Damned if I Do

by Philip Nitschke

  It was unreasonable for me to take a set against him on account of his father’s actions but this knowledge didn’t help what was an already rocky relationship. I mentioned who his father was to someone; this got back to my supervisor and it was all downhill from then on. He hadn’t been much help with the tricky project before, but now he became almost obstructionist, and I was in trouble. As well, he didn’t have a good track record for his students getting PhDs.

  What usually happened when things went sour with a doctoral candidate’s thesis was that he or she was awarded a Masters degree as a consolation prize, which usually meant goodbye to an academic career. I was saved from this fate, first by Mal Phillips, a visiting Canadian lecturer, who more or less took me and the project under his wing. (I was pleasantly surprised when Mal turned up at one of my ­voluntary euthanasia workshops in Vancouver in 2010.) My second saviour was Max Brennan, head of the department. Professor Brennan couldn’t become my official supervisor, as that would have been too much of a slight to my appointed supervisor, but he took over the steering of the research and had a hand in the appointment of my examiners.

  But having the PhD didn’t smooth my path to an ­academic career. The Vietnam War may have been winding down but the Cold War was still going on, and those of us on the left were still highly critical of American policies. I learned that Flinders University, along with others in Australia, was ­accepting funding that could be sourced back to American companies involved in the development of high-tech US weapons.

  The thought of my research being even partly funded in this way upset me. Instead of making my protest through university channels—submissions to committees, approaches to faculty deans and the vice-chancellor, etc.—I went public.

  My denunciation of the university policy was published in The Advertiser and picked up by the ABC. I was interviewed on ABC radio’s AM program, voicing my anger. Although my demeanour is usually quiet, I can become heated and was on this occasion. Despite his support for me during my earlier difficulties, Professor Brennan was unimpressed. He hauled me in to explain myself. The message, which I received loud and clear, was that what I had done wasn’t a good career-in-physics move.

  To tell the truth, I wasn’t that surprised. In any case, I’d taken longer, owing to the difficulties, with the PhD course than was usual and I felt I’d spent too much time as a student. Other people in the last stages of their PhDs were ­applying here, there and everywhere for post-docs and anxiously watching for the mail, with commiserations for knock-backs, and celebrations and big piss-ups for successes.

  After AM though, I received two unexpected letters. One was from the American actor and stage director Hayes Gordon, of the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney, saying something like, ‘You’ve got a future on the stage, boy. Do you want to come and work for me?’ The other had been written on a typewriter with missing keys, and read: ‘I heard you on AM, great stuff. Come and work here, we need people like you.’ It was signed Don McLeod. And I’m thinking, Who the hell’s Don McLeod? He can’t even type.

  I was about to throw the letter out when I ­mentioned it to Chris Starr, one of my friends from the politics department. He said, ‘Bloody hell, you got a letter from Don McLeod. That’s amazing.’ The next thing, the letter was doing the rounds of the university and I quickly came up to speed on just who Don McLeod was. I learned that he’d led the first Aboriginal strike in the Pilbara in 1948, the year after I was born, and had written the book How the West was Lost about it. There’d been a film about him and he was a legend. He was living on Strelley station, which Indigenous people had bought, and was helping them run it.

  Two amazingly different job offers but I didn’t take either. I occasionally speculate on just how different life might have been if I had.

  FIVE

  Wave Hill

  It was a rusty little humpy, not more than four feet high, eight feet deep, by perhaps five feet wide. Vincent Lingiari, the elder of the tribe, the sacred Kadijeri man and a noble human being, had had to crawl into this dwelling, often after working from daylight to dark.

  Frank Hardy, The Unlucky Australians

  Don Atkinson was the laboratory and workshops manager at Flinders. I needed materials like glassware and electronics, and mechanical equipment for my project, and so I was dealing with Don all the time, negotiating with him about what I could and couldn’t have. He had a strong left-wing political background, which spilled over into all aspects of his life. He was an intriguing person and I got to like him a lot. I was incredibly sad when he died of mesothelioma, in April 2007 and was very glad I had had the chance to talk to him in Adelaide shortly before he died.

  He had a little entourage of postgraduate students, all politically left, and we had drinking sessions on Fridays at the Tonsley Park or Flagstaff hotels. We thought ourselves smarter than anyone else—that we knew what was going on. Elitist, really. Don used to go to places like Nigeria, and come back with stories about how things were in the third world and in South Africa. That was inspirational, but he also used to make the point that it was way too easy to carry on about problems overseas; it wasn’t that we shouldn’t be concerned about them, but that there were things that were very wrong in Australia. Don was the one who first told me about Wave Hill.

  The August 1966 strike by Aboriginal stockmen at Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory made news around the world and highlighted Australia’s ­shameful ­treatment of its Indigenous people. The strike, and the accompanying land rights claim by the Gurindji tribe, led to a struggle that lasted for eight years. The story of those hard years is encapsulated in Frank Hardy’s The Unlucky Australians, and Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly’s well-known song ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’.

  A number of Aboriginal leaders toured Australia, ­seeking political, financial and moral support. In 1971 I attended such a talk at Flinders University given by Lupna Giari, or Captain Major as he was known, one of the Gurindji ­elders. The strike had gripped my imagination from the start and Lupna’s talk intensified my interest. Disenchanted with academic pursuits and with an emerging interest in issues of social justice, I wanted to join in the struggle.

  After the talk, I asked Captain Major how I could help and was told a gardener was desperately needed. Over the next weeks, some politicking went on and there was a coup within the post-graduate student association that led to them setting up a fund to pay for a gardener at Wave Hill. This money initially funded my role, although there was other support as well. I wasn’t alone in my passionate support for the Gurindji; far from it. Many unions, such as the Waterside Workers Federation, were on side and Frank Hardy’s book greatly helped get people ­interested in this Aboriginal cause.

  My intentions were more modest: I wasn’t looking to write anything; I just wanted to be of practical help. My ­initial plan was to go, as a gardener, to where the Gurindji were camped, on strike and hoping for land to run their own cattle station. This was at Daguragu—whitefella name Wattie Creek—around 800 kilometres south-west of Darwin. I knew almost nothing about gardening and wasn’t much interested in it, but I was prepared to give it a go, just to be able to help.

  However, there was a delay before Jenny and I could leave for Wave Hill. I’d become friendly with Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger in the Department of Oceanography. The department, later renamed Earth Sciences, looked at oceanography, seismology and meteorology. It was ­running a couple of field stations and one of them was at Cape Du Couedic, the bleak exposed south-west tip of Kangaroo Island. Schwerdtfeger said to me that I looked like someone who needed a break. Presumably, he thought that if I had a rest I might settle down and stop doing self-destructive things like drinking too much and shooting my mouth off!

  The oceanography department wanted someone to look after the field station and the lighthouse, and it sounded good to me. There were three houses down at the end of the island, built at the turn of the century for
a time when the light had to be tended; now they were deserted and the place was very isolated. I was told that there’d been difficulties with people in the past. Recently, a couple, an ex-laboratory assistant and his partner, had come to grief. She was pregnant, which didn’t help, and they had brought a cat, which was forbidden, because the field station land was excised out of the Flinders Chase National Park. The ranger, George Lonzer, kicked them off the island.

  Schwerdtfeger said, ‘See if you can straighten this mess out. Go down there and write a book or something.’ He took Jenny and me out to dinner and painted a picture of the beautiful, peaceful life we could have. So we packed up about ten tea chests of stuff, god knows why, and loaded all on the Troubridge ferry from Port Adelaide. There was a big send-off, as though we were going to London, even though it was only about five hours to the island.

  The job paid $11 a week all up to look after the field ­station, which meant just being there and taking phone calls, and organising for when the oceanographers came over for various research projects. I had to do the meteorology readings at nine and three o’clock and send through the results. It was a spectacular place, but bleak and lonely. In winter, the storms would come in straight off the Southern Ocean and blow hard. Of the three houses two were derelict. Jenny and I got busy fixing up the habitable house, which had National Trust protection and was well fitted out.

  There was a deep pool at the bottom of a high, steep cliff, and the previous occupants had left a series of ropes and ladders that enabled a fairly perilous descent. I got a cray pot and every morning would clamber down these ropes and ladders, then get into my wetsuit and swim out. The water was cold but beautifully clear and deep, and I could see my cray pot metres below. I’d pull it up, swim back, pull it ashore, put these giant crays in my rucksack and clamber back up. It was hard work getting the crays, and I sometimes thought I’d eventually lose interest and never eat another crayfish in my life. We were having crayfish morning and night; I’d never eaten much before because of the expense. But it was the ritual that was satisfying—boiling up the copper and ­dropping in the crays (which did upset me). I also did a lot of spear fishing; we were living off the sea.

  An article with a photograph of Jenny and me on the island appeared in the magazine section of Adelaide’s Sunday Mail, in the wake of the AM interview. The headline was ‘Heaven and $10’.

  After nearly six months, things started to go wrong. We initially had a lot of visitors; we’d do the entertaining, drive them around, take them spear fishing, and they’d say how fantastic everything was. But then we’d drive them to the airstrip at Kingscote and they’d fly back to Adelaide, leaving Jenny and me alone. There started to be silences between us and weren’t getting on well together.

  Jenny began baking cakes and selling them to the ­tourists who came by. But I realised that I was just marking time and had to do something meaningful. Don Atkinson rang up from time to time, and eventually came over to the island. He said, ‘Are you serious about going to Wave Hill, or are you just fucking around?’

  So it was time to make my apologies to Don McLeod and Hayes Gordon and go. Jenny was up for it. I had a Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40 that I’d bought second-hand, one of the first of that model in Australia, and I spent some time ­getting it into condition for the trip north. We loaded it up with seeds and gardening tools and set off, like some modern day Johnny Appleseed. The trip was like going up the river in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The differential broke down in Alice and I had to dismantle it in the Todd riverbed, but it was the hostility from some of the people along the way that shocked us. We had to get rid of the Toyota’s stickers protesting against the US Pine Gap base and cope with being called ‘southern shit-stirrers’.

  On arrival at Wattie Creek, things got off to a bad start. I met David Quinn, who’d been there for a couple of years as a sort of manager of the station’s business—writing and answering letters, ordering and paying for things and so on. He was the only literate white male before I arrived, which made him important. I sensed his hostility immediately and later came to understand it. There was also one white woman in the camp named Lynn Raper. She was an amateur linguist who spent most of her time with the women, writing down the language. It was immediately clear that she and David Quinn were in a relationship.

  Jenny and I were assigned the saddle shed to put our swag in and it was about a hundred metres from the centre of the camp. Nothing much happened for the first few days, but in the early morning of the fifth day I saw a lot of ­unusual activity going on. David Quinn was loading his and Lynn’s stuff into his old Land Rover. One of the elders, Pincher Numiari, came over to me and said there’d been a lot of trouble in the night. He told me it was going to get nasty, that the police would be involved and I’d best keep right out of it. That’s what we did and watched as there was a lot of coming and going; no police, but there were meetings of the elders and a feeling of tension. Neither David Quinn nor Lynn Raper said a word to me. They just drove off in the loaded-up Land Rover.

  Shortly after that, Pincher came over and told me that Vincent Lingiari wanted to see me. Vincent was the leader of the Gurindji people, the one who led the Wave Hill Walk Off in 1966. Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam would later pour sand into Vincent’s hand when the land in question was handed back to the Gurindji. The federal electorate of Lingiari is named in his honour.

  I went to where the elders were having their meeting, and no one said anything about what had actually happened between Mike, Lyn and the community, but it was clearly serious enough for the couple to pack up and leave. Vincent just asked me if I wanted to do the job David Quinn had been doing. I said yes. The job of helping run the place had much more appeal than being a gardener. Still, I had mixed emotions. I was excited by the ­prospect of the more interesting job and pleased that the people seemed to have faith in me, but the tension of the last few days had been high and Jenny and I decided we needed a break. We got in the Toyota and headed off for the closest pub, in Top Springs, 170 kilometres away, for a drink. We hadn’t had a drink in a week.

  We got to the pub, and there was Quinn’s Land Rover. We went into the bar, and I greeted David and Lynn politely.

  ‘What the fuck d’you think you’re doing here?’ Quinn said.

  ‘Just having a drink.’

  ‘You think you know everything,’ he said. ‘But you know fucking nothing. You’ll never be able to work here.’

  Somehow he’d got the idea that I’d been after his job from the start, which wasn’t true. He went on about what had happened at the camp. I was angry by this time and res­ponded, criticising him for talking in public about it. It was just a throwaway line but it was the wrong one at the wrong time.

  Lynn was there and screamed at David to kill me. We went outside. David was a bit reluctant but shaped up for a fist fight. In the end it came down to pushing and shoving each other, and then he broke away.

  ‘You’re not worth it,’ he said. He grabbed Lynn’s arm and they drove off.

  I was sitting on the ground by this time and was a bit shaken. I can understand Lynn’s anger. At the very least, she’d received some bad treatment. I later came, like David Quinn, to resent interlopers. This event was a lesson for me in the kinds of tensions that often develop in places like Wave Hill.

  Jenny and I were in at the deep end, the only ­literate people there. I took on the job of being the community’s administrative manager; I signed the cheques for the ­purchase of stock and acted as Vincent’s secretary. As the land rights issue developed, there was a lot of correspondence to deal with. Jenny befriended the women—the strikers had their families with them, and at times the community numbered more than 200 people—and she was given a ‘skin name’ and adopted by a family.

  The conditions were the toughest I’d ever experienced. We lived in rough sheds made of scrap galvanised iron covered by branches—unbearably hot in the
summer and awash in the Wet. Our shed was one of the best, with a floor composed of stones, but that didn’t make much difference. The Wet was heavy that year, and with the rain, large centipedes came in. The kerosene fridge in the camp centre rarely worked; we had no power and the only communication with the outside world was by unreliable high-frequency radio. The people wanted their land back, and they were prepared to put up with hardship and disease to make their point.

  I doubled as the station mechanic and my Toyota was often the only workable vehicle.1 In such a remote place, working vehicles were more precious than gold. Another vehicle that assumed legendary status was Brian Manning’s Bedford truck, which brought supplies down from Darwin. Brian was a Darwin waterfront worker who was ­instrumental in helping the Gurindji in the mid 1960s, some seven years before I arrived on the scene.