But these more or less realistic, and materialistic, reasons would not by themselves have provided such a powerful impelling force for young Australian men in the latter half of the nineteenth century if the inland itself had not added its own mysterious call to their receptive ears. Youth is, after all, both the period of idealism and the time when love of adventure for its own sake grips the imagination; and many young country lads responded to the appeal of the inland with an impetuous enthusiasm that city dwellers who have been cooped up all their lives within the dull confines of large house-covered areas find almost impossible to grasp. Yet to those who have experienced it in their own youth, the call of the bush is something that they can never forget, even in their declining years. For the bush is a free land that no man has ever succeeded in taming finally, let alone in conquering. In its ageless immensity, small spirits felt ennobled and timid spirits emboldened, while strong spirits became tinged with heroism.
When he first arrived in the Centre – in 1880, according to the Henbury plaque – Gus Elliot had been one of the pioneers at the original Glen Helen Station settlement known as Mangama, which was located on the Ormiston River near the junction point where it merged with the Davenport River to form the Finke. He could have been about twenty three years of age at that time. From Mangama he had taken a number of long rides into the still unexplored country west of Glen Helen. He had even reached the spring on the northern side of the Mt Liebig complex, though this mountain was located close to the western termination of the MacDonnell Ranges, some two hundred miles west of Alice Springs. He had found the waters of this spring flowing down a gully for several hundred yards into potentially good cattle country. All of Elliot’s long rides had been undertaken during the early days of the Hermannsburg settlement, about a decade before Strehlow’s arrival in 1894. But during the 1880s the Western MacDonnell Ranges and the Mt Liebig country had been far too densely populated by aboriginal tribesmen for the peace of mind of the early white stock-owners, who had to be prepared to suffer heavy stock losses if they set up stations in what were at that time still undisputed Western Aranda and Kukatja tribal areas. After staying for several years at Mangama, Gus Elliot had moved into the safer cattle country located downstream from Hermannsburg. He left behind him a half-caste son, whose mother Utnea came from the Mangama area. This half-caste son, who was called Gus Elliot after his father according to normal Central Australian custom, was brought up at Hermannsburg, and later christened Michael.
Some time after leaving Glen Helen, Gus Elliot had become the junior partner of Edwin Hooper Sargeant (commonly known as Ted Sargeant), the new owner of Horseshoe Bend Station; and the two men had jointly established an hotel here and become its joint proprietors. Horseshoe Bend Station had originally been sited on the left bank of the Finke near Inggodna. This ‘old station’ had been built by ‘Dickie’ Warburton – the man who had eventually sold out to Sargeant. It was only after Sargeant had taken in Elliot as his partner that the station was moved about a mile down to its present site of Par’ Itirka. The new site was above the level of the highest Finke floods, and a shallow well near the new stockyard yielded water rather less brackish than that available at the original homestead. Because of its shallowness, this well could be worked by a rotary pump, with the donkeys moving in circles as they turned the main horizontal pumping lever.
Elliot’s affairs had prospered greatly after his move from Mangama to Horseshoe Bend. In 1912 the death of E.H. Sargeant had made him the senior member of the new partnership of Elliot and (‘young Harry’) Sargeant (the two names being transposed in this way to indicate the change in seniority): ‘Young Harry’ Sargeant was the son of ‘Old Ted’ Sargeant. And finally, on 30th August, 1913, he had married, in the South Melbourne Baptist Church, a Victorian girl, Ruby Elizabeth Martin, who had been born as a labourer’s daughter in Geelong. At the time of her marriage Ruby had been twenty years of age. Just before their engagement Elliot had told his future bride that his age was twice her own, and on the day of the wedding he had amended this figure and set it down on his marriage certificate as forty eight years. But the old hands in the Finke stations area claimed that Elliot must have been at least fifty six years of age on this occasion. The Elliots had one child – a daughter called Sheila. Sheila, who was now eight years old, was not present at Horseshoe Bend when the Strehlow family arrived. She had already been sent down to Melbourne for her schooling.
Though Elliot was by now undoubtedly in his middle sixties, he still lived a surprisingly active life. His marriage to a young woman seemed to have rejuvenated him, and given him the freshness and the vigour of a young man. Hence no one could see anything strange in his offering to race down eighty miles in a buggy to Charlotte Waters in less than a day and a half, pick up the doctor on his arrival, and then turn around without a break in order to speed back in the same space of time or even less. Perhaps, too, his young wife’s heroic achievement of riding seventy miles in twenty four hours over rough country without taking a rest had given him additional inspiration to attempt a similar or even greater endurance feat.
Elliot was the perfect host to the Hermannsburg travellers that morning. Normally breakfast was eaten as a rushed meal at Horseshoe Bend; for, like all other cattlemen during the summer months, Elliot attempted to get most of the station work done in the morning hours before the day grew intolerably hot. But with a true bushman’s courtesy he realised that Mrs Strehlow needed to be taken out of herself and given a break from her own anxieties at least during mealtimes; and he was only too willing to indulge in his reminiscences about the by-gone pioneering days in order to divert her thoughts temporarily into new channels.
Mrs Strehlow had last enjoyed Elliot’s hospitality ten years earlier, on the occasion when Ted Sargeant had suddenly died at the hotel. She and her husband, when returning from long leave, had been struggling to get back to Hermannsburg on the dry and desolate road leading north from Oodnadatta. Progress had been painfully slow because of the exhausted condition of the mission horses. She and Theo had walked many miles, both in front of and behind the van, during its snail-like progress over the gibber plains: one night they had even walked in front of the exhausted van horses for two hours, carrying a stormlantern in order to guide the driver along the telegraph line to Blood’s Creek. Strehlow had held the reins, while the dark coachman had walked beside the team to urge it along with incessant whipcracks. Walking had been a more comfortable mode of progress than sitting on the springless van, whose bumps over the pebble-strewn gibber flats had threatened to dislocate all the vertebrae in the backbones of the travellers. Even Jakobus, who was bringing up the loose horses, had been forced to drive them on foot at one stage since the saddle horses were too knocked up to bear a rider. On the forenoon of the day on which they had left Old Crown Point they had been met in the stony, undulating country near Cunningham’s Gap by a mounted dark stockman who was driving four fresh buggy horses towards them. He had handed over a letter from Elliot, advising them that his partner, Ted Sargeant, had died early that very morning, and requesting Strehlow to accept the loan of these horses so that Sargeant could be given a Christian funeral on the same afternoon. With the aid of these four fresh horses a quick dash had been made over the remainder of the distance. The horses had galloped over a good part of these final twenty-two miles. Horseshoe Bend had been reached by a quarter to four in the afternoon; and Strehlow had conducted Sargeant’s funeral immediately afterwards, for the hot March weather would not have permitted the mourners to delay the burial of the body any longer.
Mrs Strehlow, who had been greatly surprised on the previous afternoon by the relatively small number of dark folk she had seen at the station, was curious to know the reasons for this decline. ‘I think I saw many more people here last time,’ she remarked to Elliot at the breakfast table; ‘there don’t seem to be many left now.’ ‘You’re right there,’ Elliot replied. ‘That Spanish influenza did it, three years ago. The blacks here died like flie
s, and it was the same everywhere, all the way down to Oodnadatta.’
‘Yes, we heard about the Oodnadatta epidemic from the Kramers two years ago,’ replied Mrs Strehlow. ‘Mr Kramer helped the police to bury the dead. So many died that the rest all fled out bush and did not stop even to bury their relatives. It must have been a terrible time.’
‘It certainly was,’ interrupted Mrs Elliot. ‘Hundreds of them died within a few weeks at Oodnadatta. It was the same at all stations between there and here; and nobody’ll ever know how many died out bush after they’d rushed away from the stations. I’ll tell you how bad things were at that time. Gus sent out old Gallagher Tom, one of our best stockboys, with five other boys to take some cattle down to The Charlotte. There was nothing wrong with any of them when they left. And then, ten days later, old Tom came riding back on his own, with a couple o’ packhorses. He was in tears when he walked up to Gus. He and the others had all caught the ’flu from some of the New Crown boys. The other five boys had died on the track, and only old Tom had managed to come back alive. Of course, they’d lost the cattle and the rest of the plant, and Tom was frightened that Gus’d be wild with him. But, of course, we only felt sorry for the poor old thing, and for the other boys, too – a couple of them had been our very best stockboys. Old Tom was ill for another month or so before he could come back to work. But we got our horses and most of our cattle back at the next New Crown muster.’
‘Yes, old Tom Pearce down at The New Crown is a jolly good bloke,’ added Elliot. ‘Absolutely honest – never played a dirty trick on anyone all his life. He was one o’ the characters in Mrs Gunn’s We of the Never Never, you know. He’s called “Mine Host” in that book.’
‘And is that why there are so few people here in the camp now?’ Mrs Strehlow asked, with a note of obvious concern in her voice.
‘Yes and no,’ replied Elliot, and put his cutlery down against the side of his plate. ‘You see, the blacks’re dying out pretty fast everywhere in these parts. When I first came up here as a young chap, the whole country was just thick with blacks. They were everywhere, and it was pretty hard for a cattleman to keep his stock safe from their spears. Just let me give you an idea of what things were like then. You could see big, laughing camps of niggers – beg pardon, blacks – in mobs of eighty or a hundred, at every big waterhole along the Finke River; and they were just as thick along the Palmer, the Lilla, the Goyder, and even down at that godforsaken dump, The Charlotte. Well, they never seemed to have many kids, at least not after us whites came into this country; and few of the kids they had ever lived long. By the time the ’flu hit them, there were no blacks living along the Finke in camps of their own any more. What was left of them had moved to the stations. The ’flu just speeded up things like. Some folk down south’re starting to complain that the early settlers must’ve shot them in their hundreds; but I tell you most of them just went off naturally – no resistance, just had no will to live, it seems. Anyway, the blacks’ve always been treated very well on this station, and on most other stations on the Finke as well.’
‘They’re not dying out at Hermannsburg,’ put in Mrs Strehlow softly, ‘and there are plenty of children up there.’
‘That’s what everybody tells us,’ confirmed Mrs Elliot. ‘You and your husband must take most of the credit for that, though I don’t know how you’ve done it.’
A happy smile stole for a moment over Mrs Strehlow’s worn and tired face. ‘Thank you, Mrs Elliot,’ she said warmly, ‘it’s so good of you to say so. My husband and I have just tried to do our duty, and perhaps God has blessed our work.’
Elliot, who had the normal bushman’s aversion to hearing the name of the Almighty mentioned except in certain blasphemous stock phrases, looked a little uncomfortable at this last remark. He twirled the ends of his light-grey moustache a couple of times with his fingers, and then announced that it was time for him to leave the table and attend to some station matters. And so the breakfast party broke up – Elliot went out and summoned his stockboys, Mrs Elliot retired into her kitchen, Mrs Strehlow returned to the sickroom, Heinrich moved out under the verandah and started chatting to two other hotel guests, and Theo was glad to be able to escape to his friends in the aboriginal camp.
Elliot left Horseshoe Bend in the early afternoon. His horses were fresh and well-fed, and he anticipated reaching Charlotte Waters about noon next day. The ground to be covered consisted mainly of bare plains and undulating stony country. There was only one long and difficult sandy stretch on this road – the three notorious Finke crossings at Old Crown Point, twenty-six miles south of Horseshoe Bend; but these crossings were not expected to worry unduly a spirited team of fresh horses pulling a light and unloaded buggy, with Elliot and a dark stockman as the only passengers. Elliot’s departure was attended by the usual clamour of dozens of campdogs which barked furiously and rushed madly after the buggy as it rapidly climbed up into the steep and fairly narrow cutting carved from the cliffs east of the station; but the trotting horses outdistanced them at a fast pace, and the buggy soon reached the top of the rock wall flanking the Finke valley on the eastern side. It then swung over the red ridge of a dune crest beyond the cliff tops, and was completely lost to view. About half a mile from the station the buggy passed a lonely grave. It was that of a prospector who had tried to walk the twenty-six miles from Old Crown Point to Horseshoe Bend at the turn of the century during the time of the Arltunga gold rush. He had attempted to cover this distance on a hot summer day; but he had already drained his waterbag dry after walking little more than the first twelve miles. A few hours later he became delirious from thirst, and his pace had lessened with every mile walked in the scorching heat. His strength had finally given out when he had almost reached the one remaining sand-dune which lay between him and safety. Had he walked the last few chains to its crest, he would have caught sight of the green Finke Valley stretching out below him; for these sand-dunes reached forward from the high-level country situated east of the valley, and completely covered the tops of the high cliff wall that protected the river bed below from the menace of their ever-encroaching sand waves.
By the time of Elliot’s departure Strehlow had passed through many hours of pain, delirium, and exhausting mental struggle. There was no longer even a faint flicker of hope left in his mind: to pray ‘Thy will be done’ now meant asking God for strength to die with the fortitude of a servant who had been loyal unto death. Thoughts of what would happen to his wife and son, whom he was leaving behind him completely unprovided for in a country that he had never regarded as his homeland, began to oppress him more and more; and his inability to give any directions for the future to the unsuspecting woman who was so soon to become a helpless widow preyed ever increasingly on his mind. Yet he knew that his lips had to remain sealed in her presence. To endure her grief and her despair in addition to those torments of body and soul through which he was now passing would have been more than he could endure. The man who had been regarded in every way as a rock was beginning to crumble under the incessant hammer-blows of excruciating pain, his resistance undermined by his own doubts and fears.
Late in the afternoon Strehlow could bear the cruel struggle no longer: he would have to shed his pride in the strength of his own self-sufficiency and confide his last requests to a sympathetic person who could be trusted both to keep them secret while he lived and to carry them out after his death. Hesitantly he turned towards his wife, trying to screw up his courage to ask her to leave the room. Mrs Strehlow was quite unaware of the struggle that was going on in her husband’s mind. She had been sitting patiently opposite to him, attempting to cheer his spirits by informing him of the moves that were being made to bring a doctor to his side. ‘Darling,’ she said, with a ring of relief and hope in her voice, ‘just think of it – the doctor should be here by Saturday afternoon. Everything will be all right after that. He will be able to give you relief immediately. And when you are stronger again, we will be able to go on, and this time in
a car. Mr Wurst is merely waiting in Oodnadatta for new car parts, and then he will make the second attempt to come here to Horseshoe Bend.’
‘Frieda,’ the sick man suddenly interrupted her, ‘please ask Mrs Elliot to come. I want to talk to her – and, please understand me, I want to talk to her alone.’
Mrs Strehlow looked at him in staggered surprise. She had never before been asked to leave her husband’s room unless he had wanted to talk to someone in a purely official or clerical capacity. But surely he could have no clerical reasons at this moment for seeing Mrs Elliot? However, she rose and left without asking any questions, only too willing to humour her husband and always ready to believe that his actions were invariably prompted by the best of reasons, even if he would not give them to her. ‘Mrs Elliot,’ she said, when she came into the hotel kitchen, ‘my husband wants to speak to you. And he wants to speak to you alone. I will wait here. Please go – he is almost too weak to talk this afternoon.’
Mrs Elliot hesitated for a moment; for the thought of being alone with a dying man terrified her. Then she noted the pleading look in Mrs Strehlow’s face and assented. She hurried into the sickroom. One glance at the sufferer’s tortured and twitching face, red and purple from the never-ending struggle of breathing, told her that the man before her would not have many more days, or even hours, to live. ‘Mr Strehlow, I believe you asked for me to come,’ she said in a low voice, trying hard to conceal her shock at the obviously serious deterioration of his condition. ‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’
‘Please do sit down,’ Strehlow replied. ‘Yes, Mrs Elliot, I want to ask you to help me, please. There are several things I want to talk to you about.’
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