by Tim Flannery
The incessant humidity and afternoon rumble of thunder over the ocean proclaimed that the wet season was imminent, so we decided to travel on to Darwin in convoy with others who would leave after Boxing Day. We were, as the old bush saying goes, ‘close up flyblown’—flat broke—but a phone call to Mum saved the day and our budget once again stretched to the odd beer. So we went to one of Broome’s two pubs to celebrate reaching the halfway mark of our circumnavigation. We had been on the road for a month.
Broome had not been discovered by tourists then, and was still a tiny settlement with a neglected air. A few pearl luggers lay in the mud at low tide by the wharf and the beaches were mostly deserted—on some there was no one for miles. At the caravan park we learned that Broome was a magnet for people fleeing either the long arm of the law or angry wives—the kind of place where nicknames abounded while surnames were hard to learn. The town’s few shops had the feel of the Chinese trade stores that are scattered through the Pacific—piles of goods here and there, tins of steamed duck resting alongside rubber thongs on rudimentary shelves.
The pubs seemed to be colour-coded—one for black and one for white—though entry to the white pub seemed more tightly controlled. Standing on the balcony of the black pub we spied the ebony face and white mane of Lawrence Williams. ‘Can I buy you a beer?’ was all I could think of by way of introducing myself. Lawrence accepted and we started to talk. I was captivated by his voice, for he spoke the distinctive ‘pidgin’ of Aboriginal Australia, but with an unmistakable English plum in his mouth, making his voice as incongruous as his appearance.
Lawrence had been born and educated on a mission north of Broome where a Church of England pastor and his wife spoke the Queen’s English—which explained why Lawrence’s voice called to mind the BBC World Service. Among his most vivid memories was the bombing of Broome on 3 March 1942, when the Japanese destroyed a fleet of flying boats that had evacuated Dutch women and children from Java. Lawrence had walked the beach for days retrieving mangled bodies. In his youth he had also hunted dugong. ‘You know, dugong just like a lady,’ he said winking at me. I didn’t know what he meant, but learned afterwards that the genitals of these large marine mammals are as similar to those of a female human as nature ever invented. As the days passed we often met Lawrence around town and stopped to chat. I soon came to appreciate that the first Aborigine I ever became acquainted with was a fine person as well as an endless source of knowledge.
Christmas Day dawned to an unaccustomed bustle of activity at the caravan park. A sort of ladies auxiliary had been formed which had, the day before, been busy making devilled prunes, sausage rolls, salads and roast chickens. Some generous soul (perhaps a fisherman) had donated a huge basin full of cooked prawns, and various bottles of celebratory lubricants had found their way into the open. The men were at work erecting and laying out the tables that had been gathered from every corner, and upon which bowls, plates and bottles were placed. The early start was needed to create the right atmosphere for the great outdoor celebration and, in deference to the weather, it would be more of a brunch than the typical southern Australian afternoon affair.
After surviving for some days on mangoes plucked from the park’s trees, the Christmas feast was looming large for Bill and me. As the morning ripened to a sticky humidity we stood ready to contribute our carefully conserved beer and packet of nuts to the communal feast. Then an early reveller, clad only in a dubious-looking pair of shorts, stumbled out of a dilapidated caravan. He was holding a lemonade bottle filled with an orange liquid. ‘Happy Christmas. I’m Paddy,’ he said in a thick burr as he stumbled towards us, already the worse for wear.
Paddy had the solid jowls and sagging lower eyelids of a bulldog, and by the look of him had led a ‘terrible hard life’. He told us that the Melbourne Waterside Workers’ Federation had sent him to Broome years earlier with a brief to unionise the waterfront. ‘I’m the only communist in Broome,’ he lamented, ‘and every bastard is trying to kill me. See the doctor over there?’ he said, pointing to a middle-aged, neatly dressed man approaching the feast tables. ‘I’m the luckiest man alive escaping that bugger. Last time I was in hospital he tried to kill me. Next time he’ll do for me for sure.’
Paddy’s problems, it transpired, stemmed from his discovery that nearly everyone on the Broome wharves was an illegal immigrant. They ran a mile when the union was mentioned, leaving Paddy with nothing to do but replace his precious bodily fluids from a bottle of booze. The caravan park had been his home for over a decade.
As the gathering grew Bill and I gorged on devilled prunes, chips, sausages and salad, and we started to meet more of the locals. One Aboriginal woman wandered through the crowd, vacant-eyed, nursing a massive, raw wound on her hand—as if her thumb had almost been severed. Shocked at her injury, I tried to find the man Paddy had identified as a doctor. All he said in response was, ‘Old Pol. Alcoholic prostitute. We see her almost every week at the hospital. No way I’m treating her today—she can bloody well wait until after Boxing Day.’ I was shocked by his callousness, but worse was to come.
By afternoon only a hardened core of caravan-park locals remained, and I found myself talking to a wizened, grey-haired bloke with a wild look in his eyes. He claimed he had once been the local jailer, but had just emerged from a stint inside himself. ‘The fuckin’ magistrate put me away for three months,’ he whinged. ‘Reckoned I failed in me duty. All I did was let the fellas out on a Saturday night. They all come back by Sunday morning.’
‘Did you let everyone out of jail?’ I asked incredulously.
‘What d’ya think I am! A bloody idiot?’ he screamed. ‘I didn’t let the bloody Abos out!’
As lightning flashed on a darkening western horizon, Paddy once again sought out our company. ‘Come back to me caravan,’ he said, ‘and have a little tipple.’ The place was an appalling mess, foul-smelling as only an unclean tropical habitation can be. Paddy opened his fridge and cockroaches cascaded out from around the door. Inside was nothing but two wine flagons filled with the same sickly orange liquid. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s me rocket fuel—methylated mango-pulp,’ he said proudly as he picked up three grubby glasses.
I did my best to be social while not drinking the stuff. Paddy fumbled for a packet of old photos, sorted through the faded images and began a well-rehearsed monologue. ‘This is the wife that left me,’ he moaned and passed us a black-and-white print of a portly woman in 1950s suburban attire. ‘And these are the children I’ve never seen for years,’ he added and passed us another of two toddlers. He was building to a full-blooded keening as he came to the last photo, which showed a small terrier sitting outside the caravan. ‘And this is the dog that left me,’ he wailed, before shuffling through the entire stack again. Bill and I made our excuses and left, though Paddy hardly seemed to notice.
That evening we found Lawrence Williams at the blackfellas’ pub, sitting on the steps, surrounded by drunken revellers. ‘Happy Christmas, Lawrence,’ I said. To my horror he rounded on me, fist drawn back. ‘You fuckin’ bastard,’ he roared. ‘I’ll kill you.’ Still not realising the danger I was in, I said ‘Hey, it’s me!’ and pushed my can of beer into his hand before backing away. He looked confused, but still murderously angry about something. And in my innocence I had no idea what it was.
I understand better now. What I didn’t know in 1975 was that for many years people like Lawrence Williams had been denied both respect and fundamental human rights. I don’t know what conditions Lawrence endured on the mission, but I do know that many such places were so paternalistic in their approach that they robbed proud men of their dignity. Until the 1960s many Aborigines had no right to vote, drink in a pub, work under union awards or travel off their reserves without a pass, and until 1967 they had not even been counted in the Australian census. In short, they were considered fit to fight for Australia in the armed services, but not good enough to count as Australians.
Looking
back it seems strange that I remember vividly the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy, yet I have no memory of that 1967 landmark referendum. It was if a cloak of embarrassed silence had enveloped my white society—the outcome of a deep shame rooted in the unspoken knowledge of our treatment of ‘them’. Nor did I realise how close those frontier days of violence between black and white—when guns and spears spoke a common language—were. Within a few hundred kilometres of where Lawrence and I stood, Aborigines who had never seen a white man still held their country. I would be twenty-two when the last of those traditional Aboriginal nomads walked in from the desert.
5
Of Nailtails and Nailed Tyres
The wet season had set in by the time we headed for Halls Creek. On the first afternoon the sky darkened as if bruised and battered, then a tropical storm burst upon us. We drove on for five minutes or so, but when the rain became so torrential that I could barely see my handlebars, our convoy stopped and Bill and I took shelter in one of the caravans. It was all over in an hour or so, and the thunder and lightning that had hushed all conversation drifted with the clouds into the distance. As the rain cleared I could see the worn landscape of the southern Kimberley, the rocks resembling ruined castles with water rushing out of every crevice. Our vehicles were in the midst of what now resembled an inland sea. Nearby, only a line of great, silver baobab trees—still to sprout their leaves and doubtless marking a creek line—could be seen above the water. It was time to stop for the night.
The following morning progress was excruciatingly slow. The inland sea had receded, but every floodway and creek crossing was running and these low points were floored with concrete that had sprouted a coating of slime—deadly for motorbikes. When the dirt road passed through a patch of scrub a lesser hazard presented itself in the form of a lithe, muscular shape that darted out onto the road almost under my wheels. It was a small, sandy-coloured wallaby, and it set my heart on fire, for a peculiarity of its gait revealed it as a great rarity. The grunter, also known as the organ-grinder or northern nailtail wallaby (Onychogalea unguifera), has a characteristic hopping posture, its left paw placed somewhat in front of the right, with elbows out as a bouncer might if holding two men in headlocks. The creature seems to work hard as it gets along, for its arms rotate and it emits an audible grunt with every leap. Just why it behaves in this way is not known, in fact very little is known about the creature’s ecology and evolution. Aboriginal hunters knew it well, though, indicating its lopsided gait (which extends to one foot being placed slightly in advance of the other) in their sign language. If a man, stalking through scrub, held his two index fingers out, one somewhat in front of the other, you knew him to be on the lookout for a small, solitary kangaroo which can explode from under a bush with the velocity of a rocket.
In 1981, in the Northern Territory, I would make the acquaintance of this creature again, but this second meeting had less favourable consequences for the wallaby. A grunter dashed out from the scrub and before I could swerve it fell under the wheels of my truck. Although dismayed at the collision, it provided my first opportunity to examine it in detail. Except for its long, whip-like tail, it looked like a small agile wallaby (Notamacropus agilis). The tail has a black crest of hairs on its upper surface, culminating in a black tuft, in which is embedded a flat, black nail the size and thickness of my thumbnail. Just why nailtail wallabies grow such a remarkable excrescence at the end of their tail is still unknown, as no one has ever seen it put to use.
I scooped the body onto the back of the truck, and back at camp I dissected its unusual feet to see what could be learned of their anatomy and function. They are built for extreme speed in a forward direction and, like a horse with its single hoof per leg, the side toes were almost vestigial. Curious as to the culinary potential of the species, I took a few steaks from the haunches and made a stew. It was delicious—far superior to red kangaroo—with a taste resembling steak and mushrooms. To my annoyance I discovered on emerging from my tent the next morning that birds of prey had stolen the carcass, depriving the museum of a specimen and me of further investigation.
While the northern nailtail can still be seen in Australia’s tropics, the two other nailtail species have not fared as well. The hare-sized crescent nailtail wallaby (Onychogalea lunata) once abounded in the west and centre of the continent. It had the unique trick of escaping predators by climbing the inside of a hollow tree, much like a sweep going up a chimney, and emerging at a spout high above to keep an eye on its pursuer. This was an insufficient defence, however, against habitat degradation, and by the 1930s the species had all but vanished. The last one ever seen by a European was captured around 1927 by Mr W. A. Wills, a ‘dogger’ (dingo trapper) working on the northern Nullarbor Plain, who sent it to the Australian Museum in Sydney. In the early 1980s scientists Norm McKenzie and Tony Robinson undertook a survey of the Nullarbor Plain’s fauna. They were delighted to learn that Wills was well known in the region and still alive. Excited at the prospect of learning something about the extinct wallaby from one who had seen it in life, they tracked him down to an aged care home in Albany, Western Australia and swiftly made an appointment to visit the nonagenarian. Upon arriving, however, they were dismayed to learn that Mr Wills had departed the evening before. Evidently nervous at the prospect of a visit from government officials, the old fellow had fled into the night in his Holden ute, driving right across the outback to seek refuge with his brother in Queensland!
The story of the bridled nailtail wallaby (Onychogalea fraenata) of inland eastern Australia is only a little less tragic. This animal is larger than its western relative, around the size of a collie dog, and with its boldly striped shoulders, hips and face, it is one of the most beautiful members of the kangaroo family. It once abounded throughout the inland agricultural zone from Queensland to Victoria, where it was known as ‘Flash Jack’, perhaps because of its speed and striking colours. Its pads, crisscrossing the scrub and plains in all directions, possibly gave Australians the expression of ‘taking to the wallaby track’ or ‘taking the wallaby’ as slang for travelling the remote outback has it. In 1862 the biologist Gerard Krefft described it as ‘the most common of the smaller species of the kangaroo tribe’, yet by the 1930s it too was widely believed to be extinct. Very few vanished species are given a second chance, but the bridled nailtail wallaby is one, and the circumstances of its rediscovery are as unusual as they are fortuitous.
The story began in 1973 when a fencing contractor, Mr Challacombe of Duaringa, was called to fence an area of brigalow scrub near Dingo in central Queensland. In those days pastoralists were given incentives by the Queensland government for clearing scrub, and could even lose their land if they did not ‘improve’ their holdings by clearing a percentage of it on a regular basis. This property was one of the last in the region to go under the ball and chain—the cocky who owned it perhaps reasoning that the yield from its poor soil was not worth the effort. Or perhaps it was a case of mañana. Whatever the reason the fatal hour was now at hand, and fencing and clearing had to be done come what may. Mr Challacombe was—strangely perhaps for one of his profession—a devoted reader of Woman’s Day magazine, its pages filled with handy recipes, knitting patterns and hints on maintaining a happy marriage. The issue Challacombe carried that day happened to include an article on Australia’s extinct animals, and he noticed a striking resemblance between an 1840s painting of the bridled nailtail wallaby in the magazine and the creatures hopping through the soon-to-be-cleared brigalow.
Challacombe spoke to a National Parks ranger, and a professional investigation confirmed his identification. It was clear that the property had to be purchased to preserve the creatures, but that was not an easy process, for the discovery had instantly converted the most backward property in the region to a unique conservation asset of the highest value. Eventually a price was settled on which, it is rumoured, was sufficient to allow its owner to retire to the Gold Coast, there to lead
the life of Riley. The wallaby too is now prospering, and plans are afoot to reintroduce it to parts of its former range.
After my first encounter with the northern nailtail wallaby, the journey towards Darwin just got worse and worse. The road was in awful condition, with huge potholes everywhere. We arrived in Fitzroy Crossing, still around 1000 kilometres from Darwin, covered with grazes and wet to the bone. The ‘Crossing’ I encountered that evening is something I wish never to see again. We stopped at a pub which was surrounded with makeshift camps. Some Aborigines were living under traditional gunyahs, while others had only canvas, or even the upturned bodies of burned-out cars over their heads. As I walked towards the post office an old man scrambled out from under a canvas sheet and asked, ‘You want woman? Ten dollar—hey, you! Just ten dollar! I got two women.’
That evening I lay under the stars in my dispatch rider’s uniform, listening to the shouting, screams and thumps in the drunken camp, but a few hours later the chaotic sounds began to be replaced by a low, rhythmic chanting. Then the throbbing of the didjeridu rang out, accompanied by the clicking of full and empty beer cans (replacing the clap-sticks of earlier times). I could see young men, drunk but dancing, moving in and out of the light of a big fire. The Cobba-Cobba, as corroborees are known in the northwest, went on until the small hours.
Even today it is hard to convey the mix of emotions that Fitzroy Crossing brought out in me: despair at the utter degradation of the Aboriginal people gathered there; amazement and admiration at how they clung to their culture; hatred of the publican and my own society that was living off their misery. And, most of all, confusion. How had this come to be?