Arnhem's Kaleidoscope Children, page 1
Table of Contents
Arnhem's Kaleidoscope Children
Mum and Dad’s Early Lives
Missionaries to Groote Eylandt
Oenpelli for the first time
Transport – a truck and a road to Oenpelli
To Darwin to live
Return home to Oenpelli
Away to school in Sydney
Family Life at Oenpelli
Teenage Adventures
Return to Oenpelli to live and work
Flying and Building Outstations
Buffalo and Abattoirs
Oenpelli and its Aboriginal People
Mining
Investigation into Uranium Mining – The Fox Inquiry
Visit to Groote Eylandt
University
My parents as an adult
Finishing University and beginning work
Crocodile
Working in Katherine
Working in Alice Springs
Working in Darwin
Buffalo People
NT Stock Inspectors
Working in the Barkly’s
Mum and Dad as Senior Citizens
Goodbye Mum
My children return
A Second Family and a final childhood.
Background to the Northern Territory and Oenpelli
The earliest record – Leichardt passes through
Arnhem’s
Kaleidoscope
Children
Memoir by
Graham Wilson
Copyright
Arnhem’s Kaleidoscope Children
Graham Wilson
Copyright Graham Wilson 2023
ISBN 9780648311218
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without prior approval of the author. For permission to use contact Graham Wilson by email at grahambbbooks@gmail.com
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank a range of people who have contributed to this book. First, thanks to those who encouraged me to write the story of my childhood and life living in the remote Top End of the Northern Territory of Australia.
I also wish to thank the many people who have contributed to this story through lives lived in this place, particularly my extended family, missionaries who worked at Oenpelli, people who worked for the Northern Territory Department of Primary Industry and many station people from across the NT and most especially the aboriginal people of western Arnhem Land.
Collectively you have given me the rich experiences which make this story live in my mind, and give the colour of the telling.
Prologue
Yesterday, November 23rd, I went to Oenpelli, an aboriginal town in Arnhem Land. It was two days after my father was buried in Darwin, next to where my mother was buried six years before. A memorial service was held, recounting his pioneering exploits.
The most beautiful part was a gathering of about six aboriginal women, standing in a semicircle around his grave. They spontaneously sang a hymn in Gunwinku, the language of the Oenpelli people. Other people threw handfuls of dirt into the grave. It was a hauntingly lyrical melody, an expression of their private affection.
There were other people at Oenpelli who could not come in to Darwin but wanted to say their sorry’s too. So I drove to Oenpelli and walked around the town, amongst these people, enveloped in a steamy wet season build up day, as aboriginal people came up and murmured their regrets at my Dad’s passing.
Later I walked out across the Oenpelli plains, to where the first water of the wet season was spilling from the end of the billabong onto the floodplains; just myself and a few hundred squawking waterbirds feasting on natures first wet season flush.
The afternoon sky turned purple, then olive-black, above the sunlit sandstone hills, as a storm built. Flashes and rumbles increased as I walked back towards Oenpelli, watching as the sweep of rain blotted out the view of the hills. A sudden blast of cold air at the storm’s leading edge swept me with its fresh rain smell. At the church, on the edge of the plains, I took shelter. The storm lashed out it’s brief fury, then was gone. Rising steam and a few puddles were all that remained.
I said farewell to Oenpelli. It was time to begin my return to Sydney. On impulse I decided to drive back to Darwin along the old Jim Jim Road, an early road to Oenpelli. I planned to camp out on the plains once across the South Alligator River. Here, in my childhood, buffalo by thousands and more, were seen.
Another more massive storm was brewing. I crossed the South Alligator River, driving through a few inches of water and thought. “Well - the big river is behind me and the road is clear ahead to Darwin”. A short time later, tropical sheets of rain began to fall. I pulled over onto a small gravel ridge on the side of the road to sit the storm out. After half an hour, it eased to a drizzle, which continued into the night. I slept in the car, thinking morning would be a better time to travel.
The grey light of 6 am dawn saw a small amount of high cloud, but the rain was gone. I proceeded, cautiously at first, but the gullies were dry, other than one or two with a trickle of water. My mind was still on the events of the last few days, but all seemed well. I swept around a bend, and there was a gully with some water flowing through it, about a foot deep I thought.
In the split second before I was into it, I had the chance to brake to a stop, but my instant decision was, it's fine, keep going. Suddenly one foot of water was three, and before I knew it the current picked up the light four-wheel-drive up. I was floating in the creek, with no engine and water bubbling inside. As the car drifted downstream, away from the road, the water outside was deeper, coming up over the dash.
I thought; “It's time to get out of here”, but with no engine and no electricity, the windows and doors were securely locked. I crawled into the back and tried to unlock the tail gate. No luck there either. Here I was, in a glass encased bubble, slowly flowing down an ever-increasing river towards the sea, while the car slowly settled ever deeper into the water.
After 30 or 40 yards it seemed to catch something on the bottom and movement stopped. My bubble still held me trapped and it really was time to get out, while my head was above the water. Two or three kicks at the window made no impression on the hardened glass. “Not good”, I thought. Then I realised there was a skylight. I couldn't open that either, so it was time to kick in earnest, two hard kicks and suddenly the glass shattered.
I retrieved what I could find of my possessions floating in the cabin, and scrambled to the shore, none the worse for wear, except for a few glass cuts to my feet. Two hours of trudging up the dirt road, then a road train came along. I got a lift to Darwin.
Then came the unpleasantness of dealing with destroying a rental car, expensive and embarrassing, when you have to explain your stupidity.
It was a lesson in two parts, how quickly security can turn to tragedy and that I should never have underestimated the fickle power of the Northern Territory. The rain, a moderate tropical storm where I was, had barely run water. Far upstream 84 millimetres came from this storm, focused in one narrow river channel. I tasted its power in my moment of inattention. I don't know why my hands and voice were shaking that afternoon, I was in one piece. Cars can be replaced, people can't.
Back to the first beginning. It’s over 6 years now since the fateful phone call that began the writing of this story. My sister in New Zealand rings occasionally, at night or the weekend. So a phone call in mid-afternoon is unusual; “Have you heard what happened to Mum?” No (I think did she win a prize or something). “There’s been a car accident and she’s been killed”. ... Silence!
All the urgent, routine arrangements take place; book a flight to Darwin, deal with a lot of other shocked family and friends, make funeral arrangements; it’s all a bit of a blur now.
On the morning of the funeral I have a memory of standing there and looking at Mum’s face; still, peaceful, lined with 75 years of living. Later, listening to an Irish song, one line brought that image of my mother flashing into my mind.
“her face is a well worn page, and time all alone is the pen”
It captured a bit of my mother’s passing and the rich life that she lived, reflected in her final face; kind, dignified and written with its own history.
This book is an attempt to share this history with others, and so to leave a record of the unusual life of her and my father, a richness in which our whole family has partaken.
As a child it did not occur to me that my parents were different from an average suburban Mum and Dad. I accepted as normal living in Arnhem Land; where the aeroplane came now and then, or sometimes a boat came up the river; that most of my playmates were black; that for four or five months of each year it was a world cut off by water, and at opposite times it was a world of smoke, fire and bulldust, punctuated by intense black thunderheads and lightning.
My earliest childhood memories, when I was two years old, sit in that blur between babyhood and remembering.
The first is an Oenpelli visitor taking me to the back paddock behind our house, to see a new calf; walking through tall brown grass, above my head, a clear blue sky above, expecting to see a soft baby animal of the story books, small and cuddly. Instead this giant creature, taller than I, on wobbly legs, with brown and white patches on half wet skin. It jumped and frightened me when I went to touch it.
The second memory is crossing the river (East Alligator) with my father. First; slipping down a silty river bank to a huge brown-yellow channel with green overhanging trees. Then being lifted into a dugout canoe, rough-carved, sculpted from one huge tree. In the bottom grey mud, dried grass and a couple inches of muddy water. Me, looking out over sides, almost as high as myself, at the huge muddy river swirling beyond. My father and an aboriginal man, with black shiny skin, pushing off, the current taking us and slowly paddling across the running tide towards the green distant bank. My memory fades; no crocodiles though certainly they were there, no birds though probably screeching overhead, nothing but wonder and bright colour seen through childhood eyes.
Partial memories drift across the next 2 years; on a trailer behind a tractor with my mother, sisters and a tribe of aboriginal ladies and children. Going through red-yellow sandstone hills towards a billabong, gritty bulldust in our eyes and mouths. We bounce across washouts, dodge branches and pandanus prickles whipping past us. We live in a tin house with ant-bed floors and a black lady that my mother calls the house-girl. Then a final memory of flying to Darwin just before my fourth birthday in a small plane, looking out the window as black dots of buffalo and brown dots of ant-beds go by amongst a mosaic of trees and floodplains. This was the end of the first great adventure of my life, as an Oenpelli child. It remains forever burnt into my mind, a child amongst children, amidst the myriad colours of Arnhem Land.
As an adult reflecting back I realise not only was I a child of Arnhem Land, but so too were my parents; coming to this unknown land, full of strange places and unfamiliar people, which they discovered for the first time. While knowing white society and its ways, and with much practical common sense, they knew little of the land to which they came. This is also their story of discovery.
Introduction
What is it about the Northern Territory that fascinates? I have only to mention its name in conversation and people turn to listen. Why, for 180 years, has it drawn people from all over to come, stay longer than they imagined and often, never leave?
“Here I give you a history galloping wild for a century over half a million square miles, the life story of a colony in quicksand.... A nameless land, a land without flag, a vague earth bordered by the meridians of God....
Black men wandering and white men riding in a world without time where sons do not inherit, and money goes mouldy in the pocket, where ambition is wax melted in the sun, and those who sow may not reap.
I write of the Northern Territory of Australia, problem child of an empire, land of an ever-shadowed past and an ever-shining future, of eternal promise that never comes true...
From tropic seas a thousand mile south to salt lakes, between desert and desert five hundred and sixty miles wide, here is the strangest country of white men in the world, where they rode for a lifetime without a home, without a wife, safe from yesterday and tomorrow, drifting from tree to tree like blacks. They bought a kingdom for a billy of sweet tea and a stick of tobacco, found millions in reefs of gold and precious metals. Finest nation building fibre the world has known swept away in high tides of emotional nature with none to care or follow, too many of them died unburied.
Here is a passionate and prolific earth never tamed and trimmed to small designs of man; .... A sixth of Australia.... a State, and one of the greatest in its own geographical right - 523,620 square miles from under Capricorn to the Timor Sea ....
Nameless, it is still a Northern Territory, as once it was of South Australia, though it has been separated from South Australia for 40 years. Never yet has it been fully surveyed or explored. You can draw a map of England to scale in the map of the Territory without a single name in it, not even a native well- which means a sump of mud.
Borders are imaginary, slant of the sun by a cairn, the 129th meridian to the 138th meridian of east longitude, the 26th parallel of south latitude between them – immeasurable planes of vacant earth silent by day, at night a blur of darkness under a myriad of bright stars. A few noble surveyors began their desert ordeal pacing out infinity, but what was the use when time and space run into red sand? The netting fence that divided it from Queensland has many times fallen. There never was a frontier to south or west.
The bad and beautiful Territory is not the youngest of the Australian family, as many believe, but third eldest. It was founded in 1824, following New South Wales and Tasmania. The black sheep never celebrated a centenary parade of its pioneers for the congratulations of empire. In September 1939, on the eve of the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of Darwin Harbour came the declaration of war in Europe, a threat from Asia, swift apparition of armies, a lightning colonisation in chaos of armed camps – that pageant soon faded back into the long grasses.
The graph of its history is the same mad zigzag up and down, from the crest of the wave to the hollow, from false glory to dejection, from the bright spotlight of sensational interest to oblivion and neglect.
Someone is always discovering the Territory, its colour and beauty, infinite resources, boundless wealth, “forever piping songs forever new”.
What is the truth of this changeling child of ours? Is it a paradise or hell, milk and honey or Dead Sea fruit? Has it a transcendent future or only a pitiful past? Is it true, as the American serviceman said, that in colonising Australia we “began at the wrong end” or, to use the cynical old phrase you hear so often up there, shall we “hand it back to the blacks with apologies”?
“If this country is settled,” said John McDouall Stuart, who grew old and blind to find it, “it will be the brightest star under the Crown, suitable for the growth of anything and everything.... a splendid country for cotton” That was 1862.
“Rich to rottenness!” cried Boyle Travers Finniss, first Administrator, in 1864, yet few save the cattle-men, remote in so many thousands of miles of wilderness, have wrested from it even a poor living. Its goldmines and its gardens are all graveyards. Until twenty years ago it was so far away from the rest of Australia that it was a land of legend – two thousand miles of desert tracks, two thousand miles by sea. Only a pilgrim could reach it.
After a century of endeavour, wilderness still. In 1942 Professor C. J. Hart of Toronto University, in an article in Asia, advised the world in general that it was not worth owning “... a land of vast empty spaces marked on the map with rivers that contain no water and towns that contain no people ... an empty barren country, one of the most hopeless in the world to live in, one of the most difficult to get away from.”
Yet in 1943 Nelson T. Johnson, ambassador to Australia from the United States, of his own knowledge in thousands of miles of travel by aeroplane and car, announced in emphatic terms: “The Northern Territory can be built into an empire ... If the government provides chances for young men and women, great cities will grow there within forty years. No country in the world offers greater opportunities for young people”
The bagmen of today, the “old death adders Major Mitchelling around”, they were the young men of yesterday, with all the energy and dreams of youth. Forgotten men, they failed but they believe. So hope withers away and springs eternal in a pattern of nature too vast for human vision, a power too insensitive to human hands.
So wrote Ernestine Hill in the first chapter of her famous book “The Territory” published in 1951. This was the year my parents first came to Arnhem Land.
Is the Territory still the place of Ernestine Hill’s imagination and was it ever so. Truth is rarely simple and trying to understand the multilayered dimensions of the Territory is its own challenge: - a timeless land, wet and dry, a black and white land, a land of opportunity and development, gateway to Asia, natural wilderness, cattle and buffalo ranging over endless grass plains and impenetrable scrub, land of deserts, waterfalls and sparkling ocean sunsets, a place of the exotic and quixotic.
Much has changed in the Territory over the last 50 years, mostly wrought by human hands, but for millennia before hands have been using and slowly making their changes to this land. Yet as it changes the essential essence of the Territory, “a pattern of nature too vast for human vision” stays the same.
In coming to a limited understanding of my parents’ lives, and the contribution they made to these changes, I have come to realise that they came as children to a land in which other, black hands had greater mastery, and in which all human efforts were little more than fleabites on the vastness. As Paul Hogan remarks in Crocodile Dundee; arguing about who owns the land, is a bit like two fleas arguing over who owns the dog.
