I had some trepidation about speaking to such a group. Historians are a bloodthirsty lot. Ever heard of the ‘Battle of the Accountants’ or the ‘Physicists’ Massacre’? No, but you know about the ‘History Wars’, don’t you? How would the colloquium take the fact that I am doing a degree in bloody Creative Writing? Just think of  the public roasting recieved by author of The Secret River, Kate Grenville, or The True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey, for taking creative liberty with the historic record.

So while there was no hiding my delinquency on the big day, I though it prudent not to mention it. I understand the attitude in some circles is that if you ain’t got your BA (with Honours) in History your contribution on matters past is invalid. Then the charms of being peripheral kicked in again. Good old Darwin — on the bill before me were a town planner and an ecologist. Clearly scientists, local government mandarins (all respect, yo), or god help us, even creative writers could have something worth saying about history in the NT.

If bush hacks such as me can get a guernsey down at the local colloquium, what makes a NT historian? My real learning, as usual during such affairs, occurred over a cup of tea during a break. I now take you ringside:

Historian 1: You know I was thinking how I got into this game and I traced it back to the bushranger stories I used to read as a kid.

Historian 2: You’re joking, I’m exactly the same, I loved bushranger stories!

(A certain Creative Writer masquerading as) Historian 3: That’s hilarious, Ben Hall and Ned Kelly were my heroes in primary school!

And so the truth is out. A youthful passion for one of yesteryear’s careers — bushranging, piracy, warrior-ing or princess-ing (more, anyone?) — is an early childhood indicator of a historian’s leanings. A university degree later on merely formalises the fact.

In the interests of boosting my credentials then, I’ve decided to post my historian’s bona fides below: the first thing I actually remember writing. I was eight years old when (like Carey, heavily influenced by Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter) I took a bloodthirsty stand against my school teachers and Armidale’s constabulary with the bellicose historians of the future.

My father’s attitudes and understanding of Indigenous people and issues is an underlying preoccupation. Aside from discussing my first forays into Henry Reynold’s work with him, I don’t remember ever talking with him about Aboriginal issues. To understand his changing attitudes I’ve looked at his writing of the late 60s and early 70s, when the ‘new left’ (by then old) went through something of an awakening on race issues along with many others. I’ve even gone as far as contacting his former colleagues for their recollections.

Yesterday I was at Ngukurr (formerly Roper River Mission), the home of the Northern Territory’s great Aboriginal activists of the 1960s: Phillip and Clancy Roberts; Dexter and Davis Daniels and others.  Daniels was a key instigator of the Wave Hill Walk-off and the most militant of the Roper River men. I had interviewed some relatives and former colleagues of the Daniels brothers and was reading a paper by Julie Kimber, a fellow fan of Dexter Daniels. Trawling through Julie’s footnotes, I thought it was a typographical error when I saw my father’s name in the same sentence as Dexter’s:

46: Donations to Daniel’s [speaking tour of the southern states] had been received by Russel Ward, Eleanor Dark, Katherine Susannah Prichard…..

I just about fell out of my swag. It seems that my father, like thousands of others, was an active supporter of the Gurindji and the quest of NT Aborigines for equal rights.

To anyone else, this is an incidental speck of dust in the long paddock of history; a footnote to a footnote. Even so, in lieu of spiritual transmissions from the afterlife, Footnote 46 told me more about what my father would think of my current antics than more years of second-guessing from here on the ground floor.

The paper of Julie Kimber’s I am referring to on Dexter Daniels can be accessed here:

That’s Not Right- Dexter Daniels in 1968

“Sir,

One of the many riches of life in Central Australia is the great history

of the local people, the settlers, Afghans, explorers and cattlemen.

Many of the old folk around town have wonderful stories to tell of the

hardship and joys of years gone by.

Knowing this, it comes as a bitter pill that the main place preserving

this heritage is woefully under-resourced. Despite holding a wealth of

records and images related to Central Australia, the Northern Territory

Archives Service (NTAS) Alice Springs branch can’t afford to promote

itself in the community and has only two paid staff.

Neither is there enough money to pay anyone to record the oral histories

of the region’s oldies, for whom time is running out. As of 2010, when

volunteers record an oral history, there is not even enough money to

have the recording typed up to be read and treasured by family, friends,

researchers and the general public.

The Minister for Arts and Museums, Gerry McCarthy, is presiding over the

neglect and devaluing of our history while funding pours into other

areas. Ultimately it is the memory of the Territory’s aunts, uncles,

nans and pops that is lost.”

Cue the violins.

I am about to jump in our highly-strung Hilux for two or three weeks of  joyriding around the Katherine region and the Top End: 40 degree heat and high humidity; pure comfort. I’ll be interviewing community elders, a publican and a clergyman.  Will the car blow up in a repeat of my last foray to the Roper Bar? Will my head explode? Will the publican throw me through the swinging doors of the Katherine Club Saloon? Stay tuned…

Marge, Tiwi’s Tenacious Typographer is also Sufferring Mightily; a result of the Grievous Harm wrought upon her Shandy Fund, notable ever since the Minister deprived her of her Gainful Typographical Employ and Beautiful Bakelite Headset.

This is a Call to all Genealogical Dabblers and Historians with Spine to DOWN TOOLS until Marge’s Reinstatment is Assured. Bifocal Spectacles, Fountain Ink Pens, Summer Slippers and other Tools of the Trade will be Decently and Properly Laid to Rest until Minister McCarthy signs a Decree Reversing his Judgement.

The Transcription of Oral History Recordings is essential to Life and Limb!

Viva La Transcription!

Anniversaries, especially personal ones, are a curious business. Of limited significance to anyone other than one’s self, the question arises—for non-drinkers especially— of how they should be marked. In the event it turned out that two of my steadfast friends, ‘Brother Be’ and ‘H2’ (appropriately enough the unique organiser of that mediation course) were in town. My favorite Über Chef Trang and I got down to business, and a banquet of rare distinction was the result.

To mark my Territorian decade more memorably though, a gift arrived in the form of a question: Would I consider collaborating in the creation of a biography of Dexter Daniels? The man was a hero and a key player in the saga of the Wave Hill Walk-off. I had been in the Territory three years before I heard of the aboriginal unionist and Land Rights rabble-rouser, another three before I started researching him and several more before I drove 1,000 kms to meet his family. Tales such as Dexter’s form the marrow of NT history and are barely past. Still, there is no such thing with history as a fickle fling or a one night stand. Time is required. Unerring curiosity, attention to one’s surroundings and an excess of patience are required to boil the billy with the dear departed.

In one of my favourite lines in fiction, Peter Carey’s Harry Joy is desperate to woo his estranged lover—an apiarist—and plants his tree seedlings in the forest adjoining her home. His hope is that one day in the distant future she will remember something of him through the honey (made by her bees) from the trees he plants. ‘Only a madman would send a love letter that takes ten years to arrive’, he reflects.  This anniversary in particular, I disagree. The best things are worth the wait.

It was one of several visits to the monolithic Royal Darwin Hospital’s Oncology Unit I made last week. One of the Warlpiri and Gurindji worlds’ finest, Billy Bunter Jampijinpa has been ensconced there during treatment for pneumonia (which he pronounces ‘remmonia’), and lung cancer. When I arrived he was fairly miserable, with no date of release. Now antibiotics and radiotherapy have, I expect, improved his physical condition, while his spirits have been buoyed significantly by the recently-imparted news that he will be discharged and fly to Kalkaringi in a matter of days. He thinks it probable that the pneumonia got a hold of him when he was forced to wait on an icy southern winter’s day at Adelaide airport during a botched medical transfer—not unlikely.

During my visits we recorded a number of bedside interviews, which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. The ‘Bunter Bootleg’ oral history series is sonically disastrous, punctuated by regular ‘culturally appropriate’ (loud and slow) interjections from an unending array of young health professionals, cleaners and tea maids, mixed with the swearing and cries of nearby patients. One of the recordings even features an accidental ‘Live and Rare’ half-hour palliative care consultation. Old Billy was remarkable, moving seamlessly from historic narrative to his latest catheter insertion or ECG reading and back again.

After a week in a cold hospital with no visitors, the highlight was facilitating a wheelchair-propelled breakout with Mr Bunter to visit the bank. Having decided that Darwin was no country for old men, Billy wanted to extract his savings prior to his flight home. The teller seemed blissfully unaware that an elderly gentleman in a hospital gown, jeans and bare feet with a loaded oxygen canister could be planning a Bardem-esque hold-up, though since her branch of TIO was destroyed by a fire bomb in a shopping trolley late last year, she was perhaps only looking out for suspicious groceries.

Billy professes scepticism about the treatments, monitoring, poking and prodding of allopathy in which he is currently immersed, and is instead pinning his faith on the power of bush medicine and interventionist prayer.

In ending then, here’s to the health of Billy Bunter; may the powers that be grant him what his oncologist will not: at least one turn of the seasons with his family on country, after a fifty year working life.

Billy's Mob Giving the Country's First Aboriginal Affairs Minister a Bit of Curry in '68

The only obstacle now is that I’ve got myself involved in the nationally critical business of ennumerating the population between the Kings Creek Wilderness Lodge and Crooked Well Outstation for the 2011 Census. I don’t know which is more surprising; the fact that I’ve become a public servant or a statistician.

The nature of a Remote Area Team Leader’s work at this early stage consists of driving through jaw-droppingly beautiful county along rough bush tracks with dodgy maps in a new 4WD, ennumerating sheds, caravans and houses. That’s right, ‘the government’ (who or what that is has become even more mysterious as I am now seemingly a part of it for a few months) has me destroying a new car counting houses in a chunk of god-knows how many thousand square kilometres.

We always end up where we are going, don’t we?

Don’t we?

An Empty Tin Shed I Counted

This raises a couple of questions for me. Firstly, my efforts in word production and arrangement—which on rare occasions of mania and self-indulgence nudge the sixteen hour mark— are perhaps a little half-hearted. The second—and I am prepared to consider it, although it appears to be a practical impossibility— is that if I pushed myself through this twee little barrier and wrote for a twenty hour stretch, say, it might alleviate my insomnia.    

Practical considerations aside, I admire those who recognise the physicality of the literary arts. Gregory David Roberts (Australian author of the similarly-gargantuan Shanataram)  won me over entirely by claiming that his appreciation of  serious literature was consolidated during one of  his many sojourns in a maximum security prison. Upon recieving a tip-off about an impending assault, Roberts would go to his meagre library and cut the covers off anything substantial—Shakepeare or Dostoyevsky were favourites. If we are to believe his accounts, Roberts was more than capable of holding his own in a shank fight, but nontheless, taped around his arms and over his torso under his shirt, these literary heavyweights saved him from bleeding to death on many occasions.

And to think occasionally I’ve wondered if writing makes a jot of difference in the ‘real’ world…

(Quotes excerpted from: F De Groen & L Hergenhan (eds), Xavier Herbert Letters , St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2002).

In the remote Northern Territory of Australia, the Gurindji country in the Victoria River district sprawls. Open savannah, melaleuca swamps and craggy, red-rock-topped hills scattered across black soil plains. Basalt fissures birth spring-fed creeks watched by ochre-drawn bats, serpents and emus. Pandanus palms fringing long waterholes etch their marks on shadowy catfish, turtle and freshwater crocodiles. Hidden bones are guarded by Echidna sentinels; their whereabouts now only half-remembered by the old. Flinted quartz-cutters lie littered by boulders, between which fat goannas— kirrawa—live. The weather of the country is as varied as the topography: the shimmering, humid heat of tropical inland summer is followed by the dry bite of ceaseless, off-the-desert wind. ‘Mugguru’, people say then, shivering: it’s cold.

The Territory’s Buntine ‘Beef Road’ is an undulating driveway for catle-packed road trains, Gurindji-packed Falcons, and the white Toyotas that ferry staff between the lights of Katherine or Darwin and bush communities. White Toyotas so common that even when I saw one, in July 2006, crushed, flipped on its roof in the scrub, I didn’t think too hard. Not that it could be the friends I was travelling convoy with.

It was a road I knew well; an eight hour drive between my home in Darwin and remote Kalkaringi, where I worked for the Gurindji. My role was to help them celebrate the 40th ‘Freedom Day’ anniversary of the ‘Wave Hill Walk-off’, their definitive rejection of pastoral feudalism.

My thoughts were travelling more slowly than my still thundering wheels……. ‘That’s not my friends…. it’s facing the other way….’ My heart was sinking regardless as my foot toyed over the brake. ‘Two cars with them…what could I do anyway? … maybe they need a driver…. shit.’ Termite mounds came into focus and I turned around and pulled up. A big fellow, a cattleman, walked towards me, and held out his hand. ‘Terry Underwood. It’s your blokes. They’re alright.’

I doubted that. A blue tarp was strung off the far side of the wreck, where people were standing around. There was no sign of my friends. Ash and dust, I now noticed, were everywhere, an explosion from each of the half-dozen landings their vehicle had made. Keep walking, Charlie. On the far side of the Toyota I saw them. The dust was all over Russell and Trevor, caked to the pale surface of their skin, cleft by scarlet gashes. Trevor’s pale blue eyes took me in.  

Russell looked much worse, lying down, his neck swollen bulbously out of shape. For all I knew he was about to die. ‘Charlie’, he croaked, ‘Was your father Russel Ward?’

Where was this coming from? I reeled, and squatted next to him. Russell (with two L’s) told me that my father, the author of The Australian Legend, a historian and radical, had been enjoying his twilight years when he ‘painted Russel’s portrait in Queensland one time, entered it in the Archibald’. ‘Mate,’ I thought, ‘you look like you’re about to die next to a godforsaken cattle track, and you’re talking to me about oil painting?’

I felt the brush of a calling card from my long-gone dad, delivered from the afterlife. Life, death and art seemed strewn among the groceries, paint, bedding and Walk-off fliers over the hard earth. Our naive good will and hope were dissipating with the fumes of a cooling engine into the dry air. A few dozen posters had been blown lazily through the scrub. Iconic images of the facetiously-dubbed ‘Saint Gough’ Whitlam, former Prime Minister and hero of the Left, pouring earth into the hand of the Gurindji’s elder statesman Vincent Lingiari, stared dumbly at us. I stared dumbly at them. Whitlam had towered over me as a child and shook my hand before launching my father’s book. The scrappy trees and termites surrounded us, eternally indifferent.

The Walk-off, in the version we were attempting to celebrate, was a barely-equalled moment of Aboriginal autonomy in Australian history. One August morning in 1966, two hundred Gurindji, Mudbra and Warlpiri workers and their families— 90% of the staff of Wave Hill cattle Station—had left their impoverished camp and half a century of racial feudalism, and gone on permanent strike. They rejected the entreaties of their British multinational employer, re-occupied an area of their land, and waited ten years for the nation’s leaders— and eventually its legislature—to recognise them. It was an enthralling story.

By the road though, the planets orbiting my life— both the anachronistic allure of the bush ‘mateship’ stuck in the craw of my father’s Australian Legend, and the stark hardship and spiritual wealth of Aboriginal Australia—were still failing to gel. For a few years in the early 70s Whitlam, his cabinet and supporters, had seemingly given form to the notion of ‘a fair go’ and reconciliation— resulting in the return of the Gurindji’s land in 1975. Old man Lingiari, once a thorn in the side of the establishment, had replied ‘We’re all mates now’, and been awarded an Order of Australia.

I’d found Lingiari’s grave marked with a star-picket, but had I found, or created, mateship with the Gurindji over two years? Troublingly, there had also been three decades of Whitlamesque ‘self-determination’ policy implementation in the Gurindji communities of Kalkaringi and Daguragu. I’d just developed their most recent Five Year Plan, and I knew they weren’t having a picnic. Was the community I had lived in the one Lingiari and his cronies had wanted?

Two hours waiting for an ambulance gave time to reflect. What exactly was the Gurindji’s ‘freedom’ as they saw it? Freedom to what? Was it a cause—as now seemed possible— worth dying for?

© Charlie Ward, 2011.