T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  On the other hand, Strehlow’s personal position towards the white population on the surrounding stations had been a much easier one than that which he had felt obliged to maintain towards his aboriginal congregation. The station people who came on visits to Hermannsburg were not church members entrusted to his care, and he was hence not directly responsible to God for the welfare of their souls. Nor was he a spiritual blackmailer who strove to frighten people into the fold of his flock by threats of God’s wrath and by hellfire sermons. Once he had fulfilled his duty by making it clear in his sermons that God hated all manner of sins among both the dark and the white sections of the population, he had been able to relax in his private conversations with the white folk who had come to visit him in his home. He was surprisingly well-informed about their private lives: everyone in Central Australia knew the personal business of most people with whom he was acquainted. Strehlow was a hospitable man who enjoyed the company and the conversation of visitors. All persons who came on business matters, too, were made welcome. In addition, the Horseshoe Bend mailman used to eat at Strehlow’s table unless there happened to be a married white stockman at Hermannsburg who was willing to take him in. Station men passing through Hermannsburg were similarly afforded unstinting hospitality. Strehlow had even possessed enough consideration for the Moslem susceptibilities of the Afghans to allow them, after they had brought up the mission loading from Oodnadatta on their camel teams, to go up to the Hermannsburg stockyard, and to be present at the butchering of bullocks for their own meat supply. Moslems were not permitted to eat the meat of animals unless these had been slaughtered according to the instructions given in their Holy Koran; and so at Hermannsburg the Afghan would leap into the killing pen as soon as the beast had been felled by a bullet, in order to cut its jugular veins and pronounce over the dying animal the traditional words – ‘Bismillah Allahu Akbar’ – ‘In the name of Allah, Allah is the Greatest of all’.

  Always keenly aware of his isolation, loneliness, and remoteness in the human world of Central Australia, Strehlow had been affected almost as much by Bob Buck’s totally unexpected tribute as he had been by the parting from his dark congregation on his last morning at Hermannsburg. He had now become a man who needed human sympathy more than ever before; for his physical condition was rapidly worsening with each day of travel. He had always been aware of the kindliness of bush folk towards persons in trouble. But it was the rich warmth and the complete sincerity of Buck’s tribute that had come as a most gratifying surprise to him. Strehlow could not help comparing Buck’s practical attitude, and his generosity in helping him out, unasked, with the station donkey team and an experienced donkey driver, with that useless message he had received from the Mission Board a few weeks ago. His fellow churchmen had provided him with no practical help whatever. They had only told him to apply for help to the Almighty; and he certainly had not stood in need of any advice of that kind.

  ‘Frieda,’ said the sick man to his wife over the breakfast meal, ‘I’m afraid that I have far too often thought in the past that we who call ourselves Christians were a superior folk to those who neither pray nor read the Bible, nor bother their heads about God and the life to come. I have always striven to educate my flock to walk in what I believed to be the Christian way of life. But during these past weeks I have come to reassess some of my beliefs. It is when you are down and out that you begin to think most clearly about the ways of men and the ways of God. It was the publican who dared not lift up his eyes to God in the temple who went down to his house justified, not the pious Pharisee who had given thanks to God so arrogantly for being infinitely superior to all people whose lives were not as blameless as his own. Christ himself dined with the publicans and the sinners and the harlots, with men and women who were regarded as renegades and outcasts by the pious sections of the community of his own day. I am beginning to understand why he condemned the Pharisees, the most upright and fiery fundamentalists of his own day, as a bunch of arrogant hypocrites and as whited sepulchres, full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness, and why he said to the chief priests and the elders of the people at Jerusalem, ‘The publicans and the harlots go in to the kingdom of God before you’. Piety without love is useless; for God is love; and these hard-swearing, hard-drinking bush folk, living with lubras whom they have not married, are the people who are always ready to show love towards their neighbours when it is most needed. Again, it was the priest and the Levite that hurried away and left a badlyinjured fellow countryman lying in his blood; and it was the outcast Samaritan who picked him up and took him to an inn for medical help, even though the injured man was his national enemy.’

  As soon as the horses arrived, the van was pulled up to the station buildings. Here its horses were taken out, and their harness was loaded on the back of the vehicle. The four unharnessed horses were driven back to the buggy. While this was being done, Bob Buck, Alf Butler, and most of the population of Henbury walked down to the buggy to say farewell to Mr and Mrs Strehlow. It was a warm-hearted farewell, and a very sad one; for all those who were present knew that they would never see each other again. Then the whip cracked, the horses began to move, and the buggy climbed to the southern river bank. After that it turned east and hit the wagon road to Irkngalalitnama. Jakobus as usual followed on with the loose horses. He had left six of them behind at the camp since they were unfit for any further travelling. These horses remained standing in the shade of a big gum tree, hanging their weary heads, and looking after their receding mates with sad and tired eyes. Two of them moved till they stood head to tail – a stance that made it easier for both of them to combat the cruel flies which were forming thick rings around their eyes and lining both edges of their mouths. These horses had already reached their journey’s end. They were to stay at Henbury and await the return of their mates from Oodnadatta.

  After the departure of the buggy Theo went up to the station buildings with Bob Buck and Alf Butler. He was accompanied by Ettie and by two or three dark Henbury lads, all of whom were talking to him in animated Aranda. He had secretly felt relieved at the prospect of travelling to Idracowra separately. For a month or more he had been an unwilling listener-in to far too many of his parents’ conversations. These had ranged from discussions on God’s purposes in sending down sicknesses and disasters on those that loved Him to harrowing examinations of the whole nature and meaning of human pain and suffering. His father’s sudden desperate plight had come as a terrible shock to him. He had been roused to deep resentment, indeed to quick youthful hatred, by the failure of the Mission Board to help the father whom he had secretly admired in his pleasant moments as much as he had feared him in his dark fits of anger. The boy had been involved far too intimately in his parents’ agonising problems; and the spiritual and bodily troubles that were testing his parents to the very limits of their endurance were matters from which Theo was only too glad to have a chance of escaping for a while, even if it should only be a matter of two days. For the first time since his father had gone to bed the boy could move about again with a cheerful spirit.

  He had about an hour to look over Henbury Station while the gear of the two donkeys that were to be harnessed to either side of the steering pole of the van was being adjusted, and while all the chains and collars of the other six donkeys were being inspected and quickly repaired where necessary.

  The scenery around Henbury could not be described as beautiful. The station had been put up at this site only because the fine permanent waterhole of Tunga provided an ample water supply both for the local stock and for all station needs. This waterhole marked the last resting place of a tjonba or giant goanna ancestor, who had gone down into the ground at this spot in order to escape from an ancestral hunter. The latter had, however, grabbed the goanna’s tail and broken it off, in a vain attempt to dislodge the gigantic creature. A particularly high river gum which grew close to the waterhole symbolised the broken tail. The waterhole was overlooked by a cluster of great boulders, call
ed Arilintara, which had seemingly grown out of a high sandhill crest rising several hundred yards north of the waterhole. These boulders marked the spot where a group of ancestral tjonba had raised themselves upright on their hind legs while they peered north-westward at smoke rising high into the air from another tjonba campsite called Utjoalindama, which was situated in the Finke gorge between Alitera and Irbmangkara. Henbury Station itself stood in heavy ground between two great sand-dunes. The dune crest west of the buildings was as high as a low hill and bore the name of Ilbirbeia. With cattle and goats stripping these dunes of their spinifex cover, the soil had begun drifting years ago; and the station area had long since turned into a light orange-brown sea of soft and very heavy sand.

  While the donkeys’ harness was being got ready, Bob Buck took Theo for a short walk and showed him over the few buildings that constituted Henbury. Like Hermannsburg, Henbury had been founded in the late 1870s. Two of its earliest founding pioneers had been the two Parke brothers, Edmund William and Walter. These two men had belonged to the landed English gentry, and they had come to Australia for the sake of colonial adventure. Edmund Parke had arrived some years ahead of his brother, and had taken up his first blocks in the Finke Valley in partnership with a young stockholder called Charles Harry Walker. But it was the elder Parke who had been the main driving force in the establishment of this huge cattle property. A man respected by all, he had, unlike the other cattlemen of the Centre, never been called by his Christian name but had always been addressed, and referred to, by both his dark and white contemporaries, as ‘Mr Parke’. According to the older aboriginal stockmen at Henbury, he had been a very fair-minded boss who had considerable regard for the human rights of the local Upper Southern Aranda group. After spending almost two decades at Henbury, the elder Parke brother had decided to return to his English estate, and had taken his younger brother with him. It was believed locally that ‘Henbury’ had been either the name of the English family estate of the Parke brothers or that of some village nearby.

  When Edmund William Parke and Charlie Walker had first taken up the Henbury cattle property, they had established their station rather higher on the Finke River, at a place called Nobmintangara, about three miles south of the exit from Parke’s Pass, where there were then, as at Irbmangkara, running springs in the Finke bed. A number of years later the present location had been chosen. There had also been an early outstation at Pmokoputa on the Ellery Creek, eight miles east of Hermannsburg. Walker had built a solid one-roomed stone-house with a thatched roof here for his residence – a rare thing at the beginning of white settlement in the Centre. This house had accidentally gone up in flames one Sunday night in April, 1880. Pmokoputa had then ceased being used as a Henbury outstation, and the Ellery Creek block north of the Krichauff Ranges had subsequently been sublet to Hermannsburg for sheep grazing. Early in 1882 Walker, who was now living with Parke at Henbury, had gone out on a lengthy trip with Dr Charles Chewings into the country west and south-west of Hermannsburg, and had been rewarded by having three geographical features – Walker’s Pass, Walker Plain, and the Walker (the main tributary of the Palmer River) – named after him. Soon afterwards Walker had taken ill and gone south to seek medical aid. He had died at the Wakefield Street Private Hospital in Adelaide on 21st July, 1885, of a painful kidney and bladder complaint, aged a mere thirty-one years. His name had been kept alive in the population of the Centre by his half-caste son Charlie, whose mother had been the Henbury woman Ilkalita.

  Among the other names of the early Henbury pioneers those of the two Breadens, Allan and Joe, stood out; and these two men had been associated with this property for more than forty years. Bob Buck himself had come to Henbury around the beginning of the new century because he was a nephew to the Breadens. The present owner of the station was Joe Breaden, who had – upon the elder Parke’s death in England – bought Henbury, Idracowra, and Todmorden from the Parke estate in 1902. At that time the Parke estate was heavily weighed down with debts; and Walter Parke had been obliged to accept for these three stations an amount considerably less than their real value. Breaden had, in fact, apologised for the modest sum he had offered; but he had not been able to obtain a larger advance from financial interests in Adelaide. The total amount involved in the deal was, naturally, not divulged to the general public: even the official document relating to the change in ownership of Todmorden station, for instance, merely stated that its pastoral leases had been transferred to J.A. Breaden ‘in consideration’ of a sum of £50. The actual final amount paid over by Joe Breaden was, however, rumoured to have been about £9,000. Breaden’s strong financial backer had been Mr John Barker, a member of the well-known pastoral agency conducted under the name of Barker Brothers.

  Under the Breaden regime, Henbury and Idracowra had continued to serve mainly as breeding stations for cattle and horses. Whenever any stock was ready for the market, it was driven to Todmorden, if the season permitted it. Here the animals were fattened, and then taken the final short distance of sixty miles (or less) to Oodnadatta for trucking to Adelaide: the eastern boundary of Todmorden abutted on the western boundary of the town common, only about a mile from the railhead. It was the use of Todmorden as a fattening station which had enabled the owners of Henbury and Idracowra to earn considerably higher profits than most other Central Australian cattlemen. For the latter had been compelled to drive their stock over distances of up to three or four hundred miles to the Oodnadatta railhead, and then to truck them immediately, no matter in how poor a condition they might have been at the end of their road journey. Even in the best seasons there was rarely much feed to be found for the travelling mobs of cattle and horses over the last hundred and fifty miles of the distance before they reached Oodnadatta; for the country south of the Northern Territory border consisted mainly of barren, stone-strewn gibber country.

  How great the potential wealth of the Henbury-Idracowra run had always been could be gauged from the stock figures alone. According to a Report made by T. E. Day, former Chief Surveyor of the Northern Territory, in 1916, the Henbury-Idracowra run had at the end of 1914 carried 5,786 head of cattle and 1,211 horses. Since it was possible even for stockowners living up to three hundred miles away from the railhead to receive an average price of up to £12 per head in the case of cattle, and at least £10 to £15 per horse, the total potential wealth of these two stations far exceeded £80,000. The Todmorden figures were additional to this total: the latter station went in for breeding horses of a particularly fine stamp, many of which brought prices ranging from £20 to £50 each at a sale without even having been broken-in. Hence it was not surprising that the three stations together had been regarded for at least three decades as constituting one of the richest stock properties in the Centre. By 1922, however, a dark shadow had fallen on this property, as on all others that were situated in the interior: with the mechanisation of all army transport and all cavalry regiments, and the rapidly increasing use of motor vehicles in civilian life, horse breeding had become a doomed industry. The Indian Army no longer required the thousands of remounts that it had always taken from Australia; and the next few years were to witness the shooting of horses by their thousands on all horse-breeding stations of the inland.

  Yet in spite of the wealth that the various station owners and financial backers had extracted from the huge Henbury run since the 1870s, there had never been any attempt made by them either to develop the property fully or to share its profits fairly with the dark and white stockmen whose toil had brought such riches to them. In the case of Joe Breaden, rumour had it that the heavy financial obligations he had undertaken in the ‘plucky purchase’ that made him one of the biggest cattlemen in the Centre had proved a greater burden than he had anticipated. In good seasons the profits from the stock sales had run into many thousands of pounds; but there had been a number of poor years as well. Moreover Todmorden, the key cattle-fattening station, was situated in a particularly low rainfall area. Its pastures depended to a l
arge extent on heavy floods in the Alberga and the Neales which then inundated the low-lying country along their banks. During normal years the stock had to depend mainly on deep artesian bores sunk at considerable cost. Whether it was the cost of the improvements on Todmorden – it possessed not only good bores but perhaps the finest homestead in the country – or the demands of the southern financiers, the fact remained that Henbury and Idracowra, the two stations where most of the stock was bred, had signally failed to share in the profits made from the sales of their cattle and horses.

  Consequently Henbury, during dry seasons, had always depended completely on the natural open waterholes of the Finke: there was not a single well or dam to be found in the rich grass country along the middle Palmer River which wound its course through the Henbury run. The only station well on the property was the shallow one at Titra, some twenty-one miles south of Henbury; but this had been an easy well to sink since it had been dug on the site of an old aboriginal soak. Consequently the six thousand head of cattle and the large herds of half-wild horses that grazed on the Henbury run were dependent in dry times on the relatively sparse feed that grew along the sandhill banks of the Finke and the hard plains that bordered upon them. This six-mile-wide ribbon of country through which the Finke flowed was as a result always grossly overstocked; and if drought conditions persisted longer than usual, the rapidly mounting stock losses soon assumed serious proportions; for the Henbury stock could not be moved to the much richer grass flats in the Palmer valley, since the surface waters in the latter dried up completely during the longer dry spells. The same parsimony could be seen in the failure of the owners to put up anything better than a few blockhouses for the staff and stockmen at Henbury Station. There were only three of these structures, and their walls consisted of huge, straight gum trunks piled horizontally one on top of the other. Mud plaster had been used for blocking the wind from whistling through the wide spaces between these piled logs. The floors of these houses, as usual, consisted of flagstones. Bathrooms and other kinds of conveniences were completely unknown at Henbury. But this was true also of most other stations in the Centre. When the Henbury stockmen wanted to take a bath, they sat in the galvanised iron washtubs normally used for laundry purposes. The water for all ablutions, and also for all kitchen purposes, had to be carried in buckets by dark women for a distance of several hundred yards from the Tunga waterhole up a steep and sandy river bank.