I started my education at the tiny Pine Creek school. My little terrier, Wuffles, would accompany me as far as the railway line I had to cross on my way, and in the afternoon was always waiting there to escort me home.
Miss Pearl Heine was the sole teacher: a gentle, gracious lady who lived in quarters behind the classroom. We launched straight into the alphabet and sums, and though my arithmetic made little progress, I could read quite well at a very early age. Our schoolwork was done on slates that, grubby lot we were, we spat on to erase, instead of using the neat little damp sponges provided. We also spent a lot of time eating from under the desk: ginger plums and dried watermelon seeds, all bought from the Chinese bakery.
My schoolmates included a tough element from among the mine workers’ families in town. On a few mornings as I made my way to school, I fell afoul of the Sullivan brothers, who lay in wait for me. They divested me of my lunch and whatever else took their fancy.
My father smelled a Sullivan rat when I refused to go unescorted to school—they were a pretty well-known bunch—so one morning he lay in wait near the railway line and, with the assistance of Wuffles, frightened the bejaysus out of them. I had safe passage ever after. Paddy, the eldest, went to reformatory for nicking something that wasn’t his’n.
Mr Sullivan, a small jovial Irishman, went to the mines to defend his daughter’s honour against a man who ‘done her wrong’. Big mistake—he shot the wrong man and was taken off to the Darwin gaol. We Pine Creek kids went down to the railway station to wave our little hands sadly as he was carried off. When war broke out he was set free, as were all the prisoners in the gaol.
I had an eclectic treasure house of friends in Pine Creek—children of many races and backgrounds, adults too. For a time, Bob Pearce was my very best friend whenever he visited. He was a liquor salesman who travelled down from Darwin on the train with his samples, order book and all the latest Darwin gossip for my mother. Poor Bob’s enthusiastic imbibing of his samples, and much more besides, was the ruin of him. One wet season in Darwin, with no escape from the unending rain on the iron roof, he beat his liver to it and shot himself.
Joe was another firm friend. He was an Englishman of good education, who in his youth had travelled the world in some luxury. Now he lived in a little hut in the bush, and often came to see my father. My mother thought him disreputable; I thought him a knight in the shiniest of armour. He gave me a beautifully bound book of English children’s poetry, and was always quite happy to have me engage him in serious child’s conversation. His departures from his hut, and the town, were often and lengthy. Years later, my father told me he’d died in a Chinese opium den in the hills behind Pine Creek.
While all the most fun and interesting people I spent time with seemed to be ‘disreputable’ in one way or another, I’m sure I must have also had some friends of whom my mother did approve!
Into the Territory of the early 1930s came tourists fired up by the exploits of adventurers in Ion Idriess’s novels, in country referred to as outback of beyond.
Pioneer Tours brought their first motor vehicles in, and my father photographed such a novel thing. Those tourists saw their trip through, in spite of heat, dust, rough roads and unaccustomed proximity to raw nature. Some of these early tourers found little other than a country too unfamiliar, with a surplus of uncooked birds and animals, and should not have left home at all.
Those of harder stuff set off to discover the undiscovered, and have left records of their adventures in old photo albums—standing bravely tall, doffing their pith helmets beside a giant ant hill or an ochre-painted Aboriginal person.
There were some notable frequent visitors to Pine Creek. A Catholic priest made visits to his Pine Creek flock, arriving by train, as most everyone did, and returning to Darwin a day or two later. There were a number of Catholic households in town, but he preferred to stay in my mother’s, although we were not of his fold. The food was better, he said, and he could indulge in a game of bridge; my mother was an avid bridge player all her life.
Dr Cecil Evelyn Cook was another keen for an evening of bridge. He was the chief medical officer of the Territory and chief protector of Aborigines. As mentioned earlier, he was also the sole doctor at Darwin Hospital for a number of years. Although he repeatedly requested a colleague to assist him, Darwin’s reputation was such that no one would take the job.
Cook learned there was a doctor on board a ship in harbour—there he found Clyde Fenton on the Koolinda, due to sail south next day. Fenton later wrote that he was practically shanghaied, for when he sobered up, his baggage was ashore and the ship had sailed.
Dr Fenton became the Territory’s famous flying doctor, who flew in to attend patients when necessary—and, if in a playful mood, bombed our house with small bags of flour. He was an audacious, flashy daredevil who could land his plane in the most unlikely stretches of bush.
A Chinese community was well-established in and around Pine Creek. Out-of-town gardeners tended their fruit and vegetable patch, working hard with simple tools and removing the bugs by hand. Some of their fertiliser was their own nightsoil, and their fruit trees flourished. During the dry, a quiet old buffalo drew their produce cart around town, filled with mangoes, guavas and bananas.
Then there was the Chinese bakery across the road. I was always reluctant to venture over there, because Mr Ah Yu, in coolie trousers and slip-slop sandals, would be reclining in his hessian bag-covered deck chair, right at the entrance. He was very old and thin, and as wrinkled as a dried salty-plum. A long grey beard of only a few hairs hung straight down from the point of his chin, topped off by a gapped, yellow-toothed grin.
Mr Ah Yu had come out from China years before to work as a coolie on the railway line, then in the mines. He had practically no English, but a diabolical chuckle could erupt unexpectedly when one was quite unprepared for it. As far as I was concerned, his chief function in life was to terrorise me. He had a homemade turkey feather fan, and I think only one exceptionally long fingernail—perhaps there were more, but I never dared a longer look to establish this fact.
Each of my visits was the same. I drew near, heart thudding, and just as I reached the door, as if on cue, he burst forth with his demented-sounding cackle and shot out his arm to point his fan at me. I almost wet myself in terror, and scuttled through the door into the dark little shop, to the kindly and much younger Mrs Ah Yu. Clutching my bread, I departed at full speed, too quickly for him to do anything but collapse with laughter.
Looking back, I’m sure my infrequent visits provided Mr Ah Yu with welcome diversion from the tedium of his day in the hessian chair.
Now his descendants are Territory business and professional men. The iron bakery building still stands, deserted now, and a plaque outside the door tells of its origins, and of the Chinese family who lived there. When passing through this old mining town, I sometimes stand awhile at that door and feel nostalgic; I remember Mr Ah Yu and my nervous approach, 70 years ago.
As well as those gentle ladies who helped tame the bush and kept colonial civilisation alive in the Outback, Pine Creek was not without those memorable few who were looked upon with disapproval and considered ‘fast’. Gossip would have it that they were given to taming the lonely miners around this riotous town, where they had wide choice of companions.
They weren’t professional ladies, but their social lives were certainly more exuberant than was considered appropriate. For my part, I’m inclined to agree with Robert Graves, who said, ‘For a woman to have a liaison is almost always pardonable, and occasionally, when the lover chosen is sufficiently distinguished, even admirable: but in love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.’
These ladies had good looks and charm, and liked a good time. They gave little thought to their reputations, long sullied beyond repair, and ignored the pursed lips. Swanning around, enjoying their notoriety, they continued to beguile and bewitch with their abundant curves, and gave not a damn for anyone. They
caused much disharmony and jealously, and loads of scandalous gossip that they seemed to enjoy; they were the cause of fist fights and vicious brawls, and once a man was shot and wounded. There were husbands in the dim background who presented no hindrance to their social lives.
Among them was the Spinifex Queen—who, gossip had it, was quite amenable to a frolic in the spinifex grass, in spite of its sharp and prickly nature.
But for me, the Cullen Queen was the most memorable, so named for the Cullen River district where she lived. She had great dark eyes lined with kohl and light golden skin, and on special occasions she wore a sari, perhaps to make the point that she was of Indian extraction and not Aboriginal. She was like a hot-house orchid growing in a bush konkerberry patch, and I thought her very beautiful. She always smiled and wiggled her fingers in my direction as if we were old friends, and I was delighted to be noticed by such a fascinating creature, although I was hushed if I asked about her.
I know not what became of those women during the war. I didn’t ask my mother, but my father, who knew everything, thought that they might have continued in good times with the incoming army, or were evacuated out of the Territory with civilians at the beginning of the war.
Pine Creek was a base for buffalo hunters, who would periodically set off from there for their camps in Arnhem Land. Others passing through this old town, who took time to spend a pleasant evening in congenial company, included men who’d come into the country during its golden heyday, and elderly men who’d travelled the Old Coast Road.
In the evenings we gathered outside for coolness and company. People came by to sit awhile and talk late into the night; that’s what we did then, all over the bush, without radios and with only one another for company. Everyone had something to tell: their latest bush travels, odd happenings, adventures. Well, life in the Outback was always an adventure, although we were probably unaware of this at the time. Every day some drama unfolded that those settled in southern suburbia could never imagine.
How lucky I am to have known such a variety of people as I did when so young. I learned early to accept the non-conformist. I rather regret I was born too early for that unconstrained period of the sixties when bohemians metamorphosed into uninhibited hippies.
CHAPTER 15
Buffalo Shooting
In 1934 my father left Pine Creek to go out into the Territory’s Arnhem Land and hunt buffalo, taking up a grazing licence of around 3000 square kilometres between the South and East Alligator Rivers—country now known as Kakadu.
No roads led to the Alligator Rivers. Oenpelli Mission had been settled out there, very little else. The lugger Maroubra came up the river several times a year to deliver supplies and take out the buffalo hides.
Shooting feral buffalo from horseback in swampy country was as dangerous an undertaking as one could imagine, and hunters were few—the Gaden brothers, Harry and Fred Hardy, my father and Tom Cole, who went out with the Hardy brothers to learn the ways of the buffalo and later wrote about his time there.
Harry Hardy, my godfather, had long urged my father to head out to buffalo country, as it was generally known. Hides were bringing 5 pence per pound, and buffalo were in the thousands. Accompanied by Mick Madigan, an Aboriginal-Irishman, and with some trained shooting horses from Harry, my father packed his old cabinless truck; with the jarring action of the crank-handle, it coughed into life and he set out through bush to buffalo country. The horse plant of 30 horses and about twenty Aboriginals followed a few days later.
Camp was settled; their gear was prepared for the hunt. On good shooting horses, a bandolier of cartridges across the chest, the shooters were ready. They started their run at daylight to locate a mob of maybe a hundred feeding on the flats and cut out the young bulls, had them strung out. As the mob went sweeping by, the shooters—with .303 rifles sawn-off short and strapped to their arms for skilful one-handed control—always shot backwards over the horses’ tails to prevent them taking fright, although a good shooting horse would become accustomed to this.
The two horseback shooters galloped close alongside the thundering herd; the lead rider leaned from the saddle, shot the first buffalo; the second rider picked off the next, the first rider took the third, and so on. The buffalo were always shot in the loins, to hit the spine and paralyse them. With a number down, perhaps twenty, the foot-shooter Aboriginals came in to finish off the wounded beasts.
The buffalo is a cunning beast, and its wide sweeping horns can disembowel a horse, injure or kill a man. In my father’s camp, never was a man lost—although sometimes a good horse went down or was taken by crocodiles.
The foot-shooters and skinners removed the hides and loaded them on packhorses to take them to camp. They were thoroughly washed in a waterhole and hung up to dry, then rotated from bottom to top each day for ten days. When really dry, they were folded and taken to be loaded on the lugger for Darwin.
At the end of the dry season, just before the rains set in, they returned to Pine Creek to sit out the wet.
My father continued shooting buffalo until the outbreak of the Second World War. He did so well that the Maroubra started coming in every three weeks to take out hides and the price went up to 8 pence a pound. I remember being told that buffalo hide was used in Russia for railway carriage seats, and no doubt for a great deal else as well. On a cattle station, the hide made great boot soles that seemed never to wear out.
Those who hunted buffalo in the Territory were fine horsemen, excellent shots, and incredibly fearless and tough.
CHAPTER 16
Darwin Convent School
While my father was away shooting buffalo, my mother—who was of the Lutheran faith—decided to send me to board at the Territory’s only boarding school, the Darwin Convent School, which was run by Roman Catholic nuns from the order of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart.
Off we went to Darwin on the train and settled into the Victoria Hotel as we always did. It wasn’t to be the holiday I expected. After delivering me to the nuns, my mother left to return to the hotel, and it dawned on me that I was to stay there, that this was a permanent arrangement.
To my way of thinking, it wasn’t! I turned tail and left at high speed, a desperate dash for freedom, and almost made it back to the hotel, which was a very long way down the road—but even with a good head start, capture was inevitable with a large posse of Convent kids in hot pursuit. I was returned, still valiantly struggling. Had I known what lay ahead, I may have fought even harder for my freedom. That establishment was right out of the pages of a Dickens novel, and I was five years old.
I’ve heard many accounts of friends’ ‘first day at boarding school’, but never have I heard of a runaway; it has boosted my self-esteem somewhat that I didn’t go quietly but had the gumption to make a run for it.
The extreme contrast of the strict and frugal Catholic boarding school to my life so far as an over-indulged only child might have caused some confusion in a more sensitive girl. Fortunately I was no delicate flower, and took what came.
I now feel sure the austere Convent life did me a lot of good, kept my feet firmly on the ground and enabled me to appreciate the insouciance of home life in the short holiday periods at Pine Creek—during which, unlike most of my classmates, I was still under the care of nursemaids.
In the primary school of Darwin Convent, two grown women, sisters from an outback cattle station, took their place each morning to learn with the first graders. They were big women, well used to hard outdoor work with their menfolk, but they took part in all our childish games; no one gave it a thought.
There was a variety of colours and a mixture of nationalities—Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Malay and more—within the stern cloisters of Darwin Convent. Two Portuguese boys with long sausage curls to their bottoms, tied back with pastel ribbons, could play a rough game of football, their curls flying in a tackle—and this in an era when no man, absolutely no man, would consider wearing his hair longer than a basin cut.
There were also many girls of mixed race sent as boarders to the Convent. The author Ernestine Hill, writing of Darwin in the 1930s, said: ‘There are two schools, a Public School, and a Convent School overflowing with half-caste children.’ Their white fathers—loving, responsible men—expected the nuns to send them out into the world educated in all the arts, and good Christians as well.
When we weren’t praying or at our lessons, if the church needed cleaning—floors swept, statues dusted, pews polished—we were all expected to buck in and help. However, if there was a Catholic feast day or a church celebration, we non-Catholics weren’t invited to attend the festivities. We sat at the far end of the refectory with our bread and jam (no butter ever passed through those refectory doors) and looked on wistfully, hoping a cake or cookie might come our way.
There seemed always to be a great number of these feast days from whose celebrations we were excluded, and I once made a half-hearted approach toward Roman Catholicism, but the nuns were no fools and saw through my self-serving intentions. I was banished back to that less fruitful end of the refectory.
There were several sessions of prayer throughout our day: morning mass, the Rosary and Benediction, and when the Angelus bell tolled daily, it was ruled that all movement must stop midstride. Wherever we were, we stood rooted to the spot like statues and lapsed into deep contemplation of the bell’s holy message—or fiddled with our bare toes in the dust and thought about things less relevant.
It was years before anyone deciphered for me, the words—the fruit-of-thy-womb-Jesus—rattled off during prayers in one swift breath, almost as one word, and which we repeated like so many little parrots.
Each time we made the sign of the cross on our person, we were assured that ten of our sins were removed from our sentence of hopping barefoot from one scorching rock to another in the fires of purgatory—that halfway house to heaven—where our sins were gradually cleansed before entry. A process of varying time, I imagine, depending on the baggage of sin accumulated along life’s path. All this straight from the lips of Sister Mary Damascene, so it had to be true.
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