First Australians by Rachel Perkins

Author:Rachel Perkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522859546
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

Here it was that one of the encamped blacks on spying me rushed helter-skelter to the storekeeper to breathlessly inform him that whitefellow come along ridin’ big one mosquito.

Previously blackfellows had described the bicycle as a ‘piccaninny engine.’ ‘Big pfeller engine come alonga bime-bye, I suppose?’ questioned the blackfellow, having in mind a Transcontinental railway doubtless. ‘One-side buggy’ had also been a native’s not inapt description of the novel vehicle.36

The drought time came again, and all suffered mightily in the first great recorded Central Australian drought of 1897–1906. Numbers of stations were now either abandoned or sold at huge losses, and the recently arrived rabbits died out until regular rains again fell.37 And although the Wankangurru and other Simpson Desert peoples had experienced few direct pressures until now, they left their homelands for the dependable waters on the fringes of the desert and the new food supplies available at stations and Killalpaninna Mission in South Australia. Many never returned, and all others visited less frequently than before their time of associ ation with white people.38 The desert dwellers of the Gibson and Tanami deserts, and the sand-plain desert between the Simpson and the Barkly Tableland, also found themselves in peripheral contact with the strangers. Treasured items of glass and steel found their way through the brief contacts, or through gift exchange along the Dreaming trails, deep into the deserts. Explorer David Carnegie found steel and glass items over the border in Western Australia; and in 1898 Mounted Constable Ernest Cowle reported that the butcher’s knife was ‘ubiquitous— for many miles West [of Illamurta police camp] and at least as far South as Ayers Rock’, and that steel was being used in their adze-tips.39

Water is the crucial answer to everything here. In the desert it’s

extreme, so these waterholes are so significant, and they, in a way,

hold a lot of the essence of the landscape in them.

RG Kimber, historian

During the great drought Frank Gillen was promoted, and in 1899 he and his family moved to Moonta in South Australia. He was replaced by the Bradshaw family who, while not having Frank’s deep interest in Arrernte culture, nonetheless had good relationships with the local people, coming to know many by name, regularly giving out rations and sharing many experiences. When the Bradshaws left after nine years, the Aboriginal housemaids and other assistants remained lifelong friends.40

Meanwhile, the pastoral pioneers of the Centre had the same strengths and weaknesses as any other members of frontier society, some being benevolent and caring towards Aborigines who lived on their station properties, a limited number being cruel, and most being somewhere in between.

John Warburton of Erldunda Station, 200 kilometres south of Alice Springs, was not unusual in the era in considering the Aborigines who lived on the station inferior. However, as a letter he wrote indicates, he clearly had a feeling of responsibility for them:

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