve beautiful encyclopedias on his shelf.
Instinctively, I wanted to learn about things Dad was interested in. It made me feel a connection with a father with whom I otherwise had not much in common. I was a little girl and he was an exceptionally busy and driven man, focused on paying back a huge overdraft and meeting the Land Board NT’s conditions.
After all, if anything went wrong, there could be forfeiture of the Bond Springs lease (‘forfeiture’ was another word I heard often, which meant the end of everything, which seemed as bad as all the three wars put together, if not worse). And if that happened, it would be caused by a species called bloody bureaucrats.
They were a group of men in white shorts and long socks, carrying clipboards and often sporting beards, who arrived from the government to tell bush people what they could and couldn’t do on their properties.
Dad believed bloody bureaucrats had no understanding of the land or what was required to work it; the difficulties and the risks. They weren’t open-minded to opportunities or helping stations have a go. They were only interested in playing God, shutting stations down, and making it as hard as possible for those ‘working their guts out’.
An Alice Girl Page 6