Larrimah, page 23
Kev says Paddy wouldn’t elaborate on the kids but he certainly didn’t deny their existence. ‘He never really seemed to know how many kids, just a lot. He didn’t tell me if they were with the same woman.’
Kev takes a sip of his drink and scratches around in his mind for any other slices of information about the phantom children, but he comes up empty.
Before we leave the Humpty Doo Tavern, he hands over a number for Phil Garlick, the other man who attended the inquest. He warns us Phil is pretty deaf and a bit hopeless on the phone. And he doesn’t have email and he doesn’t read real well, anyway, so texting won’t work. ‘Also, he’s a millionaire,’ he adds.
Phil is usually in the Northern Territory in his caravan around this time of year, but COVID has trapped him at home in Griffith in the NSW Riverina region. We arrange a time to call, phone him up, hit record, and he hangs up on us. We call back and he doesn’t know what happened. Can’t work out this bloody phone, he says.
‘How did you meet Paddy?’ we ask.
‘Pardon? WHAT?’
It’s not going well.
Eventually, we get into a rhythm, and that rhythm is mostly a series of booze-filled anecdotes. Phil’s Larrimah connection is through Billy Lightcan—they’ve been mates for sixty years and used to work for the same trucking company in Katherine. ‘But they didn’t put us together because we used to drink too much bloody grog,’ Phil confesses. Somewhere along the line, he doesn’t remember where, Phil met Paddy, and the pair bonded over booze. ‘I tell you what, love, we’ve had some heavy nights on the grog, him and I. He was a top bloke. Whatever he said, you could put your life on it. He was honest with me.’
Paddy was there for some big moments in Phil’s life. The pair of them were drinking at the Larrimah Hotel one Christmas morning when Phil received a call that one of his sisters, who’d lived most of her life in the United States, had died and left him a bit of money. Almost a million dollars. How she had so much and why she left it to him, Phil doesn’t know.
Instead, he launches into an unprovoked account of what he thinks happened to Paddy, based on what he heard at the inquest. Richard knows something. Fran knows something. Owen definitely knows something. Maybe even his old friend Bill knows something. He sounds frustrated by it all and wants to know why the coroner hasn’t come back and charged the lot of them.
When we’d met Phil at the inquest, he was pale, overweight, a heavy smoker. He tells us he’s eighty-one now and he’s had some bad news from his doctor—we feel it again, the creeping sadness for Barry, the sense that we’re running out of time.
But Phil has that bush way of narrating tragedy and hilarity in the same voice, and without letting a beat pass, he hints that he’s a ladies’ man. It’s an easy leap from there to ask if he knew if Paddy had any children.
‘He always told me he had seven girls,’ Phil says. ‘Seven daughters from blackfellas at Brunette Downs.’
It’s not much of a lead, but we take it. And then we get another. Megan Ashley, who lived near Paddy in Daly Waters, vividly remembers taking Paddy his mail one day and meeting a beautiful woman, who might have been Afghan–Aboriginal, and a girl who was about eight or nine. Paddy introduced the girl as his daughter.
We trawl through documents, searching for anything on the Aboriginal community at Brunette Downs around the time Paddy first arrived in Australia. Back then, in the mid-1960s, the so-called ‘native camp’ sat about 300 metres from the main station homestead, with anywhere from sixty to one hundred and twenty people living there at a time, mostly local Wambaya people. The land’s traditional owners had always hunted in the grasses and lagoons around the area for their food, but when the cattle edged out the wildlife, many took up work on the station.
As ‘wards’, the Aboriginal population was the responsibility of a station’s management, which received an allowance for ‘maintenance’ of the people on the property. It happened all over the Territory, just as it did to Wubalawun man Allen Maroney’s grandfather. Even though communities were fed and accommodated, Aboriginal people were given no autonomy and very little control over their own lives, and living conditions were often poor and segregated from broader station life. As Allen said, there was a vast gulf between the pay rates and rights of Aboriginal and white workers.
We find years of Department of Aboriginal Affairs audits of the Brunette Downs camp—through the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s, the hundred or so people living in the community were housed in a dozen corrugated iron sheds with ant-bed floors and no beds. There are photos of the camp’s three pit toilets: hot tin sheds with crude holes in the floor, covered in faeces and ripped-up magazine pages that had been used for toilet paper. Health department reports are scathing: Aboriginal children suffered ear and eye infections as a result of the water supply being cut off intermittently and there were widespread gastrointestinal outbreaks.
It’s hard to read, and there’s worse to come.
In 1976, a prisoner in New South Wales, held for an unknown crime, writes to the commissioner about his time working as a cook on Brunette Downs. He claims Aboriginal workers there are being exploited, that Aboriginal children are denied fresh fruit, vegetables and milk, and ‘the toilet block is not fit for pigs to use let alone human beings’. His letter is passed on to a senate inquiry and the claims are all addressed, but by 1977 another inspection reveals the camp to be in ‘an extremely filthy and disease prone condition’ and the toilets ‘heavily infested with flies, maggots and cockroaches’. For eighteen months, the camp’s only three taps are not connected to water, which instead comes via an old trailer-mounted tank that frequently runs dry.
Then came the grog. Brunette was a dry community but illegal grog runners made it out there from time to time, and by 1978, Aboriginal people from all over the Territory were going there to live or passing through, bringing alcohol with them. ‘Even children have been reported to me presenting themselves at school rotten drunk,’ one official writes.
The more we read, the worse we feel—if Paddy had pursued a relationship with an Indigenous woman at Brunette, there’s almost no way it can have been on equal terms. We find claims that when the Aboriginal stockmen were working, white stockmen would go down to the camp and have sex with women. We know this sort of thing isn’t exclusive to Brunette. It happened all over the country.
We start sifting through old census records, looking for children with the last name Moriarty, or families with seven children. No one has seven daughters, and very few have more than four children living there with them. We come across a fellow who bears the last name Limerick, the Irish county Paddy was from, and wonder if he could have given a son that as a last name. But the dates don’t match.
Indigenous naming traditions also mean people can go by kinship names, traditional names and nicknames. An Aboriginal man tells us that, back then, surnames didn’t reflect a family lineage: people just chose something they liked and attached it to a child, or employers inflicted their surname on a baby. There’s a whole generation of children who were named after racehorses and footballers and pastoral stations.
We need to talk to someone who was there at the time. Paddy wasn’t a blow-in who took off after one season of droving—everyone says he lived at Brunette for many years, long enough to accumulate a handful of kids, apparently. So we start jotting down names then trying to find those people. Finally, we come across a story and a name that might clear things up.
On a mid-November day in 1976, just as the season turned from hot to impossible, Tony Willy heard the buzz of a small plane in the airspace overhead. Brunette Downs was a busy station, even back then—at 12,212 square kilometres, it was more than one and a half times the size of New York City and was running about fifty thousand head of cattle. All sorts of people dropped in: politicians, journalists, government officials, pilots mid-race. Today, skidding across the dust in a small aircraft, was the Health Department’s flying doctor service.
Although such visits were routine, Tony paid attention because the nurse jumped in her car and drove the 300 metres to the Aboriginal camp, picked up two women and took them back to the clinic. It was the driving that was odd; perhaps they were seriously ill, he thought. So when he returned home to the camp, he started asking questions. And he discovered both women had been fitted with contraceptive devices, possibly against their will and certainly without truly understanding what was occurring.
Tony was furious but unsurprised. About six weeks earlier he had approached the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) with a similar complaint. In the lead-up to the 1976 Mt Isa Rodeo (which was almost 700 kilometres away but in bush terms was considered right around the corner), Tony claimed several women, both married and single, were fitted with devices—either without understanding, or under the impression it was a mandatory procedure. When some refused to go to the clinic, the nurse drove over and picked them up.
‘They can’t just go and do that to white ladies, can they?’ Tony said to the DAA officer when he reported his concerns, resulting in a flurry of correspondence between the DAA, the Health Department and the then-management at Brunette Downs, which questioned if forced contraception was government policy.
So when Tony started investigating this second incident, it was like history repeating—his earlier outrage hadn’t resulted in any real change. There was one small difference between the two events. This second time, the two women fitted with inter-uterine devices were asked to sign consent forms agreeing that they understood the purpose of the device and it had been inserted voluntarily. One of them marked the space with a simple X.
The worst of it—the worst in a series of terrible injustices—is that it was the whitefellas who were the reason for so many unplanned pregnancies on stations. Although they had no proof, the DAA area officer claims non-Aboriginal stockmen were having relationships with the Aboriginal women on the property. ‘My mention of relations between Brunette Downs stockmen and Aboriginal women is purely general and based on information I have gained over the years, both in an official and private capacity and I daresay we are in no position to upgrade the social inclinations of any stockmen, white or black,’ the officer writes.
In a letter raw with polite rage, Brunette management denies any such relationships, saying they are prohibited and would result in dismissal if proved. The manager at Brunette counterclaims that he has received a complaint from male members of the Aboriginal community that three white men from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs who recently repaired the pipeline to the camp had relations with three Aboriginal women and were supplying them with alcohol.
It was common knowledge that white stockmen had sex with Aboriginal women on stations across the Northern Territory, and that while there were love matches many relationships weren’t on equal footing. In some places the ‘promiscuity’ was described as ‘rife’. It was generally accepted as a by-product of isolation and gender imbalance on the stations, and even if it was against some stations’ policies, management often turned a blind eye. At some stations, it’s claimed such relations were encouraged as a strategy to decrease the turnover in white labour. More than likely, there’s a whole generation of children born as a result.
This information isn’t like the filing cabinet in Larrimah—the Pandora’s drawer of things we shouldn’t know. These are things that should be known, of course they should. But it’s hard to know where to put Paddy in all of this. At any rate, his not knowing how many children he had suddenly makes sense. Any relationship between a white man and an Aboriginal woman (or vice versa) was so taboo it would have likely been kept quiet, and if there were children the father might not have been involved in their upbringing. That was not only usual for white station workers in these circumstances, but also the way Paddy had been brought up, in the absence of a father. But as to what that potential relationship was—whether it was an act of love or one of coercion—we cannot say. The relationship might have been very one-sided. It might not have been a relationship at all. We wonder: could another kind of past have caught up with Paddy?
So we start looking for Tony Willy, hoping he might remember the young Irishman fresh off the boat and employed on the station. Maybe Tony can tell us, honestly, what kind of man Paddy was, at least back then. Maybe he can tell us where to find these children.
Station workers are difficult to track. Many drift around and the Aboriginal community at Brunette Downs where Tony lived has moved. Plus, this was forty-four years ago. Would Tony even still be alive? A quick Google search finds him in the Northern Territory News back in 2014 as a representative of one of seven groups awarded native title rights in the Barkly Tablelands. The story is from Tennant Creek so we contact Jasmin Afianos, who used to run the Tennant and District Times.
‘Yes, I know Tony,’ she says. ‘But he doesn’t own a phone. I can get someone to run over there with a phone for you if you like?’ she offers helpfully. ‘He is pretty deaf, though. You’d be better off just going there.’
Tennant Creek is a ten-hour drive and several COVID biosecurity checkpoints away. To get permission to go we’d need to prove our visit was essential, and we’re not sure talking to a bloke who may have known another bloke almost fifty years ago qualifies.
We move on to another contact on our list: someone we can see in person. Detective Senior Constable First Class Wayne Smith meets us outside the closed doors of Darwin City Police Station. ‘COVID,’ he explains, ushering us inside. Police front counters are more of a risk to the community open than closed now, it seems.
Detective Senior Constable Smith isn’t just part of the NT Police Missing Persons Unit, he is the unit. It seems outrageous, the idea of one man covering all this open space, all these tucked-away corners and vanished people. But Detective Senior Constable Smith explains that although more than one thousand people go missing in the Northern Territory every year, according to national statistics, 99 per cent are located. ‘Probably greater than that. Anecdotally, I’d say it’s ninety-nine point eight per cent,’ he says.
There are categories of missing: runaway kids, homeless people, people lost in the bush, people who’ve voluntarily gone missing. Detective Senior Constable Smith spends a lot of his time dealing with ‘concerns for welfare’ or ‘location unknowns’. He’s been in the role since 2016, and in that time, he’s only had seven longterm missing cases cross his desk, including Paddy’s. They’re the hardest and worst cases, and they’re especially challenging in the Territory, where distance, isolation, technology, weather, culture, feral animals and waterways with crocs—things that wouldn’t necessarily arise elsewhere—play a role. Of the seven long-term missing cases he’s worked, police have only been able to locate one person, who unfortunately was deceased.
It’s a desperate undertaking, looking for someone who is gone, though the nature of the desperation varies. One strategy that is consistent across cases is that police treat the information coming in via missing persons hotlines, letters or emails seriously. Not all such tip-offs are concrete and a lot of them are borderline dubious. It happens a lot, Detective Senior Constable Smith says, people getting in touch saying they’ve had a dream or a vision or a premonition; psychics and clairvoyants and mediums who claim to have been contacted from the other side. While they don’t seek out such tip-offs, police don’t laugh them off.
‘It would be silly to not consider all options,’ he tells us. There can be real information hidden in peculiar tip-offs. ‘You’ve got to be open to the idea someone might have a piece of information that they know first-hand but they are scared and they might have had a dream about it. Or they might not have had a dream, they might have seen this first-hand and they just want it out there. So you can’t rule that out. You’ve got to keep an open mind.’
The idea of taking every wild theory seriously seems at odds with the sensible setting of the police station. But now we know who we have to go to next. Someone who we’d been made aware of a while ago. We hadn’t exactly discounted him, but we hadn’t rushed to find him: a man who says he has special abilities and claims to know exactly where Paddy is and what happened to him.
22
Some weird energy, a dead-weird PhD and an even weirder offer
If you stick around an outback pub long enough—until the bar mats are dripping with condensation and the stars outside have risen to a level of spectacle that would be breathtaking if everyone weren’t too drunk to notice—you’ll hear stories. Not the brash tall tales that get told in the heat of the afternoon, yarns about crocodiles guarding bank vaults or self-decapitating emus. These are quieter yarns about the kind of things that can happen on long, lonely roads.
Somewhere through the second bottle of rum, a long-haul truckie might whisper about the time he’d nodded off and woken to the shock of the truck swerving out of the way of a tree, his fillings buzzing in his mouth. ‘It’s a miracle I’m here to tell the story,’ he’ll say. And then, softer, he’ll admit that it felt for a crucial second like there was someone else’s hands on the wheel.
Next, a bushie might confess to seeing and smelling and hearing things late at night. He’ll tell the barflies nursing warm beers after last call that there are sometimes shadows in the trees that look more like people than animals—figures you can only snare in the periphery of your vision. ‘Makes your skin crawl,’ he’ll say. ‘It’s enough to make you shiver, no matter how bloody hot it is.’
There are strange things in the sky and lights on the road, someone will confess. Almost everyone who’s been out here a long time will swear by it. Lights, sometimes called Min Mins, that can’t be explained or followed but that are, for a second or two, bright enough to blind you.
The line between fact and fiction is precariously thin, out here. So maybe it’s no surprise that as soon as you’re outside the metropolitan limits, there’s at least one person in every room who’ll bet their drought-stricken property on the skills of a water diviner.
