T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  From the hollow of the shield let the fire shower down!’

  During summer, on the other hand, these pebble heaps were carefully avoided and the charm verses belonging to them were never uttered, lest their inherent magic power should cause the sun to scorch to death both men and animals; for the very presence of these black pebble heaps at Inggodna was believed to be one of the reasons for the long and fierce heat-waves that afflicted the Horseshoe Bend area each summer.

  Inggodna was, however, only one of the totemic sites associated with fire and hence with the heat of the summer sun. Two other sites further downstream were believed to be even more potent. The first was Uralirbuka, whose name meant ‘Where the fire went underground’. Here was a huge cave where the bushfires that had burned their way at the beginning of time from distant western Paranerka towards the Finke Valley were believed to have gone underground. The trail left behind by these bushfires between Paranerka and Uralirbuka was marked by a long, low line of black hills.

  But the most potent of all these primal fire sites was Mbalka, a pyramid-shaped mountain about sixteen miles south of Horseshoe Bend. Mbalka had been the home of a malicious crow ancestor who had flitted about over this unfortunate land and lit devastating bushfires whenever he flew down from the sky. The fiercest fires had raged around Mbalka itself, striking terror into all other totemic ancestors for many miles around lest the whole countryside should in the end be utterly consumed by roaring tornadoes of leaping, billowing flames. Huge resin-charged spinifex tussocks exploded noisily as the shrieking flood of fire cascaded over the sandhills, and the beautiful green pmekua bushes on their crests quickly turned into scorched brown shrubs and began sprouting little flames from their drooping branch tips. Thick stands of cane grass started to smoke as soon as the sudden blast of heat swept over them. All the mulgas, bloodwoods, and mallee trees turned into swaying pillars of fire, and their limbs became crackling torches of flames. So fierce was the blaze that even the finest grass roots were scorched black in the hot soil, while the roots of the larger trees smouldered and turned into grey ashes many feet below the surface of the ground. Long twisting tongues of flame broke off from the main billows of the conflagration, shooting skyward like red-and-yellow evil spirits. The roar of this devastating, storm-fanned blaze sometimes resembled the mad howl of a tornado and sometimes the rushing noise of a great flood of water that had risen high above the restraining level of its river banks. Helpless marsupials, lizards, and snakes died in their thousands, unable to escape from this vast lake of fire, whose lapping tongues often shot out suddenly for hundreds of yards into thickly grassed or well-timbered plots of country, and then curled and twisted around till their tips of flame met, encircling and trapping further helpless populations of singed and trembling animals. In the sky above large flocks of screaming parrots and cockatoos could be seen fleeing from the fury of the blaze below. Though most of these ancestral birds were able to effect their escape, the black, red, and grey feathers in the plumage of their later bird descendants were believed to reveal how close they had come to finding death in the merciless blast furnace below. For in the Aranda-speaking area the pink and red feathers of these parrots and cockatoos were taken to symbolise the colour of the leaping flames, the black feathers the dead bodies of charred birds, and the grey feathers the ashes of birds totally consumed by the blaze.

  This destructive, howling bushfire lasted for many days. Each night the cloudbank of black smoke hanging low over Mbalka glowed dark red on its underside from the vastness of the reflected conflagration below. At last, when the unbridled insolence of the crow ancestor had reached its peak of destructiveness, two rain ancestors from distant Erea, a long lagoon situated close to the final floodouts of the Finke River, approached Mbalka with stealthy steps. As they drew nearer, the ground grew dark under the huge shadows of their accompanying retinue of rainclouds; and one night they surprised the crow ancestor himself, clad in his black coat of fire-charred feathers, while he was gloating in high arrogance at Mbalka over the bushfires that were raging and roaring about him on all sides. Heavy rain began to gush and pour in torrents from the clouds accompanying the two Erea ancestors. Soon the vast lakes of fire were turned into seas of water, and clouds of steam hissed up from the sizzling tree skeletons and charred stumps. The crow ancestor himself was drowned by the overwhelming fury of this rainstorm; for the sheer weight of the water poured down from above was too heavy to permit him to unfold his wings in flight. But though the rain ancestors of Erea had quenched the primal fires of Mbalka, this mountain was still believed to shelter eternal heat and flames under its vast and heavy mass. Any frivolous performance of its secret fire rites by ‘the human beings of later days’ was believed to have the power to recall into existence and to fan into sudden fury disastrous bushfires throughout the land; and these bushfires would in turn magically induce the summer sun to increase its heat to such a dangerously high level that men and animals everywhere would be scorched to death. Hence the fire rites of Mbalka were carefully kept a close secret by the old leaders of the local fire totemic clan; and they were performed only on the rarest occasions, particularly during long and unusually frosty winters.

  The very existence of Mbalka and Uralirbuka, of Inggodna and Par’ Itirka, was believed to keep up a constant threat of heat and fire over the Horseshoe Bend country. Since this local group area also included the Land of Death around Undunja and Uralterinja, the Horseshoe Bend clansmen enjoyed a most unfortunate notoriety in the Aranda-speaking country: all of their major totems were of a kind that increased the afflictions of mankind; and any reports of the performances of the Horseshoe Bend sacred ceremonies were greeted with noticeable lack of enthusiasm by all Aranda groups who were living adjacent to this area.

  Horseshoe Bend was fully living up to its mythical reputation as a heat-creating totemic centre on that oppressive Thursday morning which awakened the two parties of tired travellers that had arrived from Idracowra on the previous day: the temperature had not gone much below the nineties during the night, and the mercury in the thermometers had quickly climbed back to the century mark by ten o’clock in the morning. At this hour hot north-westerly gusts were whirling and whipping up the sand from the dunes and the river flat on the far side of the Finke into shrieking waves of yellowish-brown dust which kept dashing against the barren, rocky expanse on which the station stood and hurling themselves in fury against the groaning metal sides and roof of the hotel building. The latter was a wood and iron structure – the roof and the outside walls had been constructed from sheets of corrugated iron, and the inside walls and the ceilings from ornamental figured tin. On a hot day the heat inside the hotel was virtually unbearable, and the only relatively cool spots for its guests were to be found under the shade of the verandahs which protected all four sides of the hotel. Strehlow, who was too ill to be moved except for the most necessary purposes, was forced to sit in his chair and to endure the near bake-oven temperatures of his tin-lined room even during the hottest hours of the day. At the same time, he was rather more comfortably off than he would have been had he stayed in the log-house at Idracowra. For the Horseshoe Bend Hotel was Gus Elliot’s pride and joy, and its furnishings gave expression to his desire to provide a home fit for occupation by his city-born wife who had come here as a bride from Melbourne. City dwellers might have regarded the temperatures inside the hotel rooms during hot summer spells as excessively high, but this opinion was not generally shared by the Central Australian guests. The men and women who lived in this country were used to toiling long hours out the open under a broiling sun in summer, and to sleeping and eating in rudely-constructed bush shacks that lacked virtually all the amenities of civilised living. By contrast, the Horseshoe Bend hotel had been put up by professional labour, and all its materials had been brought up from the south at heavy expense. At the time of its construction it had been considered to be perhaps the most modern hotel building in Central Australia. Hence though it contained only half
a dozen bedrooms, these were all distinguished from each other not by numbers but by names, such as ‘the Sullivan room’, and so on.

  On that Thursday morning it seemed as though the mythical ancestresses of Pot’ Arugutja had, after destroying the northern visitors from Rubuntja, left all their baleful influences behind when they left for Jitutna, so as to ensure a harmful and deadly reception for the sick man who had come to their deserted windbreak from the precincts of the north-western MacDonnells. The hot, dust-drowned landscape could not have looked grimmer and more hostile than it did on that unfriendly morning.

  Strehlow was much lower in point of physical strength and mental alertness than he had been only the day before. Mercifully perhaps, his overwrought mind began to wander every now and then; and in his moments of delirium he did not seem to be conscious of those excruciating pains that had begun to rack his body most of the time. But these fits never lasted very long, and then his low moans would show how much pain the very act of taking breath was causing him. The lower portion of his body, from his chest downward, had become swollen to such an extent that he could no longer put on any clothes; and his lower limbs hence had to be covered with a sheet during the day and with a threadbare blanket at night. From the chest upward his body had wasted away till all his ribs and most of his bones were visible in clear outline. His once powerful hands had become so thin and emaciated that his wedding ring had fallen off his left hand a couple of hours after his arrival at Horseshoe Bend.

  While Strehlow sat helplessly in his room, the men and women around him were sparing no efforts in their battle to save his life. The owner of Horseshoe Bend Station and the proprietor of its hotel, Gus Elliot, had made many long telephone calls on the previous day. The doctor from Marree who was staying at the Oodnadatta Hostel had been contacted several times, even though his medical advice remained of necessity singularly ineffective. There were no medicines at Horseshoe Bend that could be recommended for the patient’s treatment; and the only possible remaining measure of relief – surgically tapping the sick man’s swollen body – had to be deferred till the doctor himself could reach the sick man. The telephone news about the possibility of car transport, however, had been most reassuring. The doctor had been only too willing to undertake the trip to Charlotte Waters in the event that a suitable local car and an experienced bush driver should be found. Acting on further special pleas made by Pastor Stolz by telephone from Charlotte Waters on Wednesday midday, two hours after Strehlow’s arrival at Horseshoe Bend, Joe Breaden had at last consented to take the doctor to Charlotte Waters. The twenty-four-hour delay in Breaden’s final answer had been caused by the necessity for making arrangements that would ensure adequate petrol supplies for the car: there were no commercial refuelling points located north of Oodnadatta. The doctor, too, had been compelled to make arrangements for an anticipated lengthy absence from his usual place of duty. He was the medical officer responsible for attending to the health problems of the railway employees, and was normally stationed at Marree. He visited Oodnadatta only once a fortnight, on the weekend when the fortnightly passenger train reached this northern rail terminus. However, the comforting fact remained that Stolz’s final telephone call from Charlotte Waters had definitely clinched the matter of car transport; and Joe Breaden and the doctor now hoped to leave Oodnadatta on Thursday or Friday. Their car was expected to reach Charlotte Waters some time on Friday or Saturday; and the doctor had agreed to continue his journey from the telegraph station to Horseshoe Bend in Gus Elliot’s buggy.

  Augustus Henry Elliot, who was universally known as Gus Elliot, was a strongly built, well-set-up man, who despite his greying moustache and growing portliness still moved around with very brisk, firm steps. He had been one of the early Finke River pioneers; and, like most other elderly white men in Central Australia, he was very sensitive about his real age. No one, not even his closest friends, knew for certain the year in which he had been born though many people made shrewd guesses at it.

  His parents had been among the first settlers who had moved into the Flinders Ranges in the 1850s. His father, Albin Walter Elliot, had been a station contractor, married to Maria Elizabeth Hughes. The normal work done by station contractors at that time consisted of fencing and well-sinking; and hence Gus Elliot’s father had been involved in the uncertain fortunes of the early pioneers as they pressed forward into the Flinders Ranges ‘to open up new country’ for pastoral purposes. The local aboriginal population had not been ‘co-operative’ towards the white new-comers who were pushing them off their tribal lands; and there had been numerous ‘incidents’. When referring to those early times, Gus’s sympathies were, naturally enough, on the side of the pioneer settlers. ‘Well, what else could you expect?’ he would exclaim to the hotel guests. ‘The pioneers came to open up new country. They brought their stock and they had to have labour – not easy to get in those days, I can tell you! Not one of the old niggers’d work for them, only some of the kids came along – boys of fourteen and fifteen or less. The pioneers would teach them to handle sheep, then one day the old folk’d come and tell them to run away. Now what could the pioneers do? They’d got their holdings from the Lands Office in Adelaide, and were paying rent on them, and anyway the niggers had never done anything with the land before the white man came into this country. The police wouldn’t help them in any way – in fact, lots of the settlers were too far out to call the police when trouble started. So when the boys ran away, all the settlers could do was to ride after them, bring them back, and give them a good hiding with a stockwhip to teach them they couldn’t just walk out on their jobs and let the sheep get killed by dingoes or let them die without water. After that the old niggers’d start making trouble. They didn’t often attack the homesteads – they usually started killing sheep or cattle, and there was no way of catching them. If the police came, they were weeks late getting there; and mostly they took no action unless you could tell them what niggers’d done it. As if any of the settlers would’ve known! In any case, there weren’t enough police in the whole of the bloody State to protect the poor battling cows in the outback from the thieving niggers in those days! All the pioneers could do was to get together when things got too tough. Then they’d go out in parties and raid the niggers’ camps and knock the thieving bastards over with bullets. Never got very many, of course: bush niggers’re pretty cunning, and their camps were hard to find, and they’d all run like rabbits if they saw a party of settlers coming up on horseback. But after some years everything quietened down. The niggers had enough sense to realise that they just couldn’t walk around the country killing sheep and cattle, and they got to respecting the white man’s property. They settled down pretty well after that, and some of ’em worked jolly hard for the pioneers. It was only during the first few years that things were really tough down in the Flinders.’

  Gus Elliot, who had been born at Quorn, remembered how excellent this district had been in his boyhood days for grazing sheep and cattle. It had been first-class saltbush country, and he regretted that so much of it had in later years been foolishly ploughed up for wheat farming – an industry that had never been safe in that area because of the low and erratic rainfall. ‘A lot o’ good sheep country was ruined by ploughing, and the wheat cockies never got a proper living out of it,’ he claimed. ‘Those government blokes in Adelaide should’ve had more sense than trying to get people to grow wheat at Quorn, Hawker, and other bloody dry places like that.’’

  Upon reaching manhood Gus had become caught up in the general excitement that spread like wildfire among the younger South Australian station hands and men on the land. Many of the more adventurous spirits saddled up their horses and went out into the relatively unknown regions of the Centre which had become publicised through the journals of the first inland explorers to cross the Northern Territory border, notably John McDouall Stuart and Ernest Giles. The latter had traversed the greater part of the Finke River Valley in 1872; and the completion of the Overland Tele
graph Line furnished a safe overland route through the interior of the country from the same year onward. Men rode far and wide on horses, seeking land and adventure. Only a minority of those who went out stayed long enough, or lived sufficiently interesting lives, to earn spaces for their names in the history of Central Australia. The Henbury plaque, for instance, omitted at least as many names as it mentioned. Thus the name of George Elliot, who acted as station cook at Henbury in the time of the Parke brothers, was not remembered on this brass plate; but since he was Leisha’s white father, his numerous part-aboriginal descendants played a most important role among the stockmen and station workers from whose labours came the profits made from Henbury and Idracowra stations by their various owners.

  Not all of the men who rushed forward into the vast spaces of the inland waited for the new areas to be surveyed, or even to be leased to them. In Central Australia, as elsewhere, the advancing tongues of the forward-sweeping flood of the more restless pioneers ranged far ahead of the often rather sluggish forces of cautious and slothful officialdom. In fact, one of the great attractions of the outback for its early white settlers was that here was a country where men whose lack of money and education made their chances of success rather slim elsewhere received their opportunity to become owners and masters of the land their eyes had first surveyed. A second category of pioneers consisted of men who had come up against the forces of law and order in the longer established regions of settlement, and who hoped to get a second chance of life in the outback. Nor should the dark feminine attractions of Central Australia for many of the first white pioneers – almost all of whom were males – be minimised. As Mounted Constable Willshire was to express it later on in one of his books: ‘Men would not remain so many years in a country like this if there were no women, and perhaps the Almighty meant them for use as He has placed them wherever the pioneers go. Surely if the “Contagious Diseases Act” is legalised in British possessions, then what I am speaking about is only natural, especially for men who are isolated away in the bush at outstations where women of all ages and sizes are running at large.’