Young Rupert by Walter Marsh

Author:Walter Marsh [Marsh, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO003000, BIO005000, SOC052000, BUS070060
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2023-07-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

A race with death

ON THE AFTERNOON of 24 July 1959, Rohan Rivett walked down the road from the News Limited offices to a dining room in the University of Adelaide Staff Club. This section of the single-storey sandstone building was typically reserved for graduates paying their alma mater a visit, but it had only recently been annexed by the club; a few years earlier, it was still known as the university’s Anatomy Room, a place with a dark history that spoke to the foundations of the college, the city, and the state.1 It was a history in which the leading men of South Australia’s medical, scientific, and academic fraternity seized, violated, and trafficked the bodies of Aboriginal men and women around the world as if they were scientific curiosities. It was in rooms such as this that men of science and enlightenment created a legacy of death and secrecy that haunted Adelaide’s grand North Terrace institutions.

Rivett turned up a little after midday to discuss another matter of life and death. Sitting across from him was a Catholic priest named Father Thomas Dixon, as tall as Rivett, with the strong body of a former rugby player and thinning white hair that matched the crisp dog collar wrapped around his neck. He wore thick-rimmed glasses, and spoke with a gentle but deep voice and a sense of purpose. The meeting had been set up by the two other men present: Ken Inglis, a 31-year-old history lecturer and onetime Fabian who moonlighted as Adelaide correspondent for the Sydney journal Nation, and the Reverend Frank Borland, a Presbyterian minister and warden of the university. But it was Dixon who did most of the talking — so much that he barely touched his lunch.2 At any rate, the story he was telling was enough to put anyone off their food.

Rivett already knew some of it. It had all begun seven months earlier, on a tiny peninsula on Wirangu Country, 800 kilometres north-west of Adelaide. Between the port town of Thevenard, which sits on a small spit of land jutting out from the coastline, and its bigger neighbour, Ceduna, is a strip of sand, seaweed, and limestone cliffs arching westward to the Nullarbor plain and the Great Australian Bight. In towns such as these, the products of the vast golden wheat fields of the state’s mid-north, as well as the gypsum and salt mines around Lake MacDonnell, were held in giant stacks and mounds before being bundled onto ships and sent away. The towns themselves became magnets for itinerant labourers, farmers coming in off the land, Greek migrants who fished whiting in the waters of the Bight, and travellers making their way up and down the west coast.

Almost halfway between Thevenard and Ceduna stood, for the time being, a small metal shack — a tumbledown sort of structure pieced together out of panels of galvanised iron. But the family who lived there, the Hattams, knew it wasn’t going to be forever. They had only been

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