The loading of the van now proceeded with great speed. The name ‘van’ was really a misnomer; and the old vehicle was, in fact, often referred to as a ‘buckboard’. Its manufacture was of the simplest and crudest nature possible. Its body had been constructed by linking the front and back axles by means of a series of sturdy long boards to form a kind of floor or platform. A wide wooden seat had been mounted on top of this floor, close to the front axle. This seat was divided by a central backrest so that two or three persons could sit forward, facing the horses, while a similar number faced the rear of the vehicle. The seats and the backrest had been covered by hard leather cushions, stuffed with horse-hair. This extremely uncomfortable upholstery gave the only protection afforded to the passengers against any severe road bumps; for the van did not boast of any springs in its sturdy, rugged frame. It did, however, possess a canvas canopy, which protected the passengers at least against the fierce overhead rays of the midday sun. In this respect the van was superior to the buggy which, though fitted with springs, carried no canopy at all: the sick man could be protected from the sun only by an old umbrella tied to the back of his upholstered chair.
Theo watched the loading of the van with much interest; for he was travelling on the second vehicle. A number of dark boys and girls who had been his childhood companions stood around him. Theo, who had never known any white playmates, had a number of special friends among the Hermannsburg children. He had always got on splendidly with them till he had reached the age of ten. Even so, it had always been he who had been compelled to adopt the behaviour patterns of his dark playmates. Once he had passed the age of ten, the bonds of friendship had slowly been loosened; and after turning fourteen, he had become keenly aware of the very considerable differences that existed between himself and his former playmates in point of the opinions they held on the problems of adolescence. More and more he had come to realise that his friends belonged, in most of their attitudes towards preparation for full adulthood, to the dark community, and that he, by reason of his European education, had come to develop entirely new interests. His father, anxious to give him a flying start for his proposed secondary education in Germany, had not only made him learn history, botany, and zoology from German high school textbooks, but had also introduced him to Latin at the age of ten and to Greek at the age of twelve. These studies were interests that Theo could not share with his dark school friends. And the latter, in their turn, upon reaching the age of puberty, had become more and more interested in the traditional Aranda world of culture. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Aranda girls were already regarded, like Shakespeare’s Juliet, as young women who were ripe for marriage; and in the old days they would, in fact, have been handed over to their rightful husbands at this age. Their brothers in the same age group were looked on as novices ready to be put through a tough series of tribal initiation rites which, in the Aranda area, used to be stretched out over a period of several years. Though these Aranda rites had been severely curtailed within the preceding decades by European settlers and missionaries, all Hermannsburg teenage boys were still forced to pass through circumcision and certain other physical ordeals; and their thoughts naturally tended to be occupied with their impending manhood tests, to the exclusion of most other interests.
In spite of their many growing and inevitable feelings of estrangement, Theo and his former playmates on the morning of his departure were genuinely sorry that they had to say goodbye to each other, and they chatted together animatedly in Aranda for the last time. But it was a group of women who were most regretful in their expressions of leave-taking from the white boy whom they had ‘mothered’ for so many years. One of them was Christina who, as a fifteen-year-old halfcaste girl, had carried the day-old premature infant, whom nobody had then expected to survive, to the christening font in the Hermannsburg church. ‘Don’t forget that I am also one of your mothers,’ she said in deep sadness, as she shook his hand and cried quietly. ‘Remember me, and write to me sometimes, and don’t be like all those other white boys and girls who were born at Hermannsburg and who were reared by us, and who then went south and never again wrote to us or sent us anything.’ Another woman, old Margaret, the mother of Lucas, who had been one of Theo’s main playmates, expressed herself rather more forcefully when giving her advice. ‘You are not just a white boy,’ she said with passionate conviction, ‘you are one of us. You belong to our people. You belong to the totem of the Twins of Ntarea, and you are a true Aranda. Go south and learn in the white men’s schools, but then come back to us. No other white child born here has ever returned to us, but you must come back to us, to your own people.’
By now the van had been fully loaded. The four horses that were to pull it on the first day were quickly harnessed up and hitched to the vehicle. Theo climbed up on the front leather seat and perched himself alongside Titus, the pleasant young driver chosen for the van; and several of his mother’s kitchen women climbed up on the other seat which faced to the rear. These women were coming along for the first day’s ride, prepared to walk back to the station on foot next day. For age-old aboriginal custom in Central Australia insisted that visitors from other groups and tribes, upon their departure to their own homes, should be escorted to the edge of the local group area by at least some of their hosts in token of a friendly parting and as a sign of respect and courtesy. The van pulled out from the station about half an hour after the buggy had left. It was followed by an additional ten loose buggy horses driven by Jakobus, one of the must reliable and experienced of the Hermannsburg stockmen. ‘Loose horses’ was the normal term given to spare horses in Central Australia at that time. Jakobus was proud and overjoyed at having been selected to accompany his sick master and friend. He had been one of the men who had written a letter to Strehlow during his illness.
The van, like the buggy, set off from Hermannsburg at a good pace. It did not take the travellers long to reach the little Tjamangkura watercourse, three miles east of Hermannsburg, with its line of tall bloodwood trees that marked part of the eastern boundary of the Purula-Kamara local group area of Ntarea – this being the area that was regarded as the home of Theo and of most of the other boys and girls at Hermannsburg. East of Tjamangkura began the territory of the Panangka-Bangata, and a few miles further, at Tokurura, began the local group area of those Ellery Creek men and women who belonged to the honey-ant totem. When the van reached Pmokoputa, eight miles from Hermannsburg, it halted alongside the buggy. An early midday meal had already been prepared from the contents of the tucker-box that had been carried under the front seat of the buggy. Its main item was fresh steak, roasted on hot coals; and soon all travellers sat down to a tasty meal in the shade of some fine, mottle-barked, river gums.
Theo walked some chains back to the ruins of the Old Station homestead building, once an outstation of Henbury, which had gone up in flames forty-two years earlier, when Charlie Walker was living here. From the ruined stonehouse Theo looked back for the last time at the magnificent distant blue mass of Rutjubma in the north-west and reflected that, after the midday meal, he would be entering into new territory for the first time in his life that he could remember clearly. So far the northern horizon had always been bounded for him by the Western MacDonnells, the southern by the Krichauffs, the western by the Gosse’s Range, and the eastern by sandhill ridges and stonehills. But at Pmokoputa the party was entering into the Ellery Creek gorge, which formed a natural highway through the Krichauffs as far as the junction of the Ellery with the Finke at Rubula; and once this gorge had been entered, the whole familiar environment would vanish from his sight – perhaps for ever. A new landscape would open before him; and at the end of a long journey by road and rail he would find himself in a country peopled wholly by white folk – a land he had heard of and read about for many years. The greatest adventure of his young life was about to unfold itself to his vision.
The journey southward was resumed with the sun still standing at high noon. The last wagon tracks ceased at Pmokopu
ta: from here on only the narrow pad remained along which the mail used to be brought by camels from Horseshoe Bend to Hermannsburg. Since this camel pad had left a trail no wider than three feet at the most where it passed through the dense ti-tree thickets that studded the Ellery Gorge, the advance road party from the station had been forced to deviate from it in many places, so that the course of the vehicles could be kept as much as possible on the open sandy expanses and crunching gravel banks. Wherever the ti-tree thickets could not be avoided, a track had been chopped through them of sufficient width to permit the vehicles to pass through without any difficulties.
By midday the horses had steadied down considerably since their wild gallops of the previous day; and whenever the sandy stretches were reached, all passengers voluntarily jumped from the van so as to lighten its weight. The drivers of both vehicles had to keep on cracking their coachwhips hard alongside the sweating, panting, snorting horses, to ensure that they would not come to a halt in the heavy white creek sand. Any horse which showed signs of not throwing its full weight into its harness was smartly flicked with the whiplash; for there was no greater nightmare during the buggy-travel era of Central Australia than a jibbing horse which had brought a vehicle to a sudden halt in the middle of a long, sandy pull.
And so the afternoon waned, and the tips of the shadows of the river gums lengthened eastward, and the sharp cracks of the coachwhips echoed back from the red sandstone sides of the gorge.
Some twelve miles of heavy going brought the party to Rubula, where a large waterhole in the Finke, fringed with high bulrushes, indicated an ideal camping spot for the first night. Both vehicles were halted on a broad gravel bank; and a multitude of willing hands had soon unloaded the swags from the van, helped the sick man down from the buggy, and unwired and lifted down his upholstered chair. For the advance road party had been waiting for the arrival of the vehicles for several days at Rubula. Theo, who was watching a tall, straight gum sapling being cut down so that its top portion could be used as the main tent pole, was almost hit by the sapling when it finally crashed down. A sharp chorus of anxious voices rebuked him from all sides for his carelessness; for the falling sapling could have injured him badly, perhaps even killed him, had it hit him. With a disdainful look to disguise his own shock the boy strode back haughtily to his parents’ camp and watched the workers who were putting up the tent, gathering the dry wood for the campfires, and spreading out the food supplies for the greater convenience of the cooks.
The sun was already setting when the evening meal had been prepared. Strehlow was tired, but very satisfied with the first day’s journey: it had been a much more tolerable experience than he had feared in the morning. Soon the dark sky was spangled with myriads of bright stars. A welcome fresh night breeze began to cool the air in the gorge which had become uncomfortably hot during the afternoon. The party broke up into small groups for their night’s sleep. Each group was warmed by its own small fires, since the dark folk had not brought many blankets with them. The sick man and his wife retired into the tent, and Theo fell asleep in his swag beside the van, still listening to the noise of the ducks landing on and rising up from the waterhole.
WHEN THE YOUNG DAWN approached next day, the fresh morning air was quickly filled with the twittering and chirping of birds. The miners were already sounding their delightful and merry music when the eastern sky showed the first glimmering of light; and when the sun began to shed a rosy glow upon the crests of the western gorge walls, the black-and-white butcher birds awakened from their sleep and proceeded to give out their beautiful flute notes from the projecting branches of gums and whitewood trees. A little later came the discordant and cynical caws of the cheeky crows, who keenly watched the morning campers from the closest proximity that safety permitted, ever hopeful of picking up any unguarded scraps. The morning air had been bracing in its cold freshness, and there had even been some light dew on the ground; but as soon as the sun began to peer over the crests of the range, the sudden new sting of its morning rays foretold that the day would soon turn oppressively hot.
The hobbled horses had been brought in long before breakfast by Hesekiel, Jakobus, and Titus. The horse teams drawing both vehicles were changed in order to give the previous day’s working horses a spell. Loading proceeded with great speed. Then the vehicles moved off slowly from the gravel bank to continue their journey down the Finke Valley. At about ten o’clock in the morning the long, reed-fringed waterhole of Alitera was reached. This name celebrated the fact that, according to Aranda mythology, the two ancestral ilumbalitnana or white ghost-gum serpents who had camped here together with their uncle, a wallaby ancestor, had originally come from the Lira Alitera or Hale River in distant Eastern Aranda territory. The two beady-eyed, baleful serpents had slithered on westward while their uncle was sleeping; and the wails of the deserted wallaby ancestor had filled the Finke valley at Alitera after he had wakened from his sleep. Unable to follow his faithless nephews, the wallaby ancestor had wandered off into the nearby Ilkitjeramanta gully, and turned into a huge boulder. The two venomous ilumbalitnana serpents who had deserted him were believed to have composed the secret songs and instituted the secret rites used during the ceremonial induction of the Western Aranda medicine men into their occult craft. The much more prosaic white name for Alitera was Boggy Hole. It had been used as a police camp for some years a long time ago but few traces remained of the former police days. It had been abandoned in the middle of 1891, after its police officer Mounted Constable W.H. Willshire, had been taken south for trial on a murder charge.
Careful driving was called for, both in crossing the Finke at Alitera and in negotiating the next half-mile or so of the rock-strewn flat along the river bend. It was the existence of this rough and difficult expanse that had caused the greatest worry to Strehlow and his advisers when the journey down the Finke was first being planned; and a closer look at the rocks, laid bare even more menacingly by the huge Finke floods of early 1921, revealed that these fears had been only too well-founded. The Finke had, in fact, come down in flood, time and again, from November, 1920, onward; and it was only in March, 1922, that the dying streamlets between the pools had ceased to pattern the sandy river bed with their intricate lacework. But at the beginning of May a further flood had ripped out again all newly restored horse-paddock fences south of Hermannsburg, and more weeks had elapsed before the flow of water had dried up finally. The advance road party had worked hard to produce a passable buggy track at Alitera by moving the smaller rocks with crowbars and by clearing new deviations wherever the terrain permitted. But only dynamite and the giant earth-moving equipment invented by a later generation could have fashioned a reasonable vehicle track. In spite of the hard toil of the advance working party, both vehicles still had to get over the larger rocks by straddling them with their axles; and some of the huge, deeply embedded rocks stuck out so much from the ground that the axles barely cleared them. The sick man was jolted about unmercifully, and was forced to hang on with both hands to the front seat of the buggy. But after some anxious moments both vehicles completed this part of the horror track without breaking either their wheels or their axles. When more level ground had at last been regained, the buggy was halted under a gum tree for some minutes to enable Strehlow to recover from his ordeal. Every bump of his heavy, swollen body against his upholstered chair had made him catch his breath and wince with pain; and he looked very ill and utterly exhausted when this grim half-mile stretch at last lay behind him.
The road party workers and the kitchen women, who had escorted on foot the two vehicles on their slow journey from Rubula to Alitera, said their last goodbyes to their master and mistress at this point. Many tears were shed by the women; and not a single person started back on the long walk to Hermannsburg till both mission vehicles had moved on once more and passed out of sight completely.
Hardly had the vehicles turned round the next corner of the winding valley, when they encountered the camel-mail string from H
orseshoe Bend. Old Jack Fountain, the gaunt, white-bearded mailman, stopped his team and unloaded the Hermannsburg mailbags from one of his camel boxes. They were quickly opened, and Heinrich and Mrs Strehlow took out the mail addressed to Strehlow and to themselves. After a brief exchange of news Jack Fountain continued on his way to Hermannsburg. According to the mail contract let out to Gus Elliot, his employer, Fountain had to cover the one-hundred-and-fifty-mile run from Horseshoe Bend to Hermannsburg in five days; and he was due at Hermannsburg on the forenoon of the following day.
T G H Strehlow Page 4