A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  As far as Charlotte Waters my grandfather’s diary had been surprisingly void of drama. And then there was an incident which reveals starkly the accepted risks of the assignment. To speed up the job, three telegraph masters (Kraegen, Mueller and Watson) were sent ahead to prepare for installing batteries and instruments at the prospective telegraph stations at Alice Springs and Barrow Creek. They took three saddle and two pack horses and written directions to the various waterholes along the route. Eleven days later my grandfather found them doubling back on their tracks:

  15th Dec. The Old Depot. About 2.30 pm Mueller and Watson arrived back with one horse and the pack saddle. They reported they could not find water at the places they expected, and that in the evening Kraegen went ahead, taking his own and Mueller’s horses, to try and find water and bring some back as they had none since 8 am and were quite exhausted from having exerted themselves, it being a very hot day. In consequence of Kraegen not returning at the time they expected, they tried to get along towards him, but were unable to go far that night. The following day they looked for water in all directions but not finding any, they were obliged to kill one of the horses to save their lives by drinking the animal’s blood which revived them sufficiently to make another effort to find water, which they succeeded in doing after they had been without water for 54 hours. They found Kraegen’s tracks leading towards the water but could not see anything of him. … It is greatly feared that poor Kraegen did not find it and may have perished as he had no food with him.

  20th Dec. Rocky Camp Waterhole. Young followed line today. He found the remains of poor Kraegen lying near the line about three miles SE from this camp, his revolver and belt and spurs lying at his feet, quart pot, pannican and three empty water cans at his side. We dug a grave near the spot and buried him.

  January 1, 1872 was the contract date for the opening of the telegraph line and there were still hundreds of miles to be covered. So Benjamin Clarke pressed on and opened the Telegraph Station at Barrow Creek on January 19, 1872. He decided to make his personal push from there, taking two men and packhorses.

  23rd Jan: The road was fearfully boggy. We had to lead our horses, and could scarcely get through it.

  24th Jan: Today we came upon some blacks who made a great row calling out. We could see them walking between the trees and all armed. Shortly after meeting them, part of pack came loose and the horse made a bolt, kicking and plunging, and two other packhorses after him. Fortunately they did not get far away.

  4th Feb: Tennant’s Creek – we have travelled 1,284 miles from Port Augusta by road. Our rations are nearly out: no meat or sugar left, and only a small quantity of tea and flour.

  8th Feb: Attack Creek. Met Mr Harvey and party at camp.

  That was then the most northerly camp of the Central Australian section of the OT line. In fact the line was wired only as far as Tennant’s Creek, so the party returned there to look for current, but getting none had to ride south along the line inspecting for breaks.

  Ben Clarke stayed on as telegraph master at Tennant Creek until August 1872, replacing the officer who had died of thirst on the expedition. Meanwhile, as his diary reveals, the thin feeler wire was being extended north to meet the feeler wire being pushed vigorously south from Daly Waters. Clarke began receiving messages from Adelaide for transmission to England and one lot of messages were received from England and speeded on their way by horsemen and telegraph to Adelaide.

  The two ends of the overland wire were joined on August 22 of that year amid great rejoicings and congratulation. The ambitious work, notwithstanding challenges and disasters, had been accomplished within two years, thus linking Australia to Asia and Europe by wire and breaking the isolation of the southern continent. But it achieved more than that. It opened up the red heart of the continent. The lonely telegraph stations, two hundred miles apart, such as Alice Springs, Barrow Creek, the Tennant and Powell Creek, were the first centres of white settlement in the Northern Territory. When pastoralists galloped up to take advantage of all the spade work of the explorers and the telegraph pioneers, the telegraph track became a stock route with, in due course, Government wells or bores along it. If it had not been for the telegraph line and the cable station, the now strategically vital town of Darwin might have languished and died as had other attempted settlements in that region.

  After my mother’s article had been published, her father Guildford Clarke – one of Ben Clarke’s nine children – wrote to her from Western Australia:

  I was very impressed with your article on the OT odyssey published in the Herald. Dear old Benno, as Mother always called him, little guessed that he would figure prominently in a description of the laying of the line, 75 years later and written by his granddaughter. The other members of the Clarke clan will be thrilled to read about the exploits of the dear old man who, by the way, was one of the retiring modest type and beloved by all who knew him. Charles Todd was Post Master General when I started as a messenger at the Kapunda Post Office where our father was Master of Posts and Telegraphs. I received 10/- a week and Father gave me three pence pocket money from it which I promptly exchanged for a meat pie at the pastry cook’s shop.

  Benjamin Clarke had sent the first morse code message from the Old Telegraph Station at Alice Springs. In 1962 a street in the town was named in his honour and the information in his diary acknowledged for adding to the history of the telegraph station at Alice Springs. An extract from the diary referring to the death of Kraegen, the telegraph operator who died of thirst, was included in a permanent exhibition in Adelaide’s GPO, preserving and honouring the expedition that had linked Australia to overseas for the first time.

  The Overland Telegraph line between Adelaide and Darwin is a tribute to the foresight, enterprise, courage and tenacity of the Postmaster-General and Superintendent of Telegraphs in South Australia at the time, Sir Charles Todd, and a willing band of colleagues. It stretched over a distance of nearly 2,000 miles through inhospitable country, much of it without water, food or settlements and inhabited by hostile, nomadic tribes of aborigines, totally unfamiliar with the white man. Five deaths occurred during the erection of the line, and occasional outbreaks of hostilities accounted for other casualties after the line was opened for traffic.

  My mother donated Ben Clarke’s diary to the Mitchell Library. It is an important record of the Overland Telegraph expedition of 1871 and her grandfather’s part in what has been called ‘the greatest engineering feat carried out in nineteenth century Australia’.

  20

  Peripatetic Parents

  My parents labelled themselves ‘peripatetic parents’, the alliteration and reference to ancient Greece giving an extra layer of gravitas to their role as travelling writers collecting material for broadcasts, books and articles. They even used this title when inscribing our copies of their travel books, as if to make up for leaving us behind.

  With warmest love from us

  Mum & Dad

  Peripatetic Parents

  Perhaps it was a form of self-justification. At any rate it had a better ring to it than ‘absentee parents’.

  Gathering material is an essential part of any writer’s life and work. Some only mine their resources from other texts. Before the electronic age, that meant physically delving into libraries and stacks of documents. But as Coralie’s and Leslie’s curiosity about travel writing grew, it became imperative for them to gather firsthand experiences. This type of work must, by definition, involve intrepid travel, remote places and fascinating people. That is what attracts and holds the audience and the readership.

  The ABC documentaries that resulted from their travels were known as radio features. Coralie and Leslie, as narrators, gave the factual information and background and a cast of actors played different people, some real, some imaginary. Background music was used, much as it is today in film and television drama. Inventive sound effects (such as cutting through a
cabbage to make the sound of ice shattering) were used in the studio to create the sense of place and action. Putting all these together with an engaging script re-created real places, people and events. It was a means for the medium of radio to both inform and entertain, long before the age of audiovisual equipment.

  Without tape recorders or video cameras, writers of documentaries had to use their written notes of face-to-face interviews to reconstruct conversations and then craft the material into dramatic dialogue. The dialogue was interspersed with blocks of explanatory text called ‘continuity’, which was spoken by the narrators. The continuity was written in sentences and paragraphs, so was more formal in style than the colloquial language spoken by the various characters. The listening audience could detect who was talking by the different voices and the tone of language used.

  As well as writing the scripts, Coralie and Leslie took part in the production, usually as narrators, sometimes in brief character roles. ABC radio features were broadcast nationally and a wide audience all over the country lapped them up as fascinating listening. But it was a long and labour-intensive process to produce thirty minutes of listening infotainment and sadly, after it went to air, there was often nothing left of the feature but a pile of scripts roneoed on foolscap paper. However, these did not go to waste. My parents wrote many of their notes and drafts on the back of used ABC scripts, thus recycling resources.

  As travel writers, Coral and Les faced a challenge both practical and ethical: how to balance doing their work while bringing up two young children – for they were also deeply committed to parenthood. My mother was determined not to be the sacrificial domestic lamb, keeping the home fires burning while her collaborator went off adventuring. This did not fit with her belief that critical to the balance of their research were both male and female perspectives. She also did all the legwork of preparation and planning: background research, writing polite letters to request meetings and interviews, investigating means and costs of travel and putting the whole itinerary together. Travel agents are a more recent invention. In Australia during the postwar years, a time of financial austerity, very few people journeyed far from home and even fewer went to remote regions, or ‘off the beaten track’.

  My father also had to confront the problem of getting leave from his job at the ABC. His practice was to save up his three weeks’ annual leave over several years and then take it in bigger chunks. For some of the longer trips, he took leave without pay, making it even more necessary for them to produce books and documentaries on their return to pay for their travel and keep up with the household expenses.

  So, intermittently, our parents would take off on one of their working trips together, and sometimes were away for months. For Megan and me, this became the routine of our childhoods. We would be sent to stay with other families, sometimes related, sometimes not, sometimes together, sometimes separately. We didn’t have any say in the matter.

  Not everyone agreed that such a lifestyle was justified. Was it self-indulgent or, worse, irresponsible? Was it sound or legitimate parenting? And how do long parental absences affect children in their formative years? Both our parents defended this practice when they were interviewed about their writing, as when one questioner asked, ‘How did you work in the daughters with the travel?’:

  ‘Ah’ Coralie said, as if thereby hung a tale. ‘That first came up when the girls were six and eight. Leslie wanted to go hitchhiking to Alice Springs and see the North. He wanted me with him and I wanted to go. BUT – what about the girls?

  ‘I had to make a decision. I could let him go alone or I could go with him, sure that the girls were left in good hands. I decided then and there that my husband came first. That’s been my philosophy of marriage. And the girls haven’t been deprived. They’ve told us they had a wonderful childhood and learnt to appreciate what home means.’

  Leslie explained it differently, reflecting many years later on their collaboration in travel writing:

  Now the third part of my writing was in conjunction with Coralie, my wife, who was a great partner with me, although she was never a robust person, but she had a tremendous wish to go along with it, and be in everything. Instead of leaving her at home, we left the children at home. We managed to find satisfactory care for them and we went off on many trips around the world to different countries but her greatest interest was in going into parts of Australia that were hardly known at that time, off the beaten track.

  I now contemplate my parents’ attitudes on this with some ambivalence. I definitely had some tough experiences while they were away and always felt a great sense of dread as the moment came for them to depart. But many children have to deal with worse and come out the stronger for it. And what were the alternatives? Our country cousins were sent off to boarding school for their secondary education. We soundly rejected that prospect. It sounded like incarceration. Anyway, our parents could not have afforded the fees.

  On reflection, I can see that the arrangement had definite benefits. Our parents’ absences widened our experiences. Early on we became flexible to different patterns and ways of living, later we became self-assured, adventurous and independent. Although a naturally shy child, I learnt to live in other people’s homes, eat different foods, play by different rules, accept other authority figures, survive at different schools, and to express myself appropriately in whatever company I found myself. More importantly, I learnt that love and respect could be given and received outside of the close family network. I also stumbled on a few dangers, which are part of any exploration.

  When I was eight years old, we travelled as a family to Western Australia again, this time overland. To cross the continent by train was a tedious and uncomfortable journey, taking five or six days. At that time, each state in Australia had a different railway gauge so every time we came to a border we had to change trains. Because the four of us were going to be away for many months, we had thirteen pieces of luggage, including the aforementioned Five Bob Case (a leather strap round its belly to prevent disgorging), the Alwyn (presented to my mother on her departure for London in 1930 and bearing a little engraved plate to say so), our Globite school cases, my mother’s red hatbox, and a string bag. I carried my life-sized doll, Baby Pam, close to my chest. Every time we had to change to another train (usually at some inhospitable hour), our raggedy collection of luggage had to be arranged along the station, checked, counted and recounted, only to be reloaded into the overhead wire racks of another bulging compartment.

  This was not a joyous homecoming for our parents. It was a journey of sadness. Between January and April, both had lost a parent in faraway Perth. The day after New Year, my mother received a telegram to say that her father had suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. She was stunned by the news and frustrated at being so distant from her grieving mother and siblings. Then, after Easter, my father received the news that his beloved mother had died. My father was too grief-stricken to talk to us. It was the first time I saw him cry, which made more of an impression on me than the passing of a grandmother I barely knew.

  This 1949 journey was special in that for once my sister and I were included – if only in the first part. We were to visit all our relatives, the Clarke and Rees families. But then our parents were taking off up the coast for the six-month outback odyssey that would culminate in their bestseller Spinifex Walkabout. Our mother’s sister Jess had offered to mind us for the duration. Her only child, Malcolm, was my age so perhaps my aunt welcomed the idea of some cousinly company for him.

  The family lived in the tall-treed southwest in a little town where Uncle Cooee was a stock auctioneer. The name fitted perfectly. On the days he was operating at the sales yards, his voice could be heard echoing over the town and through the wooded hills and orchards. In the crisp mornings, I walked through the bush with my cousin to a tiny school with a composite class and a male teacher. I still remember the first time I bit into a green apple off the tree. I
t tasted like no apple ever has before or since. One day my cousin told me, conspiratorially, that his father kept a dead man in a box under the bed. Everything was so new and strange to me that anything was possible.

  Then disaster struck. I developed a very serious illness called ‘virus pneumonia’. Fortunately for me, the new wonder drug penicillin had become available, otherwise I probably would not have come out alive from the cramped hospital room I shared with a few old ladies. Despite my aunt and sister visiting daily and doing their best to cheer me, I cried and cried into my pillow, longing for my mother’s tender words and touch, as any sick child does. My parents, meanwhile, were uncontactable somewhere in the Kimberley and none the wiser until I was well out of hospital and beginning a long convalescence.

  When I was in Year Five, my parents went off to New Guinea (then an Australian protectorate) for three months. They stayed in the Highlands, learning about the life and work of patrol officers, meeting the indigenous people (some groups then reputedly still headhunters), and examining the recently erupted Mt Lamington volcano at close range. This adventure resulted in my father’s novel for young people, Danger Patrol, as well as the creation of a series of radio documentaries in which they both performed. Blanche invited me to stay for the duration at the HP.

  The Purchases lived in a sprawling Federation house that stands at the end of the wide tawny-gravelled main street in Young and is still used as a medical practice. In the time of my visits, the property was also the family home where Blanche and Maurice raised their five children and gave so much hospitality the place was known affectionately as ‘the HP’: the Hotel Purchas. Maurice Purchas was the town’s multitasking family doctor. His work covered the entire medical spectrum from general practice to surgery, pathology, radiography, obstetrics: a birth-to-death line of responsibility. This was the scope and challenge of a country practice.