Outback Heroines

by Sue Williams

  For Heather, it became a huge life lesson. She had known tough times before, but nothing compared to this. ‘I’ve always been able to pull things out of a hat when I needed to, and I’m a pretty strong person,’ she says. ‘But when you’re looking down the barrel and you can’t see anything but a bullet . . . you really do think, What can I do next?

  ‘I can see, looking back now, why banks are so horrified by the thought of lending money for trucks. You can start a transport company and lose everything you own, your house, everything, because in the transport industry there are so many rogues who just don’t pay. You do all this work, all your costs are upfront, all your payments, all your fuel, all your tyres, all your wages – and at the end of the month when you expect your cheque it never comes!’

  Heather Jones is doing what she loves most in the world: thundering through the Pilbara at the wheel of a massive road train, a smile on her face as she powers past the burnt ochre gorges, scattered with wildflowers.

  Her nails are manicured and polished, her hair straightener is stored in the back, and she has a pair of high-heeled shoes to change into later. But while she likes to express her femininity, the gently spoken woman never lets that get in the way of doing her job as well as she can. Putting up a full set of gates on the road train – with five gates to each side of the three 45-foot trailers to hold the load in – and then chaining and strapping it down has this morning left her soaked in sweat and it’ll be at least another 12 hours until she can have a shower, if she’s lucky. But she doesn’t mind. She has a foil packet of ready-to-go curry in her bag, enough water to keep her going for a week, and a clear conscience. Based in Karratha once more, she’s managed to pay off most of her debts, she still has one truck left and she’s back driving for herself.

  ‘She’s a bugger of a lady,’ says Wally Campbell, the owner of a heavy haulage transport company in Perth for whom she once worked. ‘She works bloody hard and she’s always on a big crusade to help other people. I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for her. She has very high morals.’

  Things are now settling down after a turbulent few years. Her daughter Kersti, now aged 25, is a trained beauty therapist and working as an office manager, while Chelsea, 24, is a part-time model and works in a Perth boutique. ‘We’re all very, very close,’ says Kersti. ‘We’re both really proud of our mum. She’s faced some tough times, but she’s always come through. Other women might have given up and moped around and felt sorry for themselves when they had setbacks, but she’s always managed to move on – without ever becoming bitter – and do her best both for us and for others who’ve needed a helping hand.’

  There are many who’ve benefitted from her efforts. Lyndal Denny, a woman who once campaigned against ‘aggressive’ truckies through her CoastToCoast100 organisation, was so impressed by Heather and her arguments on behalf of the drivers, she took her licence to drive a heavy rigid vehicle, upgraded it to road train status and got a job as a truck driver herself. She’s now working with Heather on a new road safety campaign. Lyndal says she will forever be grateful to Heather. ‘She took the time to come and visit me, to sit down, to talk rationally, to educate,’ she says. ‘We pondered together the possibility of finding a way to build a bridge between motorists and truck drivers with a view to reducing the road toll, changing all driver attitudes and stopping the carnage. She’s a woman not afraid to stand up for her industry, looking to save lives and prepared to come together with others coming from alternative perspectives. She is truly an inspiration to women everywhere,’ she says.

  Heather’s mum, Connie, has also joined the industry. At 60 years old, she found herself at a loose end after her 37-year marriage finally broke down, and came to stay with Heather, who put her to work driving the pilot vehicles that precede over-sized trucks. She’s now embraced it as a whole new lease on life and now, at 70, is busy travelling all over Australia in her new career. In the meantime, Heather’s constantly being visited by all manner of truckies, calling in to say thanks for her efforts at improving the industry.

  ‘Sometimes difficult things can happen to you in life, but it’s how you get through them that defines you as a person,’ says Heather, now aged 47. ‘I’ve woken up to some of the values my parents taught me all those years ago. They used to say, “Just be happy with what you’ve got.” These days I may only drive one truck, but I love it, and do I really need any more? I look out through the windscreen and I can see the world out there, and a stunning place it is, too.

  ‘And there are all these beautiful people who are out there too, on the road seven days a week for the community. Without them, there’d be no mines, no food, no roads, no houses, no clothes. You need trucks to survive in this world, especially here in the Outback, and we’re all so much richer for them.’

  13

  COMPASSION RATIONS

  Jeanette Brown, Cherbourg, Queensland

  There were no ‘good old days’ in one part of the Australian bush. How could there have been? In this old Queensland country township, parents were routinely separated from their children and had to apply for permission to visit them. People were forced to queue for meagre rations of food, with flour often contaminated with weevils. Three-quarters of hard-earned wages were kept by the government for safekeeping, but never returned. Mortality rates were 10 times greater than for the rest of the nation.

  But it was only when Jeanette Brown was in her 40s, when she started doing some research into her heritage, that she realised why her grandmother simply never spoke of the good old days of her childhood.

  Her eyes fill with tears when she thinks of the kind of lives her grandparents, and her parents in turn, were forced to endure. For they were banished to a settlement that was virtually a prison camp for men, women and children, whose only ‘crime’ was to have black skin.

  Once, her ancestors roamed freely over Australia’s Outback, hunting and gathering food according to the seasons. But her grandparents spent most of their adult lives as prisoners in one of the most inhumane, impoverished institutions ever seen in Australia – and perhaps even the world – with her parents born and bred in the same appalling conditions. ‘It was heart-breaking to discover what their lives were really like,’ says Jeanette today. ‘Absolutely heart-breaking. And it’s awful to know that they never shared any of those stories with us as we were growing up. We only came across the truth in our research. It was completely devastating.’

  Jeanette’s grandparents were among Indigenous people taken from all over Australia by the Queensland government from the early 1900s and herded into the little settlement of Barambah, later renamed Cherbourg, 250 kilometres north-west of Brisbane in the South Burnett region. There, Aboriginal people from up to 55 different language groups, often with totally conflicting patriarchal and matriarchal authority structures and radically different cultural codes, were made to live together in barbaric, jail-like conditions, with most unable even to communicate with each other. Then, to confound the confusion and misery, state officials took away their children and put them in dormitories behind barbed wire, forbidding mothers and fathers to see them without permission.

  While some residents were put to work inside the settlement, others were allowed permits to leave for agreed periods to work elsewhere on cheap labour contracts drawn up on their behalf, with absolutely no say in what they involved. Even then, 80 per cent of their wages were taken from them, allegedly to help pay for the costs of running the camps and for the money to be looked after for them. It has never, to this day, been recovered or refunded. For those who remained, it was a miserable existence eked out on meagre rations, originally intended to be supplemented with the food they’d be able to hunt for themselves. That might have been bearable had all their weapons not been taken away by the authorities, fearful their inmates might try to break free.

  Today, Jeanette doesn’t want to dwell on the horrors of those times, which endured until the authoritarian regime was gradually disbanded following the hi
storic referendum in 1967 to amend the constitution to include Aboriginal people in the census and allow the Commonwealth to create laws for them. But she believes it’s important for those times to be remembered, recognised, documented and acknowledged. Then everyone can try to move on and work towards creating a much stronger and healthier community for the future. As she talks about it, she wipes away her tears with the back of her hand.

  ‘This isn’t talking about a moment in long-ago history,’ says Jeanette, aged 57, who’s now one of Cherbourg’s elders. ‘It’s talking about something that was still going on in my lifetime, a system and attitudes that have impacted on thousands of Aboriginal lives, and continue to do so even today. That’s why we remember it, so all Australians, black and white, in the city and the Outback, can understand how the past has shaped the present, learn from the past for the future, and hopefully move forward in a meaningful way.’

  This morning, there’s a busload of 50 schoolchildren visiting Cherbourg from the town of Murgon 6 kilometres away, and Jeanette and her sister, Sandra Morgan, are busily buttering a teetering tower of bread and chopping cheese and a box of tomatoes to make sandwiches for their lunch as part of their program.

  This afternoon is another group booking – this time a delegation of students from the University of Missouri. For them, there’s a trayload of scones already baked, standing by ready for toppings of jam and cream.

  ‘It’s always like this!’ Jeanette shouts out cheerfully as she butters diligently between taking calls on her mobile. ‘It’s never not busy. We have so many people now coming to see Cherbourg and finding out about its history. I think most people had no idea about the kind of things that went on in Australia in those days, and it’s usually very sobering for them to see what it was like.’

  Sandra, her older sister by 13 years, frowns at Jeanette. ‘Keep working!’ she scolds in mock anger. ‘They’ll be here before you’ve done half the bread at this rate!’

  When the kids finally roll up in their coach, Sandra breaks away to greet them, standing at the gate of the white picket fence surrounding Cherbourg’s old ration shed, now renovated into an award-winning and soberingly atmospheric museum, and entrance to the historical precinct of the town. She leads them up the path through the neat, manicured gardens and then shows them inside. She, like many of the older residents of the modern-day town, with its population now standing at around 2000, can speak from painful personal experience of some of the grim periods the museum showcases.

  Seventy-year-old Ada Simpson, a long-time local, arrives at about 11.30 a.m. She’s been drafted in to talk to the first bunch of visitors about her early life growing up in the settlement, and it’s a task she plainly relishes. Her stories of the sugar, tea, weevil-infested flour and small quantity of meat that were doled out for their meals, have struck a particular chord with many of her young audience. ‘It was good hearing about them days,’ says 13-year-old Trevor. ‘But I don’t like the sound of the food they were given. I prefer the food we get now!’ His classmate Sarah nods her head. ‘It made me feel sad in a way to hear about life then,’ she says. ‘It sounds as if life has improved a lot.’ She takes a big bite of her cheese and tomato sandwich, and picks up a handful of chips. Her voice instantly becomes muffled. ‘We all feel more privileged now.’

  By the time everyone’s cleared up after the children, the Americans have arrived. ‘Jeanette’s good with all these people,’ says Sandra. ‘She has a lot of energy and so much enthusiasm. She helps keep it all going.’ The new set of visitors are a group of 24 college students on a four-week stay in Australia, taking part in a study program organised with the University of Queensland. Jeanette and Sandra welcome them together this time, and their visitors’ mouths fall open as they enter the museum. They walk around the walls, peering at the black-and-white photos of people queuing for food at the old ration shed or lined up in their Sunday best, looking gingerly at the camera, and at the tiny children sitting, doe-eyed, on their beds in the dorms. They carefully read the stories written between the photos, and watch the films about the history of the settlement. Then Jeanette and Sandra take turns to talk about how the museum was set up and the precinct preserved. Their afternoon finishes with a corroboree performed by local schoolkids.

  ‘That was one hell of an experience!’ says Kenton, 20, when the music finally fades away. ‘For most of us, it’s our first time out of our country and we had no idea about these kinds of things.’ He’s bought a boomerang from the little gift shop at the museum, and Sandra warns him that it means he’ll one day return. ‘I sure hope so!’ he says cheerily. ‘That was awesome!’

  Jeanette Malone was born in Cherbourg in 1956, the youngest of six sisters – four full sisters and two nieces adopted into the family – and four brothers, only one of whom was younger than her. The government’s thinking of the day was that education was wasted on Aboriginal children and that they wouldn’t be able to keep up with white children anyway. As a result, Jeanette’s older siblings were all forced to leave school at 13, and were sent away to work.

  One of Jeanette’s sisters, Honor, for example, was put to work in a hospital for four months, then sent on a train and a truck to Blackall, 850 kilometres away in Central West Queensland. There, she worked at a property, doing all the domestic chores, as well as looking after the chickens and bringing in the cows when the jackeroos were out mending fences. ‘It was no life at all,’ she says today. ‘I was so scared so much of the time. Sometimes I had to go out in the dark by myself, and I couldn’t see anything, or where I was. And at shearing time, the shearers would try to get in your room, so you’d push your bed against the door to stop them opening it, and put something up against your window. The government would take your money and say they were sending it home for you, but we were given a little bit of pocket money and didn’t see any of the rest. It just disappeared. I’d save up all my pocket money to send it home to help the family out. Jeanette was very lucky being born when she was. By that time, our people were allowed to be at school longer and get a proper education.’

  It still wasn’t easy for Jeanette, however. When she was just a toddler, her dad, Jack, or Champ, as he was known, caught leprosy and was sent away to Fantome Island, near Palm Island, north-east of Townsville. He spent the next five years there. ‘We were lucky that he was cured, but I didn’t know him until I was seven or eight,’ says Jeanette. ‘At the same time, my mum, Naomi, caught TB and was separated from us. She was hospitalised for a long time. So in the end, our grandma brought us up. I don’t know how she coped with so many children!’

  Jeanette was a bright kid and, with the changes in legislation, there was no longer any question she’d be allowed to stay at school. But there was a different kind of surprise waiting for her. In Year 4 at the primary school in Cherbourg, she was told she’d been selected to transfer to the white mainstream primary school at Murgon. The new premise of the day was that if Aboriginal kids showed real promise, they should be given the chance to compete with all their peers.

  Attending the Murgon school, though, was a shock. Jeanette couldn’t understand many words on the curriculum, let alone keep up with the lessons. ‘I went from the top of the class when I’d been with the Aboriginal girls to the bottom with the white kids,’ she says. ‘I was the only Aboriginal girl in the class, and that’s when I first encountered personal racism, too. The white boy next to me didn’t like it that I was there, and he’d make a big thing of blowing the germs off anything I touched.’

  She struggled on and, gradually, with a lot of determination and extra studying at home, worked her way up through the class. Yet there were always hurdles. One day in Year 5 they were all set an essay to write about their home town, and she wrote one about the history of Cherbourg. She toiled over it for hours, handed the essay in and . . . the teacher didn’t ever mention it. She never received a mark for it, nor saw it again. ‘She was always very smart, my little sister,’ says Honor, whose surname is now Cleary. ‘Bu
t she worked hard too. She was always studying, always eager to learn. It wasn’t easy for her.’

  When it was time, Jeanette moved up to the high school at Murgon, joined this time by all the kids from Cherbourg, since there wasn’t a high school in their town. While she welcomed the chance to see them again, it was a double-edged sword. All the black kids were dumped into the one class together and treated as the lowest grade of the year. ‘They set us easy work they said was more suited to us,’ says Jeanette. ‘So there was no opportunity to get on and be challenged. They encouraged us in sport, but not in any academic areas. It was just another type of racism.’

  Disillusioned, Jeanette left school at 15, and enrolled in 1972 for a year-long TAFE business course in Brisbane, where she lodged with a cousin. From there she worked as a junior clerk at the offices of the trade union for the Association of Architects, Engineers, Surveyors and Draughtsmen of Australia. In the 1970s, a whole raft of Aboriginal organisations were just starting up, and Jeanette next found work with the Aboriginal Housing Association. Her daughter, Belinda, was born 12 weeks premature on 21 July 1979, the same date that her great-grandfather Charlie had died 21 years before, and Jeanette’s mother came to stay to help with the baby so that the new mum could continue working. A few years later, she began a new job at an Aboriginal childcare agency.

  By 1989, when Belinda was 10, Jeanette had grown tired of the city, and felt a pull to go back home to Cherbourg. She found a position with TAFE as an education support officer in the town, promoting courses to people in the community, and worked there for a while. Always believing that education was a way forward for people, she loved it and studied for an associate diploma in community development. ‘We had so many courses running in Cherbourg at one time, it was hard to find the space for them all! It was a time when the government finally realised that people were interested in further education and so we had some funding for courses. It was a pretty exciting period.’