On that momentous day in 1924 when she realised that she was pregnant and things had gone horribly wrong, she learnt that the love she had thought was mutual was probably not so. But her articles always found space in the Packer newspapers and she remained his favourite journalist. Now, hearing the sad news of his death, she could not reveal her true feelings to her mother, who was adamantly negative about him. It would have hurt Madge to discover that her daughter felt so unnerved, sad and miserable.

  No record remains today of the monthly payments Ernestine received. She must have wondered what would happen now and if there was a codicil. She had no idea if she was mentioned in Packer’s will, but his lawyers would no doubt contact her if she were.

  Packer had been a wealthy man. He sold Smith’s to Hugh Denison in 1930 and received some £175,000 for it—a huge sum, about $13 million in today’s money. He also received 400,000 preference shares in Associated Newspapers when he sold two newspapers to them.

  Now that he was dead, Ernestine had no idea if the Sunday Sun would still run her copy or if she would continue to be its feature writer. She saw no reason for it not to, but no one there would feel any obligation towards her. Certainly, Robert’s legal son wouldn’t; after all, it was Frank Packer who had sent out the team to investigate the Granites rush. She had no reason to trust him, he had no reason to like her and she wondered if she would want to keep writing for a newspaper run by him.

  She did not have to wait long for the situation to become clear. No codicil had been found and the monthly payments stopped. She decided not to pursue it. She had earned enough to sustain her family over the past three years, and they would get by without the extra money.

  Lloyd Dumas, managing editor of The Advertiser in Adelaide, had previously asked her to join his staff, letting her know that he would love to employ her as a feature writer. Until this point there had been no reason for her to move to Adelaide, but now she contemplated taking up the Advertiser’s offer.

  She had been travelling for almost four years, often taking her son with her but with only small interludes of rest. She feared that all this spasmodic travelling, disrupting Bob’s life, might have a negative influence on him. Madge was now in her seventies and Bob was growing up fast. Ernestine began to think it might be time to establish a permanent home. She was also in need of an office where she could work on her notes for the two books she planned to write.

  Two weeks later, on 17 May 1934, Ernestine, her mother, Aunt Kit and Bob boarded the Karoola to Adelaide. Dumas and Ernestine had come to an agreement; she had been appointed to the Advertiser staff as a feature writer and would remain there for the next four years.

  Until she found a more permanent place to stay, their home for the time being would be the South Australian Hotel on North Terrace. The hotel was slightly in decline but the lease had recently been taken over by Louisa O’Brien, an ambitious and determined woman from a family of hoteliers. O’Brien immediately set about restoring the grand old place, and guests had already noticed her skilled feminine touch. It was clear that it wouldn’t take her long to restore the old building to its former majestic self.

  Robert Clyde Packer was buried on 21 May; Ernestine Hill did not attend the funeral. She could not. It was not only her new job that prevented her from going to Sydney, although she probably used that as an excuse to herself. For her to stand at his grave and bid farewell to his coffin would have embarrassed his wife and children, and her. So she let the day pass in contemplation of their mutual history while never regretting its consequences. Without realising it, he had given her the greatest possible gift—never a day passed by when she did not rejoice at her son’s existence.

  Just a week after she set to work for the Adelaide Advertiser, the East-West Express (the service from Alice Springs) brought with it an old friend. To Ernestine’s great surprise, Daisy Bates had left her tent at Ooldea and come to Adelaide. She had been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the New Year’s Honours in January and was now in town to attend the investiture ceremony. The lieutenant-governor, Sir George Murray, would be presenting her with the award in recognition of her lifetime’s service to Indigenous people.

  It was a just reward, Ernestine thought, for Daisy’s hardship and work. A day later she accompanied her friend to Government House, where the medal was pinned to the lapel of Daisy’s coat and she was congratulated for being among the first women in Australia to receive a CBE.

  It also meant that Daisy would receive £1000, which would make life a little easier financially, but she would still be ‘poor as wood’ as she herself expressed it. She looked very proud and was doted on by officials, some of whom had to endure her sharp tongue but still refused to be put off by her manner. Having heard about this strange old lady for so long and been given the opportunity at last to meet her in person, they had no intention of letting the guest of honour spoil it for them. They engulfed her like hungry seagulls prancing around a bag of chips, making a fuss of her.

  Ernestine concluded that Daisy loved every minute of it, but regrettably she couldn’t tempt her to linger in the city. All too soon, Ernestine saw her off again, waving to the small figure sitting on the train that would take her back to her tent and ‘her people’. Ernestine worried about her friend returning to that drought-ridden land.

  Daisy was now old and frail. The United Aborigines Mission had recently opened a post at Ooldea Soak about four kilometres from Daisy’s camp. In charge was Annie Lock, whom Daisy openly despised, but Ernestine hoped that Lock would perhaps take heart and keep an eye on her.

  In July 1934 Ernestine gave a lecture about the wellbeing of the Central Australian Aboriginal people at a social event organised by the National Council of Women. Ernestine and Violet de Mole, the vice-president of the Adelaide Lyceum Club, discussed the valuable information that had been gathered by Daisy Bates. De Mole, who considered the matter one of federal importance, promised to send a letter to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR, the predecessor to the CSIRO), recommending that it make a proper record of Daisy Bates’ knowledge.

  Ernestine never heard what happened to this request, but she later sent another plea for the establishment of a safe location where all written knowledge about the Aboriginal people could be protected from the ants and the elements. Daisy’s valuable records were being kept in a tin trunk and, in the event of a fire, would all inevitably be destroyed. Ernestine wondered how much archival material Daisy had carefully collected and accumulated out there, vulnerable to the elements and perhaps already lost forever.

  During the rest of the year, Ernestine busied herself settling in Adelaide and writing copy for The Advertiser and the Sydney Sun, which continued to run her articles. Her stories were mainly about local people—the ‘half-castes’ living in the city, the glorious gardens and the romance of early tomatoes growing in glasshouses just beyond the city limits. She wrote about Lydia Longmore, a remarkable teacher at Goodwood Primary School, and about a school for the blind in the city centre; there were articles about Adelaide’s tea and coffee, and the Adelaide parakeet and lorikeet. During that year she also worked hard at writing her books, running from bus stop to desk top, smoking her Craven A cigarettes, typing her copy, sorting her notes and memos, and gathering new ideas.

  For months the city had been the centre of her roaming, but by the end of 1935 she was starting to yearn for open spaces again. She was beginning to find the subject matter available to her in the city slightly mundane and boring, but she willed herself to stay, knowing that her books had to be written and money had to be earned. She smoked, fretted and wrote her way through that year.

  Feeling every day ever more stifled and cramped in the city, Ernestine one day entered Lloyd Dumas’s office and boldly requested that she be given the chance to travel through Central Australia again. The stories she would be able to write would be far more interesting, she explained. She was also suffering from respiratory problems and was coughing a lot. She hoped the interior’s drier air would help her feel better.

  To her surprise, Dumas consented. She supposed he realised that keeping her in the city would only add to her rising stress, and he no doubt hoped she would deliver exciting feature articles for The Advertiser in the months to come.

  So she headed back into the interior—to Alice Springs and beyond.

  19

  From Alice to Dumas

  Once again, Ernestine Hill was spending her days in Central Australia, collecting notes for the book on the Australian interior that she planned to call The Great Australian Loneliness. First, she celebrated Christmas and New Year with her family in Alice Springs, the town that would be her base for the next three months.

  Alice Brown, the doctor’s wife, was a good friend and Ernestine always found it a pleasure see her. Alice could ride and shoot as capably as any man, and tell a good yarn too. She had moved from the Alice to Katherine with her husband the year before, but she came down to spend a few days with Ernestine during the Christmas holidays. The two met at the ice-cream parlour to catch up on the latest news about old friends and life in the city. So engrossed were they in their storytelling, they did not notice the parlour doors had closed and the proprietor had almost shut them in for the night. Making their way to the Stuart Arms, they slipped into their hotel rooms.

  The next morning there was a rumour that two gold thieves had been arrested at Winnecke Depot, a goldmining site some 80 kilometres to the north-east. When Ernestine arrived there, she found the place nearly deserted except for three old prospectors, whose presence was a bleak reminder of the old gold rush days. They assured her they still found a few nuggets every now and then, but only ever enough to buy food and small necessities. The accused men had already been taken into town, so she left the depot a little disappointed that she had been unable to record their story.

  The trial of the two gold thieves was held in Alice Springs in February 1935, in the newly created Supreme Court of the Northern Territory. Before then, all defendants had to be sent to Darwin to be tried, because the town did not have its own court. Ernestine found the courtroom crowded, with lots of excited people craning their necks to witness every aspect of an actual trial for the first time in their lives.

  The courtroom at Alice was very small and not really adequate for accommodating so many people, primarily because the new jury box that had been sent from Adelaide took up most of the floor space. After the court officials, prisoners, witnesses and spectators had entered, Ernestine joked that there was hardly enough room for her to fold out her camera. She pitied the jurymen—they had been bunked up overnight in the local hall, in thirteen beds that lined the walls. But no one complained—Alice and its people were proud to finally have their very own courtroom.

  Alice Springs was becoming quite a sprawling and well-populated city; the gold rushes had led to an influx of prospectors and others, many of whom had never left. Easy access by train and car had increased the popularity of the little town, but unfortunately there was still no proper hospital. The hostel created at Adelaide House by the Presbyterian Church’s Australian Inland Mission (AIM, which was founded by John Flynn, later of Flying Doctor fame) did a great job, but the small building had no isolation ward and could hardly be called adequate.

  Ernestine felt compelled to write an article drawing attention to this situation. There was at the time no hospital between Port Augusta and Darwin equipped with an operating theatre. Increasing numbers of people suffering from tuberculosis sought refuge from the coastal cities in the dry, bracing air of Central Australia, but there was no sanatorium and the disease spread due to patients living in hotels and hostels. Without precautionary measures, community health was at risk. A doctor already flew to remote areas from Cloncurry—in a single-engine, fabric-covered biplane capable of carrying a pilot and four passengers—but there was also a need for a nationwide organisation that could send a doctor by plane to reach families in remote areas who otherwise had to travel vast distances to seek treatment. It was not uncommon for people to die, like the Reverend Carl Strehlow, on their way to a mission or town. In time, Flynn’s AIM Aerial Medical Service received the backing it needed to become the Flying Doctor Service.

  Ernestine also wrote a series of six articles for The Advertiser called ‘No outback now’ that were republished in Walkabout, a magazine published by the Australian National Travel Association. It combined cultural, geographic and scientific content with travel writing, and since its foundation the previous year, she had contributed regularly, and this had enhanced her popularity considerably. Walkabout’s editors were active promoters of Australian photojournalism, often publishing half- or full-page photographs. Until then, Ernestine had been frequently disappointed by how her photographs looked in print, the ink turning them into smudgy, dark, phantom-like images. The first publication of her photos in Walkabout excited her—the slightly shiny, thicker paper upon which the magazine was printed gave her photos a clearer, glossy appearance.

  Her days in the Alice passed by all too soon, but Ernestine was keen to return to her desk and finish The Great Australian Loneliness. The Advertiser had also sent her a telegram indicating that a letter addressed to her from Daisy Bates was waiting for her. With so much pulling her back to Adelaide, she rode the railway tracks of The Ghan and the Trans-Australian south.

  Daisy’s letter was dated January 1935. ‘The bush was alight, she wrote, the temperatures at Ooldea rose to 120 degrees Fahrenheit almost daily and the Indigenous locals had fled.’ As should Daisy, Ernestine thought to herself as she folded the letter back into its envelope. This frail old woman should be brought to safety, but Ernestine knew how strong-willed and stubborn she could be, so she wrote back expressing her concerns but leaving a decision to Daisy.

  Just a few weeks later, another letter came that compelled Ernestine to take action. Fires were now raging through Daisy’s camp; she had buried her notes in the ground, hoping to save them from the all-consuming flames. Her eyesight was almost completely gone, she wrote. Someone had to save her. If no one else felt compelled to do so, then Ernestine would. Rising from her desk, she knocked on Lloyd Dumas’s door.

  Dumas was a large robust man. He was a Huguenot by ancestry, despite the speculation that he was descended from the great novelist Alexandre Dumas. Dumas came from a long line of newspapermen, his father having been the founding editor and sole proprietor of the Mount Barker Courier. A newspaperman in his heart and soul, Dumas had been hired as a cadet on The Advertiser at the age of fifteen.

  If Ernestine could convince anyone that Daisy had a story to tell, it would be Dumas, she thought. She told him that, if she could manage to get Daisy into the Advertiser office to tell her stories first hand, they would sell lots of newspapers and might make further profit from syndicating her stories to other news media.

  As she tried to convince him, Dumas eyed her through his glasses. He had met Daisy before and knew what he would be letting himself in for. His most polite description for the old woman was that she was ‘a prickly bush’, but Ernestine relied upon his instincts as an editor. He could spot a good story, even if its narrator was a strange, somewhat erratic old lady fighting flames hundreds of miles away.

  After she finished, Dumas sat quietly, still looking at her from behind his glasses with intense eyes. Breaking the silence, Ernestine went on to explain how Daisy might reveal her life story in a series of articles and how they might be able to make a book out of them. ‘The Advertiser could share the rights to publication,’ she added optimistically.

  Dumas answered with a doubtful look. ‘The lady is almost blind and, from what I’ve read, her prose these days is hopelessly out of date and too obscure to publish.’

  ‘I could ghostwrite her.’ It was out of her mouth before she realised what such a task would entail.

  Dumas smiled, tapped his pen on his oak desk and said, ‘Go tell Mrs Bates that Lloyd Dumas would be proud to receive her in the Advertiser’s office and that all expenses, including transport, board and office space, will be paid for and arranged according to her wishes.’

  Ernestine was at first stupefied and, just for a moment, almost lost all sense of decorum and hugged the man in her enthusiasm. But Dumas was already busy with the papers scattered across his desk and she managed to suppress her glee. With no more than a small and unobtrusive but sincerely felt ‘Thank you’, she made a dash for the door.

  Just before she left his office, Dumas coughed. Without looking up from the paper he held in his hands, he said, ‘Ernestine, I know you won’t let me down.’

  Ernestine scurried out of the building to the post office, to send an urgent telegram to Mrs Daisy Bates of Ooldea. She felt privileged to have been given this opportunity to rescue Daisy’s valuable data, and relieved that the old woman would be safe in the city and far away from the dangers of her campsite. Of course, she was also absolutely delighted by the prospect of being able to work with her.

  Alas, just a fortnight later Daisy, in a very polite but candid manner, refused this generous offer. In her explanatory letter she wrote that rain had now fallen, that ‘her people’ were back and that the prime minister, the Right Honourable J.A. (Joe) Lyons, was soon to visit her at Ooldea. He would be travelling from Melbourne to Fremantle on the Trans-Australian, in order to board a boat to London. He had sent Daisy genuine letters of interest and she had requested a personal interview. Although she had received no answer, she was sure that the prime minister would want to meet her when his train stopped in Ooldea. She had been summoned at short notice the year before to advise the Lyons government on policy towards the Aboriginal people of northern Australia but, to her great disappointment, her offer at the time to act as a special commissioner had been turned down. She thought that perhaps now Lyons might be willing to appoint her.

 

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