CHAPTER 2
Mounted Constable Jack Sargeant
In Central Australia, Sergeant Robert (Bobby) Stott was The Law and The Order. As police commissioner for the region, he was known throughout the country as the uncrowned King of the Centre. He dispensed justice decreed by the times, by the isolation and with the small police force of the day.
My father always claimed, with some amusement, that he was shanghaied into the Territory Mounted. Sergeant Stott—ever on the lookout for recruits to swell the ranks of his small force—jovially persuaded my father to sign his little form: maybe in a few years, when he was older, Jack would be called upon to join the police force. Thinking nothing would come of it, my father signed.
A few weeks later, a telegram from Stott was tapped through to my father by Morse code:
You have this day been appointed Mounted Constable Northern Territory Police Force, a horse plant is being sent from Newcastle Waters to convey you to Rankine River. You will change horses at Anthony Lagoon and the plant will return to Newcastle Waters.
Just like that, with no specific qualifications for the job, no educational or health requirements—certainly no training period—my father was officially policeman, stock inspector, mining warden, protector of Aboriginals, registrar of cattle brands, receiver of dingo scalps from doggers, issuer of permits to employ, gravedigger for spear wound and fever victims, and supplier of rations. And he was still employed by the British Australian Telegraph Company.
Territorians have always referred to Alice Springs as ‘The Alice’, Katherine as ‘The Kath-Er-Ryne’, and the high stony ground of Newcastle Waters as ‘The Ridge’, so when my father set off with his horse plant to take up his first police post, it was to ‘The Rankine’.
The Rankine River on the Barkly Tableland is dry for most of the year. The fierce cold wind of the dry months made a drover’s life hell, plodding along in the dust of a thousand head of cattle. But with the flooding rains of the wet season, all of the Tableland’s rivers and creeks come to life, and its nearly 300,000 square kilometres of grassland could gladden the heart of any cattleman. Amid the nutritious Mitchell and Flinders grasses of the Barkly, huge cattle stations were established early, and a packhorse mail run came through every six weeks.
The arm of the law was very long on the great plains of the Territory in 1921. A meagre police force patrolled more than a million square kilometres of country that spread from desert borders in Central Australia to the jungle tropics along the Arafura Sea. Within these boundaries were arid desert, lush grassland, rivers and mountain ranges—mirage and desolation, unmapped, unpeopled.
Police outposts had no outside communications except for those stationed along the Overland Telegraph Line. Officers spent months patrolling over hundreds of kilometres with packhorse plant and native tracker. Roads were rough or non-existent in the dry; impassable even by horseback in the wet.
When my father came to the Rankine in 1921, there was a bore for water, with a turkey-nest holding dam, and a store catering to drovers. The police station was a small iron building, hot as an oven within. Over its entrance hung an indomitably authoritative sign: Police Post GRV (George Rex V). Was King George, on the other side of the world, even aware that this small speck of habitation on the great plain existed?
Bush police posts left much to be desired and in some cases were merely iron sheds or worse. Nicholas Waters, the first Commonwealth Inspector of Police in the Northern Territory, protested in a 1922 report:
Better quarters should be provided, so as to allow them to get married, as most stations are unfit for occupation. When last heard from the Constable at Lake Nash Station, he was occupying an old tent and bough shade for over two years.
The cattle station there had promised to improve his quarters, but nothing has been done. There is no means of securing prisoners except by chaining them to a post or tree. I submit lockups should be erected at Timber Creek, Rankin River and Roper River.
Rankine was a two-man station; my father joined Alf Stretton, who years later became superintendent of the Territory police force. Born in Borroloola, Stretton was one of the many children of W.G. Stretton, an early Territory policeman who’d endeavoured to tame the lawless gangs of travellers taking the Old Coast Road to seek fortune in the goldfields. In 1872 Wentworth D’Arcy Uhr had established this track when he made a trip from Charters Towers with 400 bullocks for Palmerston; pioneer cattlemen had followed with great herds.
At Rankine, Stretton and my father, along with two trackers, were the only police presence within thousands of square kilometres. Later John Creed Lovegrove took Stretton’s place. The arm of the law was very long indeed.
As stock inspectors the Rankine police were responsible for dipping the big herds coming through the Barkly Stock Route during the droving season. They used an arsenic dip for tick and kept a close watch for the parasite’s attendant red-water fever. They also administered to the health of Aboriginal people: yaws and leprosy were common diseases, and it was no easy task persuading bush Aboriginals to leave familiar country for medical treatment; unless detained, they silently disappeared into the night and were never seen again.
Anthony Lagoon Station, some 220 kilometres across the Barkly Tableland, was a breeding depot for police horses; from there the policemen restocked their plant with horses bearing the broad-arrow government brand.
Supplies for the Rankine police station came from the Camooweal store. Once, an item on their account caught my father’s eye: ten sets of horseshoes that had neither been ordered nor received. He drew the storekeeper’s attention to this. ‘Oh! The horseshoes: the bookkeeper couldn’t remember who bought them, so we charged for them on every account! You are the only person to remark on it. Everyone else paid up.’
One morning at the height of the droving season, a big wagon drawn by twenty horses—with loading for Alexandria Station—pulled up in Rankine. On board was a brand-new Ford, sent down from Darwin for police use by Captain Bishop, chief veterinary officer of the Territory and a Boer War veteran. Fifteen years later, the dear old captain, with his clipped white military moustache, would chaperone me to my first school ball.
The Ford proved a godsend for police on the downs, where the country was hard and flat; it cut travelling time on the long distances between cattle dips. Although bush patrols were still carried out with horse plant, the motor car brought my father and his colleagues into the modern world of the early 1920s.
For most Territorians, the motor car was pretty much a novelty until the early 1930s. But, in 1912, Administrator Gilruth and his chauffeur had made an epic car journey over horse pad and bush track to Borroloola, which says something for the early travellers and something for the early motor car as well.
CHAPTER 3
Old Darwin Town
In 1825 the boundaries of many Australian states and territories remained unfixed and land that includes the current Northern Territory was incorporated into New South Wales. Between 1825 and 1838 the British made three unsuccessful attempts to establish settlements on the coast of what is now the Northern Territory. In 1846, the British government considered creating a colony of ‘Northern Australia’ but later that year all plans for settlement of this proposed colony were abandoned.
The current boundaries of the Northern Territory were formed from the ‘leftovers’ of Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland establishing their borders between 1829 and 1862. In 1862, on the sixth attempt in four years, John McDouall Stuart travelled the length of the Northern Territory, thereby earning a £2000 reward from the South Australian government. The Northern Territory was incorporated into South Australia on 6 July 1863, with the British reputedly glad to be rid of what they saw as unprofitable and inhospitable country.
Unique among Australian colonies, South Australia had been established by free settlers, not convicts. Perhaps with a transcontinental rail line, the Territory’s pastoral, mineral and other resources could provide a good means of
revenue for the colony. In February 1869, George Goyder, the surveyor general of South Australia, arrived to survey a town site on Port Darwin, which he named Palmerston for the then British prime minister. He enthused: ‘South Australia has no reason to fear her connection with this place.’
The new town was settled in splendid isolation at land’s end atop rocky cliffs, the harbour at its feet; a harbour with few equals, it’s said. But the town has no close, surrounding hills to snuggle into; no hinterland of cool mountains for its residents to escape the vicious heat. It lies like a hide pegged out to dry. Town of perpetual summer, its seasons are ‘the wet’ and ‘the dry’. After monsoon, the curtain goes up on cooler dry weather until October, when heat descends with its usual ferocity, and one hears from its brow-mopping citizens, ‘By God! I wish it would rain.’ And by December, it usually does.
In 1869 the good citizens in their settlement high above the port had rejected the name Darwin. They refused to live in a town named for a man who said they were not created in God’s image, but were descended from monkeys. Unbeknown to them, the name Palmerston had a rather more unsavoury cloud about it.
Queen Victoria disliked her prime minister, apparently because at an advanced age he revealed a penchant for parlour maids of great English houses, which created a bit of a scandal back then. Rumour has it that he died on a billiard table at Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, in enthusiastic sexual dalliance with yet another maid. He was given a state funeral. The residents of Palmerston, thousands of miles distant, could hardly have heard about the salacious and fascinating aspects of its namesake.
Poor little town. Not much of a complimentary nature seems to have been recorded about Palmerston in its early days, except of the considerable gold extracted from its environs. We’re presented with a grim picture of daily life. The heat was unbearable for white men and women, encased in their European dress. Residents also had to contend with the isolation, the debilitating fevers and the deplorable filth of Chinatown.
Very few of the Territory’s pre-war European citizens were Territory born. They came from all over—from China to the American goldfields—to join the gold rush that began in the early 1870s.
Palmerston’s seemingly limitless capacity for booze drew comment from almost every visitor. The town became no place for the righteous. Its churches remained forlornly empty, while hotels overflowed. Drunkenness upset worthy clergymen endeavouring to tend their wayward flock. One Methodist minister of early days wrote: ‘It is a town sunk in iniquity.’ But then by all accounts he wasn’t one for much fun.
A Reverend J.A. Boyle wrote in his diary of having preached twice in Palmerston to a congregation of four, in a church full of snakes and mosquitoes, with rain battering the roof. ‘It rather spoiled my sermon,’ he wrote glumly. He added, with apparent bitterness, that in a population of 600 whites, the bond stores held 3000 gallons of spirits and wine. ‘I cannot help but feel discouraged at this dreadful apathy. Lord stir up thy people.’
The residents of Palmerston did manage a faint stir, but only enough to write cheeky letters that depressed the poor old thing further, and did nothing to staunch their unquenchable thirsts and indifference to his services.
There was considerable traffic in opium in Palmerston. Unlike cocaine and alcohol, opium is mild, pleasant and relaxing. It intensifies thoughts and eases pain. Where men lie with pipes, in dim shadowy surrounds, there is a curious smell—like toasted nuts, even faintly chocolaty. But this drug is seductive; it can slyly take hold, sink its claws deep, and you are lost.
Opium came to the Territory in the mid-1800s. Aboriginal people had largely been written off as a workforce, and the small European population still lived with the belief that the white man couldn’t work in the tropics. Bringing in workers from India was considered, but the Chinese ‘coolie’ was finally settled upon as a source of manual labour.
In 1874 the ship Vidar arrived with the first batch of 176 coolies. They cost £9 7s to introduce and, with provisions, were to work for £3 per month, ten hours per day, not on Sundays. Many, some say all, were opium addicts; they also brought with them smallpox and leprosy.
Leprosy remained, and was disastrous for the Aboriginal people; having never been exposed to this disease, they had no barriers against it. Opium also became their scourge; the Chinese used ash from their opium pipes as payment for Aboriginal women, and their need of the drug was born.
By 1879 the Chinese far outnumbered Europeans in the Top End, and numbers were boosted further when railway construction began. The District Council of Palmerston allotted the Chinese a camp to the north-east of town, as the wind never blew from that direction. It was a shanty town of tin shacks with small odorous backyards, appallingly filthy, sanitation non-existent. Medical men condemned it as unfit for human habitation as leprosy took hold.
The smell wafting out of ‘Little Canton’ was awful and remained so for years; Cavanagh Street was referred to as Lavender Street. But Chinatown continued to grow right in the heart of town; gambling flourished in iron-walled alleys, where a wager was possible on anything at all.
In 1901 with the Immigration Restriction Act, many Chinese were deported and some suicided in preference to deportation, while others returned to China with new-found wealth, enabling them to live a good life with several wives.
As a young police officer in the early 1920s, my father suffered great embarrassment when he was ordered to observe a Chinese mother suckling her infant in her home, to ensure the child was a genuine resident, born in the country.
In the late nineteenth century, after a succession of unprofitable endeavours, the Territory was proving too expensive for South Australia and the state sought a way to divest itself of what many South Australians referred to as its ‘white elephant’. After a visit to the Northern Territory in 1888, J.C.F Johnson, the South Australian minister for the Territory, said, ‘It is a bad job that we have had anything to do with the Territory—a bad thing for the Territory, a bad thing for South Australia—we should get rid of it!’
Finally, on 1 January 1911—just eight years before my father’s arrival—South Australia was rid of the Northern Territory when the Commonwealth government took over. Two months later, on 3 March 1911, the name Palmerston was changed and the town of Darwin was born. By then the name was already in common use, with no heed paid to monkey ancestors.
Darwin was a tropical colonial town in every sense: a combination of coconut-plantation ports of the East and the old American west. You might have seen, through the swinging doors of the old Terminus Hotel, a hunter in from the bush, bandolier across his chest; Chinese in coolie pants jogging by with yoke and baskets; Japanese pearlers milling about in their glove-like boots; chattering girls of mixed race, with tropical blossoms in their hair; children of exceptional beauty, black through to palest coffee. A proliferation of colours, smells, languages—you could have been anywhere in Asia. Truly, it was as cosmopolitan a town as you could find, and those who knew it well loved it in all its colourful bawdiness.
There is no chance now of re-creating Darwin’s past. Gone are the European men in immaculate tropical dress, white linen shoes, pith helmets; gone are the days when evening dress was de rigueur after sundown for men and women. No barbecues back then: white-jacketed Aboriginal houseboys attended in the evenings, and the punkah fan cooled every public dining room and bar.
Ships from the south and from Asia brought regular loading. A certain monthly ship from Singapore, my father fondly recalled, made the very best gin slings. The unloading of liquor generally took precedence—should a strike prevent further work, some shipping lines had the good sense to pack the cases of alcohol well down in the hold.
Work ground to a halt in the wet. For the government employees who could afford it, this was a time to take berth on a ship and retreat south. One heard the old refrain ‘out of Darwin by Christmas’. However, there were those to whom Darwin was home, and to them it was exhilarating to catch the town in the wild seaso
n of monsoon, when rain crashed on iron roofs so you could barely carry a conversation within, and water rushed in torrents down streets and gutters. Children released from weeks of scorching heat were out splashing through it, with not a thought to the warnings of fever and hookworm—all of the kids already had hookworm and a variety of other tropical parasites as well.
Storm time was exciting, and this was a town where anything could happen, from murder to all sorts of scandalous mayhem, and not an eyebrow raised—although every indiscretion, secret late-night tryst and unlawful dealing among European citizens made for good gossip.
In a new country, awash with opportunities, people came seeking their fortune in gold or pearls, or on vast cattle runs. From the early 1920s, Russian immigrants grew peanuts and bananas. And in every isolated corner of the bush, an Irishman could be found—bred for export, my father said.
Drawn by the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and storytellers of the swashbuckling Pacific, men took berth on ships bound for the East—for Singapore, Shanghai and adventure—and never made it past Darwin. Here was all the exotic colour they wanted. They came ashore for a drink and forgot where they were going. Some came for more serious reasons: a scientist devoting a month or two to research Darwin’s abundant insects and reptiles; a writer bent on prising his first great novel from the romance of an untamed Territory.
They came for only a season, missed the boat, stayed on for the next 60 years, their ambitions foundering early in the lethargy and torpor of early tropical living. Darwin’s motto was ‘mañana’; no wonder it was known as the ‘Land of Wait-a-while’. If you were curious enough to ask, you might be told, ‘Bin here for Christ knows how long, mate.’ That was all you would hear of it.
Drinking was the great avocation, from elegant evening cocktails to the remittance man with his everlasting gin bottle. He was from an aristocratic family, outcast to the furthest possible shores for some indiscretion or another—aimlessly wandering the East, coming finally to Darwin, where most of his days were spent in the coolness of a tropical bar, waiting for the next cheque to arrive.
Daughter of the Territory Page 2