How the Territory Found Its Feet

A Better Place to Live by Diana Giese; Freshwater Bay Press, 2009, $22.95.

This little book reminds me of one of those tiny electric torches, no bigger than a walnut; women often carry one attached to their handbag, and men to their key-ring. Small, yes, but they cast a brilliant light into a dark corner. Diana Giese, in plain language and from much personal knowledge, describes the heroic quarter-century of the Northern Territory’s effort to remake itself, following its total ruination during the Second World War.

Darwin’s harbour was clogged by the wrecks of sixty-four ships sunk by Japanese air raids; services such as electricity and water had ceased. Of the buildings not actually wrecked, few had escaped damage. The re-gathering population, old-timers and new-chums alike, often had to squat in some semi-ruin, and share it with the owls, possums and snakes.

Apart from Darwin, Japanese air attack had greatly damaged the Territory’s scattered other settlements, and the roads connecting them had fallen into ruin. Supplies of European foods from South were meagre and erratic. Townspeople of Aboriginal or Islander background often fared best, able to hunt game, fish and birds such as geese.

Financed by the Commonwealth government with mere “crumbs from the Budget table”, the new administration was short even of rock-bottom basics like building materials. The Bible’s so-called impossibility of making bricks without straw was achieved with a mixture of a local earth and a little added cement. (Those bricks withstood Cyclone Tracey decades later.)

One priceless asset was the public spirit of the numerous Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Malays and Indonesians. When Chinese Harry Chan was elected mayor in 1966, he declared Darwin to be “the most racially unprejudiced city in Australia”.

In 1954 there arrived on this scene of mixed problem and promise the new Director of Welfare, Harry Giese, the author’s father. He was a man of unbounded energy, optimism and resource, and all his qualities were challenged to the full. Schools had not only to be built but staffed. Hospitals and lesser health agencies had, it seemed, to be conjured out of thin air. Jobs must be found, not merely for individual subsistence, but for the stability of society. (Nan Giese, Harry’s wife, also became a leading figure in Territory public life.)

Marvels were achieved from minimal resources, all aided by local community co-operation, self-help that Giese encouraged. For example, if a certain centre had undertaken a heavy construction program, it would be helped to start its own sawmill for timber supplies on the spot. (Even forest replanting for the future was considered.)

Enrolments in secondary education by Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal children rose wonderfully, and the needs of mind and spirit were by no means buried under the load of practical demands; from home-grown, “roll-your-own” performances among the mosquitoes, sandflies and flying ants, visits began from artists of international renown. At the same time, Aboriginal performers and artists began to claim the attention of Australians elsewhere in the continent.

Diana Giese shows us a new community not merely finding its feet, but beginning to take powerful strides on them. Much of this took place under the watchful but benign eye in Canberra of Paul Hasluck, Minister for Territories for some twelve years. This task was for him merely a continuation of a deep interest he had held since a young man. (You are unlikely to find a photograph of any other Minister for Territories in the saddle of a stock-horse, inspecting for himself a mob of travelling cattle.)

Hasluck’s aim was to give Aboriginal people long-term opportunities to move into the mainstream of Australian life, “becoming part of the social and the political and the economic fabric of the wider society, if they wish”.

The 1950s and the 1960s were the time when most was achieved to make the Northern Territory “a better place to live”, but the author notes that little help came from the rest of Australia, although “the new social scientists and radical anthropologists were loud, from afar, in their criticisms”.

Then, in the 1970s, the joint madness of Gough Whitlam and his toady “Nugget” Coombs swept all aside with the new doctrine of “separate development”. Experienced people in the Territory at once foretold the “disastrous outcomes in health and education” which shock us today. Is it not a paradox almost sublime that, across the other side of the continent an Aborigine, Noel Pearson, is re-teaching what wise white men had learned for themselves twenty years ago?

This well-made and attractively illustrated book comes from one of the heroic small presses which have carried such a burden for the finer points of Australian culture: in this case, most fittingly from Freshwater Bay Press. It was started seventy years ago by Paul and Alexandra Hasluck, and remains to this day an object of special care of fresh generations of the Hasluck family.