Alice on the Line by Doris Blackwell & Douglas Lockwood

Author:Doris Blackwell & Douglas Lockwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Alice on the line
ISBN: 9871741108033
Publisher: New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Published: 2009-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

DOCTOR WHITEFELLOWS

IF EVER I FEEL NOSTALGIC ABOUT THE YEARS at Alice Springs I have only to open my own diary or my father’s. Then at once I am transported back through half a century of time and a thousand miles of the outback to the tiny settlement that was my home for nine years—and although I haven’t returned since we left in 1908 I can see it as clearly as if it all happened last week.

Hundreds of unimportant incidents that would otherwise have been forgotten are preserved for ever in these pages. I would never have remembered that a well-known geologist, Dr Charles Chewings, arrived in December 1902 to superintend operations at the Winnecke goldfield, or that my father opened a post office there in September 1903. Here again I see a note about the tremendous undertaking of carting the treatment plant to Winnecke from the Oodnadatta railhead. The smaller parts could be carried on camels after dismantling, but the huge boiler weighing several tons which was used to drive the machinery had to be brought in a wagon. On that trip Dr Chewings and his assistants were six weeks crossing the Finke River alone.

I might have forgotten the visit by the South Australian Government geologist, H. Y. L. Brown, who came on camels in June 1902 for his regular inspection of mines in the Northern Territory. After visiting Arltunga and Winnecke he then left for Kurundi goldfield two hundred miles to the northwest.

I see that Professor Sir Baldwin Spencer and Mr F. J. Gillen were with us in April 1901. Mr Gillen had already collaborated with Professor Spencer on their book, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, and he had now been given a year’s leave of absence from the P.M.G.’s Department for further field work among the aborigines.

There are notes on line inspections, the movement of sheep and horses to other telegraph stations, reports of court cases in which my father adjudicated, lists of stores, and the comings and goings of the surprisingly frequent travellers, all of them reminding me vividly of incidents that take me back easily to the day they happened. How well I remember the aboriginal stockboys leaving every few months with flocks of sheep for Barrow Creek, generally in response to telegrams that mutton farther north was becoming short. And how well I remember the arrival in March 1906 of a party of government geologists who had been on a prospecting trip to the Petermann Ranges in the far south-western corner of the Northern Territory. They were in a sorry state. They had encountered excessive summer heat (fancy going out there in summer anyway!) in a waterless area and underwent hardships such as have fallen to few.

As though that wasn’t sufficient punishment, they were attacked while sleeping by wild Loritja tribesmen near the Ruined Rampart on 5th December 1905. One of the prospectors, T. W. Hall, was speared in the eye, and another, H. Fabian, in the chest. Their leader, F. R. George, nursed the wounded men under these terrible conditions until they were well enough to travel.

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