My father was devastatingly handsome in his youth, with the dark looks of his Scottish ancestry. He was generous, good fun, a born raconteur, but not a commendably attentive husband. He was away on bush patrol for long periods and—alas!—in the fashion of the times and the country, he drank too much.
Drinking was the great unifier in the Territory. If you didn’t drink when you came there, you sure as hell did by the time you left—that is, of course, if you ever got around to leaving. But it didn’t do much for a harmonious marriage, and my parents’ marriage could never have been described as such.
With the wet season over, movement began on roads north, and it was time to take the trip back to the Territory. Mother had never been bush and thought it was a great adventure. They loaded rations, benzene and a good many spare parts for their car, then set off, taking much the same route my father had travelled with the Afghan camel train in 1919.
Along this route the Afghans still carried freight, but now Sam Irvine brought mail in his truck from Oodnadatta to Alice Springs (still officially named Stuart) every six weeks. Roads were somewhat improved, but heavy sand was always to be a problem for a motor vehicle. At Marree, the storekeeper suggested that my parents hire his coir (coconut fibre) matting to negotiate the deep sand. On arriving in Alice Springs, the mats were to be left at Fogarty’s Store for a returning motorist.
When my parents were ready for the road, their tucker box and water replenished, an old desert-dusted Aboriginal man approached Mother. Thin and very dirty, he was rubbing his stomach and chewing on a dirty sock. ‘Me ’ungry, Missus, no tucker.’ Mother, shocked at such need, freely dispensed food, then returned to the store to restock, much to the storekeeper’s amusement.
It transpired that the old man was an accomplished actor and, with neat addition of the dirty sock to chew, did very well from soft-hearted new chums.
For my mother, first bushman, first lesson.
My parents left Marree with coir mats strapped aboard and had a fair run to Oodnadatta. Barely out of town, their problems began. They set the mats under the wheels, crawled forward, transferred the rear mats to the front and continued on through long stretches of deep sand. This route had twice been tough for my father. I always thought it a great pity he never travelled on the modern train that glides effortlessly over the camel pads of the old Afghan trail.
The Afghan cameleers were settled in Australia from 1860 to attend a mode of transport more suited to the harsh desert interior where horse and bullock teams were proving unsuccessful. It is written that without the camel, European settlement within the centre of our dry continent would not have been possible on the same scale for a further 50 years.
The Afghans were victims of prejudice and religious intolerance. Alienated by both Aboriginal and European, they remained secreted behind their religion in their Ghan town communities, but they were also hospitable and giving.
There is a much-told tale of the first camel track seen by Aboriginals of the central desert, who were familiar with the tracks of everything that moved in their world. They were thoroughly bewildered by this strange print in the dust. After much consideration, the elders decided it resembled a baby’s bottom; when an infant of the tribe was brought to the spot and set upon it, the fit was perfect. All was explained: a debil-debil piccaninny had taken a moment to rest awhile on this dusty path on his journey through another time.
The Afghans brought loadings through the Barkly Tableland. They were a common sight out west in the Kimberley too, where there is still a well-tended Afghan cemetery. They came through Alice Springs up to Newcastle Waters, but took their teams no further north, for there grew the Cooktown ironwood tree, whose round green leaves were poisonous to their camels.
My parents had an endless fund of anecdotes about these remarkable men, and about their camels too—some of whom, with head held high, looked out upon the world with a cool disdain, but were gracious enough to accept titbits from children. But the camels could also be dangerous: my father once saw a cameleer killed, his head crushed by a bite from a rogue animal.
Travelling through the Barkly, an Afghan had an altercation with the manager of Alexandria Station, Cay (C.A.Y.) Johnson. After a loud and angry argument, the Afghan departed to his camp, returning soon after with two long stiletto-type knives. He presented them with great formality and dignity, for the manager’s choice of weapon. ‘Mr Johnson,’ he said, ‘we fight, one man die.’ My father witnessed this drama, and remarked that it said something for the persuasive powers of Johnson that he was still there years later—and so was the old Afghan, travelling his regular route.
It can truly be said that Afghans carried everything in their loading—building material, stores, furniture, household items—but no pork or bacon. In the bush, bacon was an easily stored food, in high demand, so before presenting it to Afghans to load, it had to be disguised in heavily wrapped parcels.
Other parcels would have benefited from more careful wrapping. My mother once ordered from Adelaide a rather fancy hat to wear to the annual Rankine picnic races. For weeks she waited anxiously for the cameleers to arrive, and in her impatience was standing at the yards when the packs were opened.
The box containing her long-awaited hat was crushed, the contents a total disaster—with no shopping and rare occasion to socialise, this was a tragedy of vast proportions, as any woman will understand. Mother sat right down in the dust, among the kneeling camels, and wept great tears of disappointment.
Later she admitted that the picture she presented of a respectable lady of that period, of whom a certain dignity was expected, sitting in the dust, clutching a crumpled hat to her breast, surrounded by camels regarding her with their long-lashed soulful eyes—which she swears were full of sympathy—and encircled by uncomfortable, turbaned Afghans, was, no doubt about it, an event to be retold with wonder around many a desert campfire.
Of course, everyone knows that if you see an Afghan standing close by his camel’s head, chances are they are discussing the 99 names of God—only a camel knows the hundredth name, which accounts for his arrogance and superior attitude.
CHAPTER 9
My Welcome to the World
In 1928, when my parents arrived in Darwin as newlyweds, a welcome to my mother on behalf of the city’s residents appeared in the only newspaper, mentioning that they’d had to deal with a very boggy road through the town of Mataranka. My parents settled into their first joint home in the new stone police barracks, overlooking Darwin Harbour. This was quite a change from when my father had first joined the force—back then, troopers had slept on camp beds behind the police station and eaten at a local Chinese café.
After six months of sea breezes and harbour views, my father was posted to Brocks Creek, a dry little settlement lying desiccated and exhausted under the tropical sun, and here my mother’s true bush life began. Brocks Creek provided a pretty raw introduction to Territory life for a young woman fresh from the city, and she was thrown into the deep end, so to speak.
With the gold rush over, Brocks Creek’s only excuses for existence were the surrounding cattle stations and railway station. It was a hard police posting, with long horse plant patrols that could take weeks. All had to be dealt with by a lone trooper: Chinese opium dens, buffalo hunters, Aboriginals and prospectors.
Across the road from the police station stood the Federation Hotel. Although in slow decline, it was a reminder of the town’s palmier days of goldmining. The publican was an old English woman named Fannie known throughout the Territory as ‘Cockney Fan’. She had come with the gold rush of the 1880s and built the Federation Hotel with her parliamentarian husband, Thomas Crush, who died long before my parents arrived in Brocks Creek.
The arrival of a police trooper and his wife right across the road from her hotel wasn’t an occasion of great joy to Fannie and the patrons of the Federation Hotel; however, they would provide diversion enough to keep any policeman constantly on duty.
Fannie rul
ed Brocks Creek—the whole 160 kilos of her—and few dared defy her. She out-drank the most seasoned drinkers, and her repertoire of obscenities was the envy and admiration of the most hardened miner or teamster.
She kept pigs, ducks, chickens and dogs—all roamed unchecked indoors and out. She also ran the post office from her hotel, and if her ever-vigilant eye fell upon a letter addressed to someone who owed her money, she opened it in the hope it contained cash or perhaps a cheque; she would then remove the amount owing her, return the change and reclose the letter without a word said.
It wasn’t long before she fell afoul of the law, as far as my father was concerned. The town’s bore water was rationed, everyone expected to keep within their limits. Not Fannie—she let water flood freely so her pigs and ducks could wallow about, and of course this caused a general shortage. My father, after many confrontations with her, cut off her water for a short while, hoping to make her aware of the serious situation they all faced.
When drunk, which was often, Fannie had a tendency to remove her clothes. On this occasion the public was presented with the vision of Fannie clad only in a tiny singlet, with her abundant rolls of flesh jiggling about her, staggering drunkenly across the road with a small bucket over one finger, desperately gasping, ‘Water! Water!’ This created a scene of much pathos and interest to onlookers, but there is no knowing if it changed her attitude to the town’s water problems—possibly it made not the slightest difference at all.
On one of the rare times my mother happened to enter the hotel, she was confronted with the sight of Fannie stretched upon the floor, drunk and as naked as the day she was born. Four of her regular patrons were seated on the floor around her, the enormous pink mound of her stomach providing them a table on which they nonchalantly played a game of cards. I believe Mother fled the scene never to return, quite shaken by such a sight so early in her Territory experience.
The well-known author Bill Harney, my father’s good friend, told another Fannie story. She was serving lunch of roast beef to a fastidious Englishman travelling through by train. The flies were in clouds, so Fannie produced an insect spray of her own concoction and gave his dinner a thorough spraying, with a jolly, ‘It’s alright, it won’t hurt you much but it’ll kill the little bastards.’ And so it did, for they lay thickly upon his dinner, their little legs in the air, as dead as dodos.
Fannie remained in Brocks Creek until the outbreak of the Second World War, whereupon the town became a military depot. When civilians were evacuated from the north, she had to be forcibly removed by the army. With a gun in her hand and the vast expanse of her back to the bar, she defied them to remove her, though remove her they surely did. She had met her match at last! Only the army had the manpower to do it.
Sadly, Fannie never returned; dying in Sydney where she’d gone to live with her sister. I say ‘sadly’ because, old harridan that she was, Fannie was one of our own, a real character of the old Outback, her like never to be seen again.
The sizeable Chinese community of Brocks Creek gathered remnants of miners from the gold-rush days. Their camp was referred to locally as the Rice Garden; it was settled on land dangerously pitted with old mine shafts, through which only the Chinese were sure to negotiate safe passage.
On a certain dark night, my father was called out to investigate trouble at the Rice Garden. Afterwards he was following a narrow path back to town, gripping two Chinese miscreants by the collar, when suddenly they both disappeared from his grasp and couldn’t be found in the gloom. Later they were hoisted up unhurt from an old shaft that lay directly beneath his path into which they had fallen.
Of much concern to police at that time was the effect opium had on Aboriginal people. One night my father had reason to police a noisy group of Chinese being threatened by Aboriginal people who were half-crazed on opium ash—a situation where a lone policeman could easily have taken a spear in the liver. A spear was thrown out of the darkness: it tore through the cloth of my father’s uniform, grazing his shoulder. With that, he took out his pistol and fired in the general direction the spear had come from, hoping to deter any further missiles.
He continued on to the crowded shanties of the Rice Garden, where he unearthed a cache of opium. Returning with his Chinese prisoner, he found he had wounded the spear thrower, so he took them both back to the police station.
The Aboriginal man was obviously wounded quite badly, so my father decided to head straight for Darwin, where soon afterwards the man died in hospital. The Chinese man was released, and my father was suspended from duty on a murder charge while an inquiry was held.
In due course, the magistrate brought in a verdict that the man had met his death by a revolver bullet fired by a police trooper in the execution of his duty. Having given his verdict, the magistrate then said—and my father always remembered this—‘Should any man ever accuse this man of having murdered this native, I ask he be brought before me, and I will deal with him accordingly.’
In the midst of dealing with her husband’s suspension and murder charge, my mother travelled to Darwin for my birth. She must have wondered just what she had taken on with her marriage into the Territory police force.
Having trained as a nurse in a large modern city hospital, my mother was to give birth in the Darwin Hospital, a little old iron building perched high on cliffs above the Timor Sea. The hospital was staffed by Dr Cecil Evelyn Cook and four nurses. The five of them had been responsible for a couple of thousand Asiatics and Europeans, and hundreds of Aboriginals camped about the town and beaches. They’d treated everything from malaria and leprosy to spear wounds and crocodile maulings. Cook operated without the assistance of an anaesthetist; instead, chloroform was administered by one of the nurses.
I was born early in 1929 on a proverbial dark and stormy night, at the height of monsoon. Dr Bruce Kirkland, who had lately joined the hospital staff, was called upon this night, and a long and arduous undertaking it was for him and my mother. The end result—puny, weak and undersized—must have seemed poor reward for their efforts.
Regardless of gender, my mother had wished to name her child Murray after the Murray River: a river dear to her heart that flowed through the country where she’d spent her youth. However, when the good doctor brought me forth he announced, ‘We’ll call her Jacqueline,’ and would brook no argument, not even from my mother—so, that was that.
Oil flares lit the sky above Darwin that night in 1929, and those with a romantic turn of mind might think this an ardent welcome to this white child born into a Territory with only a few thousand Europeans scattered over its wide landscape. However, the oil flares were in fact beacons to guide aviators during the great air races of the day.
Of course, in 1929 the birth of a child was always a good excuse—if an excuse was needed—for prolonged celebration. My doting father thought I was the best thing to come out of that year of disaster and financial mayhem. The completion of the Alice Springs to South Australia railway line had to come a close second.
I was duly welcomed into the Christian faith in Darwin’s small stone Anglican church. The famous old hunter Harry Hardy, a man as dry and tough as the wild buffalo he chased on horseback, was chosen as my godfather. Harry and his brother Fred were the most successful and well-regarded buffalo hunters of their day. With Aboriginal companions, they rode the wetlands of Arnhem Land and could ship out a thousand hides in a season.
With the murder case resolved, my father was reinstated into the Territory police force, and my parents returned to Brocks Creek with me.
Soon after our arrival, the local Aboriginal women presented my mother with a coolamon, carved from the outer trunk of a tree, to carry her new infant as their babies were carried. But my mother would never have learned the knack of carrying a coolamon on the hip, and it was left to the nurse girls.
Infants were barely visible in the coolamons, covered with bits of cloth and clothes to keep off flies and the sun. One wonders that they could breathe, but they
seemed always to sleep peacefully in their snug cocoons. If they stirred or fretted, the mother scratched with her fingernails on the underside, which soothed the baby within.
CHAPTER 10
The Many Ways to Die in the Bush
My mother’s nursing training proved useful at Brocks Creek and a steady stream of patients, black and white, presented with a wide range of ills.
Throughout her years in the bush she had never been employed by, nor connected in any way with, a health or government service, but Dr Cook sent her medicines to treat yaws, Barcoo rot, ear and eye problems. With no doctor in the area, her medicines—though basic—were in demand; much of her treatment entailed constant care for each phase of illness as it presented.
On one occasion she had the unenviable task of dealing with a man who had cut his throat in a suicide attempt. He was left on her verandah in a very bad state—the only course for her to take was to get him through to Darwin Hospital.
A rugged trip lay ahead: the road was rough, thick with dust and unsealed all the way. With my father driving, their infant daughter with them, my parents set off in their open touring car and travelled through the night. My mother made the journey holding together the man’s ghastly wound and doing whatever else one does to staunch excessive bleeding. Incredibly, they succeeded in delivering him alive to Dr Cook the next day.
With the patient progressing quite well, he was brought into court to face charges for his suicide attempt, which the law in those days considered akin to murder. It was too soon for him to deal with the stress of a court attendance, and he collapsed and haemorrhaged his unwanted life away.
On another occasion, Mother had to deal with a man perishing from thirst. Searchers found him wandering naked, for clothes are early discarded in this situation. The sight of mounted rescuers sent the thirst-maddened man running: he was caught, wrapped in wet blankets and delivered to my mother. A long drink was out of the question, so she gave him a wet flannel to suck and kept him moist. He lost a great deal of skin from dehydration, but he lived—or so my mother told me.
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