I was very annoyed when in late December I went up to the Milikapiti airstrip, ostensibly to escort the former Community Adviser – Grant Cole back to the ‘big-house’ to pack up his belongings and move to his new posting. I had been told by the powers in Darwin a few days earlier that my temporary posting to Milikapiti, on the north coast of Melville Island was to become permanent!
There had been a change of plans and Grant advised me that I was being posted to the desert – Ali Curang, or Warrabri as it was then known, 160 kms south of Tennant Creek. A telegram from Head Office arrived a few hours later confirming this advice. So much for courtesy!
The barge from Darwin was due to arrive in a couple of days so I packed my meager belongings into the Ute, aiming to pick it up in Darwin and drive south in a few days’ time. This was going to seriously change my plans for the Christmas booze up with my fellow comrades-in-arms. A group of us had a booking for a few days over Christmas at our favourite pub – the Seabreeze Hotel, on the Nightcliff foreshore.
I flew into Darwin and spent the next couple of days in the bar waiting for my gear to catch me up. It did, and I headed down the ‘Track’, the Stuart Highway to the uninitiated, a thousand ks’ south. I arrived at Warrabri on December 22nd, 1974.
In these times staff were akin to chess pieces, one move generally reflected movements elsewhere. In this case, Warrabri incumbent Roger Styles was being moved to a large community 300kms to the north west of Alice – Yuendumu – mostly populated by Wailpiri-speakers, but with some Anmatjerre people from further east.
Warrabri – its name an amalgam of two of the larger language grouping of the area – Warramunga and Wailpiri (with significant numbers of Anmatjerre and Kaytej-speakers as well) was a dusty, flat expanse. Low acacia, a few spindly gums and European plantings of pink and white-flowering Oleander seemingly everywhere picking out the roadsides throughout the community.
A central core of administrative buildings, a mix of old corrugated iron shedding variously designated as the Office, a health clinic, a mechanical base and the government store – a central supply depot that serviced the need for bulk food items for the communal kitchen, spare parts for the mechanical garage, fertilizer and implements for the wholesale garden project and the other domestic day to day consumables used by a community of 500 people.
There were a few new-ish brick buildings – a brand new police station and some staff housing I recall – but little else substantial. There was a style of corrugated building known as a Kingstand – their sad, dilapidated presence set in dusty dirt streets, some with perimeter fencing, most without that provided the necessary civilizing example and the basis for domestic housekeeping training!
Beyond the town, and interspersed between the designated zones of affiliation – buffers that kept some distance between historically fractious language groups, traditional windbreak encampments had been established. They catered for new arrivals from other centres and for others preferring a more traditional approach. Some of these had scrounged corrugated iron sheeting to break the seasonal winds sweeping across these quite flat plains. All were set around hearths.
I had a couple of days with Roger, meeting community staff and elders. A Christmas Eve party was to be Roger’s swansong but despite quite a serious hangover next day, all hands were called rapidly into action. Darwin had had a direct hit from a cyclone – Tracy and sketchy reports suggested major damage.
Our local policeman advised that Tennant Creek (160 kms north) was being set up as a Relief Centre. They were going to need emergency supplies. We raided the government store and baby food, biscuits, a variety of tinned food, blankets, and god knows what else were taken into Tennant. There were roadblocks already set up, stopping people from northbound travel.
Rumours were rife and hard facts scarce to find. I set up my own Relief post on the our highway turn-off and by late afternoon a trickle of strange-looking streaked, scratched and mottled cars started to come down the road. Half yellow, or blue, red or white, half steel grey, streaks ripped through the duco to bare steel. Sand whipped up from the beaches has effectively blasted surfaces back to the steel.
Mick Ivory, my Director arrived about lunchtime. Bloodied from numerous unattended cuts, ripped clothing and a jumbled demeanor provided my first real inkling of things up north. Mick, this normally considered, laconic boss accepted a cuppa and through tears, started a long rambling story. I could imagine the thousand, lonely kilometres, his only companion the vicious memories replaying the horrors experienced the day before. At one moment his concern for Audrey and the kids, another respite with the remembered realization that they had been flown out of Darwin the previous evening!
Despite our protestations, he insisted on moving on to Alice – still another 360 kms further south. In years to come Mick severally returned to that disaster. He remained living in Alice Springs, acknowledging that thereafter he was never comfortable when visiting Darwin during the wet season.
Over the next 48 hours, Mick’s experiences were repeated all too regularly. Travellers without more than a pair of ‘stubbies, one lady still in her pjs, the cars all carrying the same vacant-faced survivors stopped for a cuppa, a chat, another attempt to download, to make sense in their own minds of what they had just been through.
Darwin was to remain off-limits to the general public for the next couple of years. Life went on.
I was to only spend a few months at Warrabri before the wheels of officialdom moved again. But those couple of months provided several fascinating interludes.
I had a deputation of old Anmatjerre men. I had been treating an initiate in their ‘young-mans’ camp with penicillin powder, after an infection was deemed beyond traditional medicines and on about the 3rd trip I was taken aside and asked if I could help secure their sacred story-boards – their Tjuringa.
We walked off across the flat country – stopping occasionally when the men sang snatches of a repetitive refrain. It may have been several kilometres, through quite uninspiring low acacia scrubland. Without noticeable fanfare, one of the old men stooped and pulled aside what appeared to be a dead bush. He revealed the end of an old 44 gal drum. It had a padlocked square door cut into it and he produced a small key from a string around his neck and unlocked it. Others were busily removing other dead undergrowth to expose three, 44 gal drums, each welded together into a 3.5 metre long, steel tube.
I stood there gawking, slack jawed as the chanting and thigh slapping commenced in a rhythm accompanying the withdrawal of several frail timber boards. Two must have only just fitted into the tube, others were shorter. They were being brought out one by one, passed out and laid across the knees of the assembled custodians.
The boards were etched along their lengths and it seemed to me that one or two men only were leading the chant, all the while tracing the etched, ancient markings with their bony fingers. Judging by the weathered condition of these chronicles, they were very, very, very old.
An hour, maybe two passed, with each of the boards receiving individual attention. Throughout, I sat behind and to the side of the corridor of elders. My mind was in a whirl – how could these old men expose such treasures to one so young and uneducated? Maybe it was a case of desperate needs justifying extraordinary measures. Where would such timbers have been sourced – today’s landscape offered no immediate solutions. Were the Mulga trees of yore bigger than today’s stands or for such ceremonial centerpieces, were trade links to the lancewood further north, the source?
Back in the community I continued to ponder the experience and to wonder at the privilege extended to me. There was an old steel shed at the back of the government store that I reckoned could be modified and used to provide greater security. A deputation of young blokes, under the supervision of the older men helped me transport a severely cut down shed out to country.
But not all the experiences were pleasant. A few weeks later a young bloke knocked on my door one Sunday mid-morning to tell me there had been an accident! I drove out towards Murray Downs Station, our near neighbor, to some mudflats. A bunch of bored kids, mostly under 10 but with a few older ringleaders had borrowed the rubbish-collection tractor and trailer. They were doing wheelies when the tractor, flipped. Fortunate for the 20 children in the trailer that it wasn’t them that flipped. But not so for the tractor driver – killed instantly and for the three boys pinned by the upended tractor mudguards. Two hours working with the police, our mechanic and nursing staff and we had the three boys in my station wagon, heading down the Stuart Highway to meet a reciprocating ambulance requested from Alice Springs. One of those boys died in hospital and the other two eventually came back to the community several months later.
It had been a hot dry summer – fairly normal for this part of Australia where summer daytime temperatures rarely dip below 35C. A typical day, with a stiff easterly wind to stir the dust and provide lift for the bush flies!
Mid-morning attending to bureaucratic paperwork was interrupted with the call to help fight a grass fire burning on Murray Downs. I discovered that thongs, t-shirt and stubbies just didn’t cut the mustard when called in to battle flames – sometimes flaring 20’ in front of the burn. I was loaned a spare pair of overalls, socks and boots and began my induction into firefighting, at the sharp end!
Under instruction I used a back pack extinguisher, supplemented with green leafy branches and a wet hessian bag to dampen down the edges on one of the fire’s fronts. It was burning along a 10 kilometre line and by late afternoon, there were about 100 of us at the scene, some using heavy road-making gear attempting to create breaks, others like me ‘pissing’ at the edges of this monster, We were all tiring fast!
We had been going for 6 or 7 hours, wondering how this was going to end when a flash of lightning lit up the orangey sky! Deafening thunder claps followed and then … plopping raindrops – the size of emu’s eggs, started darkening the soil all about – huge dark chocolaty smudges. Daylight vanished, the wind intensified and the grassfire finally met its nemesis. We got bogged in the mud on the weary drive back to Warrabri – but efficiently extracted with the aid of a passing grader!
It continued to rain for the next three days. Buckets and buckets of the stuff and word came through on the radio sched’ that my permanent replacement, Jeff Stead was heading my way. I was going off to Docker River!
It had been a short, eventful period, just over two months. Months later I found out that missing the Christmas Bash at the Seabreeze Hotel, in Nightcliff hadn’t been such a bad thing after all. Colleagues who made it spent that night desperately dragging and trying to hold bed mattresses against themselves and whatever solid structure remained of the pub. First the bedroom windows shattered, the roof went and finally the walls disappeared. They clawed their way to the bar area and hunkered down next to the toilets. When that area flew off into the night, they spent the remainder of that terrifying night crouching in what remained of a brick corner, three of them, two mattresses, flying debris and the unnerving, constant howl of the storm!