We of the Next Era

Daughter of the Territory
by Jacqueline Hammar
Arena, 2015, 464 pages, $22.99
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Daughter of the Territory is an excellent title for Jacqueline Hammar’s fine memoir—and valuable if informal social history—of the Northern Territory, but I wondered if “From We of the Never Never to Whitlam” might have been a good subtitle.

She captures the Top End in a way redolent of Mrs Aeneas Gunn’s 1908 classic We of the Never Never and takes it jauntily through to the present day, though racing and thinning towards the end, seemingly under the weight of change since about 1970 and the pages needed to cover a century.

The colourful and eccentric characters, black and white, the bronzed and laconic bushmen, the immensity of unpeopled distance, the clammy agony of the wet season, the heat and torturingly muggy time as the dry gives way, the loneliness, but also the gossipy, neighbourly sociability and world-class boozing, the fear when illness strikes; not too much seems to have changed since Jeannie Gunn’s time there more than a hundred years ago. Also, like Jeannie Gunn, she implies that the Territory is a great place where white and Aboriginal get along together pretty well, despite the bad press.

Jacqueline Hammar was born in Darwin in 1929 so she has personal memories going back well before the Second World War. She has taken the story back even earlier through her father Jack Sargeant’s journal and her talks with him.

Jack went to the Territory in 1919 as an eighteen-year-old linesman on the Overland Telegraph, fresh from being an under-age soldier in the First World War. He served with the Northern Territory mounted police from 1921 to 1931 and then at various times was outback storekeeper, publican, buffalo hunter and much else. He went to the Territory early enough to know and talk to pioneers from the construction of the telegraph line and founding of Darwin (at first Palmerston) around 1870.

After helping in the pub and stores when she left school, Jacqueline worked on long cattle droves with the men while Germaine Greer was still at school. From the mid-1950s she and her husband Ken built up from very little the showpiece station Bauhinia Downs on the Limmen Bight River, which is about as outback as you can get—about a thousand kilometres south-east of Darwin, towards the Gulf of Carpentaria. Today her son Kurt is a big figure in the live cattle trade to Indonesia and Malaysia.

With next to no money, Jacqueline and Ken started by mustering wild cattle in the area, remnants of the abandoned leases of the old pioneers. They built their own bush hut for a first homestead, struggled with low cattle prices, but took up a grazing lease and over time developed Bauhinia Downs.

Often the story she tells of her own life and of others sounds like pioneer grazing in southern Australia a century or more before, including relations with Aborigines. Black–white relationships in the early period of contact are one of the most troubled aspects of Australian history. Not enough has been recorded for an authoritative account but what has been recorded suggests bewildering variation in Aboriginal responses to the arrival of whites. Hammar makes several points which might help broader national understanding.

This is not an analytical or argumentative book; the style is anecdotal, often with the quality of lively campfire yarning. As with most written about Aborigines, disagreement is to be expected, but she has lived among Aborigines, often where they have been the majority population locally, for more than eighty years. She has Aboriginal friends, including her wedding assistant at the lonely Borroloola mission, and mostly employed them on the station. Her son still does.

In recent times she told an old station hand city people said she should call him an Aboriginal person. “Can’t call you blackfella now,” I say. “Waffaw no more blackfella, you whitefella, ent it?” she is told; “and he is much amused by these people of a city he has never seen … who have only seen him pale skinned in city clothes on their television screens.” She has a bush candour about some sensitive subjects.

She does not suggest there was no difference other than colour. Whites ran the main industries, dominated the government, owned the language and offered a vastly greater range of skills. The Aborigines often had poor English and usually clung to aeons-old customs and superstitions, including fear of “debil debils”. Her main experience was with station hands rather than with remote Aboriginal communities. But she does indicate that the people all rubbed along together pretty well.

Northern Territory mounted police get a bad press, especially from that much-published photograph of a line of unclothed bush Aborigines being marched off to justice in neck chains, probably in her father’s day. The locked chain, she says, was the only safe way one or two policemen could travel with prisoners. She does not add that before adequate roads and transport foot was a common way of travel, or that neck chains leave the hands free to brush flies and attend to other needs.

The remote deserts of the 1920s saw the last flickers of violent resistance to the new order, especially by “small tight” desert clans. There were only about forty Territory mounties at the time, often assigned in ones or twos to tiny settlements where the police station was a furnace-like iron hut. Locally they doubled up as protectors of Aborigines and general government officials.

Her father wrote: “Aborigines admired the uniformed troopers, respected their authority in the bush. One could ask, ‘who that man?’ and be answered, ‘That no more man, that policeman’.” He also remembered the ardour with which police trackers wanted to pursue “bad niggers”, and father and daughter seem to indicate that the prospect of a less violent and death-prone and better-fed life than of old began to seem attractive to the traditional people.

Jacqueline notes how rapidly spear-carrying near-nude people who came into their store at Newcastle Waters in the 1930s wanted to don clothes and the women to work indoors. They had a ready and grateful appreciation of her mother’s (“the Missus”) medical help, as an Adelaide-trained nurse. Only a few years earlier there would have been more ambivalence, a willingness to follow an anti-white rebel, or admire a warrior who killed a white.

Under the old rules, “full-blood” Aborigines were not allowed to have alcoholic liquor. It was a serious offence for a licensee to have them on the premises. Part-Europeans needed a licence to drink (the “dog act”) and could have it suspended for drunken bad behaviour. Officialdom published a list, and at the family’s pub mixed-race drinkers were asked their name rather than suffer the indignity of showing their licence.

The destructive days of Chinese-supplied opium had also passed by the 1930s. For better or worse, the old system stopped many present-day problems.

It was strictly illegal for whites to have sex with full-bloods other than in legal marriage (though it was far from unknown). She does not give the reason, but official policy then was to shield the tribal people from the ill effects of mainstream society. In particular, venereal and other diseases had long had a devastating impact and been the principal cause of the decline in indigenous population, which in the 1930s had just been reversed.

Unlike the present day too, when it risks a human rights offence to mention the subject, the lot of the part-European was distinctive. The tribespeople disdained them as “yeller feller” misfits and when—in earlier times—they were allowed to live past birth at all, they were often mistreated or sent or taken away.

When Hammar’s Lutheran mother sent her at five to pre-war Darwin’s only boarding school, the convent, the other pupils included part-Aboriginal girls sent by their grazier fathers to be “educated as ladies”. And more recently there was the dignified city man who married a white woman and came back, amid much emotion, to meet the mother from whom he had been taken as an infant, only then to go home and not be heard from again. The last Chief Minister but one was part-European.

It would have been good if Hammar and other writers told us more about this distinctive, if greatly varied, middle nation that straddles the ethnic border, and now forms the majority of the 700,000 Australians who indentify as Aboriginal. The Northern Territory population in the post-war period was about 50,000, with 20,000 counted as Aboriginal and 30,000 as whites. People genetically less than 50 per cent Aboriginal were counted as whites.