Oh 771/2 Douglas Walker

STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 771/2

Full transcript of an interview with

DOUGLAS WALKER

on 17 November 2004

by Dr Sally Stephenson

for the

OODNADATTA MUSEUM ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library OH 771/2 DOUGLAS WALKER

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

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J.D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA: INTERVIEW NO. OH 771/2

Interview with Douglas Walker recorded by Sally Stephenson at Oodnadatta, South Australia, on 17th November 2004 for the State Library of South Australia’s Oodnadatta Museum Oral History Project.

TAPE 1 SIDE A

This is Sally Stephenson interviewing Douglas Walker at the Dunjibar Community Council office in Oodnadatta on the 17th November 2004 for the Oodnadatta Museum Redevelopment Project. The interview focuses on Douglas’s life in Oodnadatta and in the Northern Territory.

Douglas, can you tell me your full name, please?

My name’s Douglas Walker, but I’ve actually got a cultural traditional name that identifies me as a Western ....., from the Western MacDonald Range areas of Alice Springs, so I’ve got a skin name which is Jabardani[?]. And I’ve got my sons and daughters, of course, along that cultural traditional names in the system for a female is Napanangka[?], like my daughter Valerie, and my sons Andrew and Douglas are for males Jabanungas[?].

So you were born in the Northern Territory – where exactly were you born?

I was born, at that time was a place called the Native Ward, somewhere within the Alice Springs Hospital complex at that time. It was a ward where we were separated from the other people and of course with the name ‘Native Ward’ you don’t have to explain much, it was where most of our Aboriginal people were kept in this hospital, called the Native Ward.

And when were you born?

...... for about thirty-odd years when I came down to South Australia, and after living thirty-odd years in South Australia I went back to Alice Springs and I had to check my date of birth again and I was just sort of in the process of going to the hospital and had a phone call from the secretary or the registrar, somebody in the Alice Springs Hospital at that time, and said, ‘Can we make an appointment, Mr Walker? We’d just like to clarify your date of birth.’ And so I said, ‘Okay, look, I’ll see you some time tomorrow.’ So I went along and enquired about why all of a sudden I had three date of births, and it didn’t take me long to work that out: it was part of the assimilation policies at that time where, once they’d taken children away in the Stolen Generation, to confuse them and to leave them with no identity, they

gave children someone else’s name and date of birth or confused them with two or three dates of birth and that sort of thing. So it took me a long time to sort of – I had to go back to my elder sisters and my brothers at that time because my parents were deceased for a long time and with the last remnants of my family, my mother’s and my father’s, just to find out how old I was, because I had three dates of birth, which was very confusing. But after I talked to my eldest sister and my eldest brother and my aunties and that sort of thing we confirmed that yes, I was born round about 30th of the first 1953.

And so what were your parents’ names?

My father’s name was ..... He was born somewhere in Oodnadatta, I think, on his birth certificate. And my mother, she was a Western ....., from a place called ..... about two hundred and something-odd kilometres west, on the Western MacDonnell Ranges, west of Alice Springs. Her name was Emma. She was a ....., and so that’s my mother’s skin name; and my father’s skin name was, strangely enough, the same skin name as my sons, Jabanunga.

And you mentioned that you’ve got some brothers and sisters: what are their names?

I’ve got a sister buried in Adelaide. She was part of the Stolen Generation. She’s buried in Adelaide, down the Centennial Park Cemetery at Pasadena in Adelaide. My other sister, the only sister that I’ve got alive, is Martha. She’s about eighty- something, ninety, and she’s blind. She’s at Alice Springs. And my living brothers: Patrick, he’s in Port Augusta; Sandy, he’s in Darwin; and Mickey lives in Milikapiti on Snake Bay Island. And I’ve got a brother buried in Darwin – Sidney, named after my father; and one of my elder sisters, Joy, she’s buried in Darwin; and I’ve got three eldest brothers buried in Alice Springs – Dickie, Charlie and Ivan – and of course with Mum and Dad in the old cemetery. Also a sister that I never knew that passed away before I was born. And my niece and a whole lot of my family that are still alive today and sadly a lot that have passed away are buried in Alice Springs Cemetery.

So if we come now to your childhood, you mentioned you were born in the Northern Territory and you were with your family for some years, weren’t you. Can you describe your early childhood with your parents and brothers and sisters?

It was a childhood that was marked by alcoholism played a very big part at that time, sadly enough, even though the law of the day did not permit dark-coloured people to attend pubs and buy alcohol and liquor. But sadly alcoholism was still straight into

the town camps and in the homes of a lot of Aboriginal people at that time, and so alcoholism played a big part. I was with my family at that time – me and my young brother and my mother and my father and my eldest brother and sisters and their wives and husbands and their children – and we actually did not live in the actual Alice Springs town boundary at that time. We had camps outside of the town boundaries, because in those days the policy of the day and the law of the day was if you could speak good English you were deemed suitable enough to live in a house and if you showed that you could live properly in a house and make use of the house and the things that are meant to keep the house tidy and all that sort of thing you were deemed ‘educated’ so you would move into a government housing commission. But sadly we didn’t fit into those criteria so we stuck to staying outside of the town, fringes of the town boundary. And I can remember a place called Morris Oak[?] – it’s still there: I drive past there when I go to Alice Springs and I showed my family where I lived and we actually went up there and showed them the rocks that we used to hold down the sheets of tins – ...... , we call them, a bit of a shelter we had in those days – and we didn’t [know], nobody told us, but where we camped in the side of the hill and the town boundary, well, that space between the town boundary and where we camped on the hill was actually a stock route and so Aboriginal people, any camps you got, and there’s about not two or three dogs, about ten, twenty dogs, and where there is a stock route we noticed station owners coming down with their cattle, drive them down to the local rail head just about a kilometre round the hill there. And so the dogs chased the cattle and the station owners chased the dogs away and they swore at us, and about an hour later the police came and shot all the dogs in the camp, they didn’t sort of wait for a dog to come out and shoot them with love[?], they chased and they shot them under the bed and in the humpies and even shot them while they were sitting amongst us. It was very scary, you could hear the big Winchesters and .45s. And then we had to shift from there because we were a nuisance to the station owners and the cattle because we were living on the stock route, and so we shifted to a place called ....., which was way down the bottom, south of Alice Springs, through the gap, and we stayed there for a while and everything was okay. There were some old buildings there left over from some Army training or some Water Resources people, so that was suitable enough: it had running water and sanitation, weekly sanitation picked up by the town councils at that time. So we were okay. And we used to go to a place called St Mary’s Village, which was and I think is still owned by the Church of England people. And that’s where a lot of the Stolen

Generation were from around surrounding Alice Springs area. And we got to know those guys because we had to bum a ride in the bus to go to a place called Hartley Street School. But schooling in those days, we felt – well, I personally felt – was more of a punishment type thing because we had to follow strict guidelines, as just any normal mainstream educational system. And the system at that time – and still today, I think – does not allow Aboriginal kids to progress because English to a lot of us at that time, and still today, is second or third language to us and so the education system I felt at that time was punishment, it didn’t allow me to try and fit in with the flow of the other kids to gain my education status. And, strangely enough, they set up a system where if you couldn’t pass grade five, I think – grade four or grade five – they had a specialised class they called the ‘opportunity class’. It was the time to give us an opportunity to really prove that we can progress in the education system. Got us through minor things like adding up and writing English that was deemed to be failures for us at that time, so most of us – well, I was one of them; I thought, ‘Look, there’s something better than just being punished,’ and so I went and looked for something that met my needs and wants and I actually started working when I was about thirteen years of age. Because I remember I worked for the local sanitation team, Jim Butler and his son Brian. Brian was the previous ATSIC1 Commissioner in South Australia. And every time the garbage truck was heading to the school we’d duck behind the garbage and tell the other guys to jump out and pick up the bins that were lined up outside of the classes. So we met people like them and they helped us to develop another type of lifestyle, moving away from that dependency, to that independence. And so I grew up being independent, even at the age of thirteen.

When was it that you were taken away to Darwin?

Darwin was when my mother died and my dad thought he couldn’t do anything because he was crook and the Welfare Department thought the same thing. And we would have loved to have stayed in Alice Springs but at that time the situation, circumstances and the government of the day and the policy of the day did not allow it and so we were taken by the Welfare and taken to a big shed and was asked to sort out whatever clothes you like and a bag or a suitcase and pack it full with all the clothes you like, and the shoes, and went back out again and they took us out to the airport and they put us on the TAA2 flight then that flew from Alice Springs to

1 ATSIC – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. 2 TAA – Trans Australia Airlines.

Darwin, to a boys’ home at that time was in ..... Point, Mitchell Street West, Darwin. We stayed there for a while and then we went to a place called Croke Island. It was, I think it still is, a Methodist mission but I would think that’s back in the hands of the local people who own the country. So we stayed there for a while and I didn’t like it there so I came back to Darwin and I spent a lot of time in Darwin there, at ..... House.

What were the conditions like there? How did you sleep and what was the accommodation like?

At Croke Island or ..... House?

Well, say Croke Island. You said you didn’t like it there.

It was a strange place. I was unstable at that time, I had a lot of psychological things that I needed at that time to address, and I had nobody there to help me to address those issues. And also it was a different lifestyle and it was more of a living in hope and free setting lifestyle, then I’d been put in a home and told to follow these strict rules and abide by conditions and rules, more or less dictated just about every minute of your life, .... you live, as you was living in the boys’ home. So I thought going back to ..... House...... House was actually run by the government of the day then, the Commonwealth. It was restrictive but at least wasn’t as restrictive as the church-run home on Croke Island. But I went to school at ..... Primary School, I think it’s still there today, across from Colin Bay; played football with the ..... Primary School and I played football with the Colts at that time with the Darwin Football Club, the Buffaloes. So I stayed there for a while, but then the following year or so it was shunted round a lot of the country, to Queensland, to New South Wales, to a college in New South Wales which was a theological college in Walla Walla between Albury and Wagga, that was near Jerilderie in the Henty[?] country. I think we all know that those town names are famous for the Ned Kelly country. Jerilderie was the place where he held up that bank. So it was like living in the church-run home in Darwin, I think it was a lot worse in the college then. You got punishment, you was punished physically. And so I didn’t like that and I told them what to do and so they sent me back to the Territory. And then when I got back there, the Welfare Department said – then I got accustomed to drinking, alcoholism and that sort of thing because I seen other people drink and they offered me drink and so I started drinking when I was round about thirteen, fourteen; we were actually drinking at the college at that time, unaware of our prefects and principals and that sort of stuff – but anyhow, I got back

to Alice Springs and I didn’t want to go to school, I wanted to go do something different. I really felt that after my mother and father died there’s nothing much there so I wanted a change in life so I had a big argument with the Welfare Department, even though they had already said, ‘You’re going to school next week, to the high school.’ But eventually a good thing came out of it, they gave me a pass and I got on the Ghan, and that was thirty-six, thirty-seven years ago, and I jumped off here and I’m still here, after all those years. But the good thing about it when I came to this country was I came at the right time and I’m very privileged to have come at that time because I was here when a lot of the elders, the grandfathers and grandmothers and the great-grandfathers and the great-grandmothers of the descendants of the Aboriginal population here in Oodnadatta today, I was very privileged because they shared their stories with [me], their lifestyle, their history; they shared the country, they shared the Dreaming; they shared the language. One of the strange things was that when I grew up as part of the trying to make myself be acceptable in the non-Indigenous, mainstream education system and the law and the system at that time, and after my parents died, I completely lost my native tongue. And I’m very happy that I bumped into my current wife and we got together when we were about sixteen and we’re still living together today, after nearly thirty-five years. And I’m very privileged to have met that woman, and working with the elders at that time and living with those elders and sharing the lifestyle with those elders at that time, I started to get my language back, I started to talk my language. And I’m very privileged they showed me the station work – I did not learn from the white stockmen, I learnt it from Aboriginal stockmen – about the station lifestyle – – –.

Can you tell me a bit about the station work?

The station work in those days was very hard. You had to break in horses, you had to ride horses. It was long. In the summer it was long, dry, hot; the only relief you’d get was you’d travel alongside the creek, the Channel Country, and that water in the waterholes and you’d swim in there and sort of relieve yourself through the heat and the dust and all that sort of stuff. And wintertime it was cold and long hours. But I enjoyed it, it was something that I learnt at a very young age. Even though I’ve worked with the elders and they showed me a lot, I can’t really say that I know more than some of these people here, some of the elders today [?and/are?] the people that have worked with me at that time: most of those guys, they grew up here. But I would say that I’d done some station work for a good ten, eleven years.

Which stations did you work at?

I first worked at Mansura[?] Station, with the Magill[?] brothers; and then I worked at Macumba Station – Macumba Station is still today a property of Kidman; and then I worked round (telephone rings) Anna Creek and I worked round Todmorden, Arkaringa, Mount Berry[?]; then I done some work over at Allendale with Norm Hagen[?]; and also I worked with a couple of contractors, contracting fencing, yard building, and contracting bores and sinking wells and putting up windmills and troughs.

If you come back to the actual station work, how were you treated by the station owners or managers?

At that time it was you only worked for about ten, twenty dollars a week, not even that. Aboriginal people were still living in, back there, side of the creek or in some sort of shanties and that sort of thing, whereas the white stockmen, they were getting rooms and had kitchen and water and showering facilities and all that sort of stuff. That was on Macumba Station. Mansura had the same thing. They gave you food, they gave you rations – meat, tobacco. Yeah, you worked long hours and I wouldn’t say we were treated equal; I think we were treated differently to other white ringers. That is until I went to Anna Creek Station and, strangely enough, Anna Creek was still another Kidman company but it was run by old Dick Nunn[?]. And Anna Creek, Dick Nunn, he said, ‘No: when you come to this station, boy, you eat at the same table, you live in the same quarters like everybody else, and you eat the same tucker. You don’t have separate camp here in my station, where I work.’ ...... So Anna Creek, you shared the same single men’s quarter with the white stockmen and you shared the same cook and the same kitchen and the same food and the same table at the station. And when you go to the bush camp you had only one cook and one table, and same food. So Dick, he was pretty good. And if you went for two or three months, you come to W..... Creek and you’d do trucking there, he’d make sure that after everything’s finished, if you went towards the vicinity of the pub somewhere, he’d make sure there was about two or three cartons of beer there for you. And he paid pretty good, compared to places like Macumba and those sort of places were paying. And place like Bob Kemp, Mount Berry, and Bill Fleming[?] at Arkaringa, and at Lillicrapp’s[?], they paid reasonable money and they looked after you and that sort of stuff. But not as much as old Dick Nunn when he was at Anna Creek, his station was one camp, one tucker, one cook.

We’ll just pause for a moment while I turn the tape over. (break in recording) Can you tell me, is there any particularly funny experiences, or memories that you have of working on the station?

When I first worked at Macumba Station and a lot of the old fellas were still alive today – great names, great people; like I said before, I’m sad to see them go. But what they left behind, their legacy and the magnitude of what they’ve done is still here with me and I’ve always talked very fondly of them. I remember a time when I went along to do some mustering. And this is Macumba Station. And I could notice the white-haired stockmen and a couple of the white stockmen, they were constantly looking around for fresh tracks and droppings and galloping up to the rise of the small hills, looking over the top of the next creek or something like that and coming down again and going along with the other mob, with us mob, and breaking away again and going up the hill and checking out everything. And I noticed the Aboriginal stockmen were all just sort of laughing away, joking away, telling stories. I was thinking, ‘Ay, why aren’t you guys doing the same thing like them white stockmen, looking for tracks and looking for droppings and going up the hill and checking out the next channel or something like that, or the next creek?’ And anyway, curiosity got the better of me and I went over and said, ‘Ay, look at these whitefellas, they might say something, ay? We should be looking for bullock.’ And the old fella reckoned, ‘No, no, we’re right. We know this country. All we got to do, we’re not going to rush, we just keep going. We got two channels that come in from the east, we go past a little swamp on the southern side where we keep going, and there’s another creek that come in from the ..... that way, then we keep going down and we come to a bend of the creek, and at bend of the creek there’s a big waterhole there. But they won’t be there; we’ll have to go back over the sand hills for about a kilometre or something and we’ll find them in the Channel Country.’ Fair enough. By the time we got to those sites or the land formations that they described, the old fellas, and when we got to that waterhole and galloped over and looked at the Channel Country they was all there, all the bullocks, feeding on the green fields of the Channel Country, away from the main creeks. So – yeah. And so people don’t know the very significance why our grandfathers and their grandfathers were employed and their grandmothers and their grandmothers were employed by the station company: because they knew the country, they knew the seasons and they knew the seasons because they knew the seasons and the waterways and the feed and that sort of thing, not only so much for the cattle or the horses but we had that knowledge, thousands of years ago, when our people lived in this country because they had to

follow the seasons, they had to follow the water, they had to follow the feed for the turkey, for the kangaroos and for the rabbits and all that sort of stuff. So when the white men come along with the cattle, all they had to know was how to break in horses and how to use the station equipment like a saddle and a whip and all that sort of thing, but when it got down to knowing the country they already knew it.

But were most of the station hands then Aboriginal?

I would not think so in those days. I would think they would have been – well, when I was working at Macumba thirty-odd years ago there was more Aboriginal stockmen than white stockmen.

When did that change?

That changed when the government and the – I can’t remember now what they call it: the equal pay, equal opportunity pay or something like, where Aboriginal people had to be paid equal as white men, and I think – I don’t know why, which was ridiculous, why all of a sudden Aboriginal people were asked to leave the station and go live in towns. But then again, I think to save dollars and that sort of stuff, money, the stations, they tended to hire white station workers and to equip them with the skills and knowledge of motorbikes and that sort of thing which was much more easier, quicker way of doing the station work. And also the skills and knowledge of windmills and windmill maintenance and bores and all that sort of stuff.

So were you working in the station at the time that equal pay came in?

No, I’d left station work a long time ago and I came to a different town: I worked on the railways, I was ganger, I done the tests[?] for the gangers, I was ganger for a ..... ganger on the line just up north here and south, and I was ganger for the special ganger, I was in charge of twenty-odd blokes, mainly white blokes, different mixture, Yugoslav, Italians, white Australians, Aboriginal black Australians, and Englishmen, Irishmen. But I was one of those many station people that was put off and came into town and sort of done work with the Welfare Department, with the Railways. I think if you ask people along the line between here and Marree you’d find a lot of those people were put off the station, most of those guys were very successful in getting jobs with the railway. It was like Cl..... Warren, a relation of Dave Warren, I think he’s in Port Augusta, he actually went up to acting roadmaster, you know? So a lot of us, we hanged around town and sadly alcoholism played a big part because there was nothing there and the best thing that could relieve people at that time was alcoholism. But sadly it was the writing on the wall of the destruction of a lot of

those old people that I had the privilege to work and live alongside in those early days.

We’ll come back to that in a moment. But firstly, can you tell me what was it like then in Oodnadatta when you were working on the railways and the gang came through here?

I think the railways was an equal opportunity. The first time that we were members of a union and we had our rights covered by a union, and we had to be treated like everybody else because we were part of the union. The pay was okay, the work wasn’t hard as working on a station and that sort of stuff, it was pretty good. It’s like working a station and like working with the old Herbie Clemp[?] and Tom Skinner – Tom Skinner was a contract fencer, yard builder, and old Herbie Clemp was a contractor for windmill, bore, well sinker – in the railways a lot of the old blokes, the old white blokes there, they passed their skills and knowledge on to you, they showed you what to do. If you couldn’t read they’d take time after work under the lamp light and help you to go through it, the theory side, and out on the track next day they’ll show you what to do and how to do it. And so that’s how blokes like us, we passed our tests for the ganger’s certificate, because you had to know the laws of the railway, you had to know what to do and what not to do. If you were to break a line you had to measure the distance between that end to this end where the break is and where to put the detonators and the flags and how to fill out the form and how to notify the train controller that, ‘Look, the gang here at ..... section 695’ or something, ‘we’ve got a break here, we need to fix him up, we’re going to break the line at this [point].’ So you had to know all that sort of stuff, you know, because it was very crucial you had to, because if you didn’t the train could be flying down from north or south and bang. So those are the skills that were passed on to us by a lot of the old white fettlers and the old white gangers that wanted us to be part of the thing. So the railway, I think, I think the railway personally to me – because I knew a lot of the guys that worked in stations between Marree and Alice Springs, and during the times that I went back up to Alice and went down to Marree and Port Augusta, (telephone rings) a lot of those guys were actually working on the railways that were before we were working on the stations. So the railways, straight after the laying off Aboriginal people, men, from the stations, the railway was the second largest employers of Aboriginal people in the railways. Not only the Port Augusta to Alice Springs line; the Port Augusta to Kalgoorlie, the east–west.

So what happened then, how was Oodnadatta affected and the Aboriginal population when the Ghan stopped coming through Oodnadatta?

The thing is that you’ve got to always remember that people from Oodnadatta were and still are the people of Oodnadatta. (telephone rings) And so removing the Ghan two hundred kilometres away (second telephone rings) is not going to make no difference because the people, they grew up here and these are the area they know, not only so much as .....’s Hole, Shepherd’s Hole, the dam, Angle Pole[?], but by the cultural traditional significance, the rock formations and the stories and this sort of thing; and the spirituality, of course, which is very, very powerful to us. And as much as I’ve got cultural, traditional, spiritual ties to my mother’s country and my father’s country, but I really believe the elders (telephone rings) in those days helped me to – empowered me with all those things. Because I was freshly out of being shunted around a lot of the countryside and boys’ home and welfare system and all that sort of stuff.

We’ll just pause the tape for a minute. (break in recording)

So shifting the Ghan two hundred kilometres west did not make any difference to the people of Oodnadatta, they are still here and their daily lifestyle and that sort of thing, the only thing disadvantage I would think would be the distance now, from here to Marla and from here to Coober Pedy, to catch the bus to head to Alice Springs, whereas in the old days, when we got on the train, we’d jump on with plenty of water and bread and tin of meat and that sort of stuff so we can have a feed, it’s a slower bloody process. You leave here lunchtime say today, you’d be in Alice Springs tomorrow afternoon. And so you took your time and just lay back. But yes, I would think the disadvantage of the railway moving away two hundred kilometres is the transportation problem thing of getting to the nearest public transport, like the buses or the train. But other than that, I don’t think it changed people much, the lifestyle, we’re still doing the same thing and carrying out the same lifestyle.

You mentioned some of the places locally that you visit, like .....’s Hole and Angle Pole: are they favourite places to go on people’s time off from work?

I remember when people had no vehicles in those days, the only time that people got to go out somewhere were – but unfortunately there was only one vehicle, it was a Land Cruiser that belonged to the old Department of Aboriginal Affairs days, and the Patrol Officer at that time was old Don Pedder[?]. It’s a pity that he was working for that department at that time, but he was a man of substance, he actually done a lot for the Aboriginal people, he done his best even though he was restricted in his job. So some of the elders, when they came off from the station, they had their own camels and their wagons, so – well, I remember before thirty-odd years ago, when I

started living with my wife, there was the camp over the other side had a camel wagon and the camp over here had a camel wagon. And another good thing about the camel wagon, when I was at Macumba, I worked with old Suzy Mack[?], Geoffrey Mack’s Suzy Mack’s great old husband, my old uncle, he passed by now, Paddy Mack, which is of course Geoffrey Mack’s father, when I was working at Macumba one of the jobs I had there was me and my other fellow associate from Alice Springs, we had to get the camels every morning. Jump on the horse, started ..... the horses, jump on the horses and guide and pick up the camels, bring them in and help with the packing of the vanguard and yoking up of the camels and make sure that camels were all tied up, and then we’d go along with Uncle Paddy. And actually he showed me how to wash[?] them down and how to yoke them up and how to chain them up. He said, ‘If you got one young colt, no good. Put him in with the old bullock or an old cow. Because that way that young colt, he got to follow the older camel.’ Be it an old bullock or an old cow. You know what I’m talking about, bullock and a cow, eh? so anyhow, once again I’m very, very privileged and grateful that I got that additional knowledge and skills of how to yoke up a camel and chain him and that sort of stuff and hobble them, from them old fellas out at Macumba at that time. So yeah, these mob, I think they had a camel wagon this way and we had one over there. And so now and again we’d all jump on and go to Angle Pole, all the kids running along behind, you know, cracking whip or throwing things, stones, you know, ..... a camel behind the ear they run fast or trot, you know? Or we’d go down to Hookey’s Hole or we’d go down to Shepherd’s Hole and sit down there for the day. And sometimes the elders would want to have – ‘Oh, we’re getting sick of it in town,’ and instead of waiting for the boss, to get a lift with the boss or someone, or old Don Pedder might be flat out, you know, because he’s always taking people out, so we’d pack up the camel wagon and head up the road, go along for the day. We might go twenty-five, thirty kilometres and pull up, good camp, camp there and start up again next morning.

Did you hunt any animals when you were staying at the waterholes?

Yes. I mean, it’s a normal thing. You do fishing. If you had fish traps you’d get the yellow belly and your yabbies, or if you were lucky you got a kangaroo if you went out with a camel, or printi or a goanna.

I’ll just pause the tape for a moment. (break in recording) So you were talking about the sorts of things you could get at Cookie’s[?] Hole. You mentioned the fish.

Yes, and also when I first came to this country – well, Alice Springs, there’s no fish there, the only fish we’d see was at Flynn[?] Church, Uniting Church, outside – it’s still there – the pond. Then, the second time I seen fish was in Darwin and Milikapiti, which is the Aboriginal name for Croker Island. And the third time I seen fish was in the middle of the desert, in Oodnadatta. Now, when I came down and when I heard people fishing – that’s where I seen them ..... on the Shepherd’s Hole and .....’s Hole – I said, ‘I’m going down for a swim,’ and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll all go down for a swim,’ and as soon as they finished swimming they brought all this fishing line. I said, ‘Ay, what these guys doing with this?’ Bit of meat, (makes casting gesture) and I think, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s interesting. What? They getting fish.’ They weren’t getting the big ones like the yellow bellies. I think there were some things that looked something like a freckled perch or something, because I’d seen freckled perch when I was with my friend on Stradbroke Island South, thirty-odd years ago, and so I can remember something that looked like that. But anyhow, they were getting fish and I thought, ‘What?’ Then someone said, ‘Oh, let’s put in a trap,’ and they went back that next day and they had a few yabbies and a yellow belly. And the goanna would be – they most probably bumped into a goanna between here and .....’s Hole or wherever, or a printi could have just walked in the same area, the direction. If not, someone had a car and they went out, get rabbits and that sort of stuff, and kangaroo.

And do you still see perenti and other goannas around here very much?

Oh, no. A lot of people still go out hunting Sundays. For malu, kangaroo, and for printi and goanna, and rabbit. And ..... any thing for bush tucker ....., the syrup or whatever they call it, comes out of the tree, you know?

The sap?

The gum, the sap, yeah.

And do you just eat that straight from the tree?

Yeah, my grandsons and my daughter and my wife, they go down all the time. Rachel and her daughter, young Taylor, my granddaughter, she goes, she loves that. They go down every afternoon after school. But it’s keeping in touch with the identity and the history of the people of Oodnadatta and the country.

You said how privileged you were to have known the older people and some of their stories and how much they told you: are there some stories that you’re able to tell me?

Not really. I think what they told me they would have wanted me to tell their future generation, but I’d feel out of place if I told you a story and I never told them the story.

Do you actively pass on the stories from your grandparents?

Yes. There are some stories that we can’t discuss until we get approval from the elders, and that’s why we’ve got people like old Nellie Stewart, Lochy Stewart, Junie, and we always are constantly in touch with the elders out on the AP3 Lands because the people of Oodnadatta today are actually the descendants of the AP, Yankunytjatjara–Pitjantjatjara people – not only so much through the pastoral industry, but of course well before white men come into this country through the association with each other and sharing of the stories and the Dreaming, and through ceremonies and that sort of stuff. And when you go to Macumba Station, when I first went to Macumba Station – because I grew up in Arunta country, see, Alice Springs and I’ve got Western Arunta families. When I was a kid I used to hear them talk, so when I came to Macumba and then I heard the stockmen saying, ‘All right, Paddy, let’s go to ..... or let’s go to ..... Swamp,’ just a couple of those places, I started listening properly then and asked old Paddy, ‘Can you repeat that name?’ and he repeated it and I said, ‘That sounds like them people I heard talking up in Alice Springs country.’ ‘Yeah, that’s Arunta, Arunta named place.’ So like ..... and ....., and Macumba has got a lot of Lower Southern Arunta name places. So the people who were here well before the pastoral industry, it was opened up, the country was opened up by white explorers, they came through associations. They followed the water, they fought amongst each other and some people overtook the weaker people and they pushed them aside or pushed them further out or whatever and took over; but then eventually they had to go back again. So the Aboriginal people have been moving around. Drought was a big factor in Aboriginal people moving away from their current home, because with no water you won’t be able to survive and where there’s no water there’s no kangaroos, there’s no feed for them, there’s no feed for the goanna and for the rabbits and the other animals; so they had to move with the seasonal changes.

Were the mound springs important places for the different Aboriginals to live?

3 AP – Anangu Pitjantjatjara.

Yes, there would have been a lot of people accessing those mound springs. But when you get to the situation where they lived and stayed at Alice Springs, it’s another entirely different thing. Most of those springs are places of significance, some sacred stories or something like that. They’re only used for certain examples like maybe ceremonies or coming in there to get the water and moving away again. But I would think a lot of our people in those days, they would have stayed around those mounds because the water was there, of course; not so much maybe where the actual spring is but further down the creek. You go to Dalhousie, the spring goes five, ten kilometres back up another creek, and Dalhousie’s hot water: well, I don’t want to go there and drink hot water so I’d follow the creek if it flowed for another ten kilometres because the further I get away from the main spring the cooler the water gets when I find a little creek or something that will hold water deep enough, well, I’ll stay, because it will be much colder there, where I can swim and that sort of stuff. I’ll swim there in the wintertime, because it’ll be freezing cold, but I won’t swim there summertime, I’ll go follow the water down another five, ten kilometres where it gets colder then.

Just to change topic now for a little bit, I just wanted to know what it was like for you bringing up your children in Oodnadatta and how do you think their lives have been different compared with your own childhood?

Like I said before, the early stages of my childhood was more of a lifestyle that was dictated to me and I think that’s one of the reasons I made that break when I was about fifteen – fourteen, fifteen I made that break and I wanted to start doing things independently. And so with my kids I kept them here in their mother’s country with her mother’s father and their grandmothers and their grandfathers and their family from my wife’s side, and it was still the same routine, the same practices, the same lifestyle that is still happening today: sharing in songs and dances, sharing in stories, sites of significance, places of significance. And so I said to my wife, ‘Can we go back and live in my country for a couple of years?’ And once again I was very privileged that my mother’s brother was still alive, old Uncle Barney ...... , and I went back to ..... and I lived there for two years.

END OF DISK 1: DISK 2

Okay, you were telling me about returning to Haasts Bluff. Can you continue your story about Haasts Bluff?

I had to go back to Haasts Bluff, which was ..... my mother’s country. I’ve got two mothers: I’ve got a mother that passed away and is buried in Finke and I’ve got my uncles, my mother’s brothers, out at the AP Lands. My other mother, I had to go

back to her country with my uncle – Old Uncle Barney was still alive then and I was very privileged that he was alive at that time, dear old thing – and I had to go back there because it wasn’t good enough for me to listen in the town, sit ..... the town or sit on someone else’s country when someone else was talking about my country. I had to be there to experience it, and I had to live with it, and I had to carry out the day-to-day roles and obligations, and I had to fit in the system, I had to learn the system. With Aboriginal culture and the system, not so much as going to school and learning about a, b, c, d, you have to ..... this is progressive. It has stages that you have to go, follow, to actually complete that progress, that cycle of culture and tradition and spirituality.

Are your children going through that?

Yes. When you talk about cultural traditional spirituality it’s all about going out with the elders and the elders talking about the land and telling the story about the Dog Dreaming or the Emu Dreaming or whatever, some Dreaming that is okay to talk to. There are some Dreamings that are only for women and for men, but there are a lot of Dreamings that is okay to talk to for families. And the actual taking my sons and my daughter and all the kids for learning hunting, to actually track the ....., track the ..... or track the rabbit or track the ..... or track the ..... or track the turkey. So they know what they can look for. ‘This is the tracks of the turkey, this is the tracks of the emu and this is the track of the kangaroo, of the goanna and of the ..... And this is the track of the dingo or the track of the kangaroo rat. Or the muskrat, whatever they call them, or bandicoot or whatever they call them. I don’t know if there’s a bandicoot here, but that other little funny little thing that hops at night. So we learn them all that and we actually take them out and we show them the tracks and we tell them, ‘Right, you ..... track this and when you get to that thing we’ll show you what to do next. Take him and how to cook him properly, how to gut them, how to do the process again.’ And that’s empowerment. Empowerment, spirituality, talking about the land, the significance of the land and why we’re associated with the land. And so I had to be back there in the middle of my mother’s country and my uncle showed me round all the lovely place that she comes from when she was a young girl and the stories, and the Dreaming. The Mereenie Ranges, very famous for oil and gas in Central Australia and in Australia. And when my uncle told me about Mereenie Ranges he said, ‘That’s only white man’s name. We call that Mirri,’ and mirri is another word for ‘dead’. And he said, ‘The old people a long time ago when they seen those ranges, they could have seen it through a rainy day or through a hot day, and

the mirage made it look like the mountains, the ranges, were moving. And so they said, “Those are mirri ranges”, means the spirit, the dead place, the spirit.’ And he showed me a lot of places and the main Haast Bluff itself is one of the highest bluffs in the Northern Territory, and the story behind it, and the springs up in the hill. And the other side of the bluff is Papanya. And so yeah, I had to be back there. It wasn’t good enough for me to listen to someone tell me about my country when I’m not there. And that’s the empowerment. And once again with the elders when they were alive and the elders today, we have the privilege to still continue and carry out those cultural traditions: ‘spiritual empowerment activities’, we call them. The kids a few years ago, they lost sight of themselves and they said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And we thought, ‘Okay, let’s think about things.’ And we stand up, me and someone else, and we looked over them hills there and we said, ‘Ay, you kids, you mob know what’s the other side of that hill over there?’ ‘Nah, what’s the other side of the hill over there?’ ‘You want to go and find out?’ ‘Yeah. What’s over there, let’s go and find out. What are we going to do? Oh, right.’ So we rang up ..... Brady over at the RFDS4 and a few others and they came up and we had a little workshop there with the kids in the meeting room there. ‘Right, we’re going to go out.’ ‘What we going out for?’ ‘We’re going to go and look at the country, we’re going to find out what’s the other side there.’ ‘How we going to do it?’ ‘Well, we’re going to walk. We’re going to take the elders with us, we’ve got to walk alongside the elders, and we’re going to camp out at a different camp every night. We’re going to go through the country the elders are familiar with and the elders can explain to us the significance of the rock formations, the hills, the waterholes, the trees, the rocks.’ And so that’s another form of empowerment. So we looked around for some money, we had help from the Four Wheel Drive Club of South Australia, the Scouts from Barossa Valley, and we thought, ‘Oh, well, you guys want to come along? You can come and share with us.’ And we all went along. Went for a walk for a week, took the elders, yep. Artefacts and all that sort of stuff, had games and stories. And we all walked. So that’s another form of empowerment that keeps us here, whereas white people, they don’t live in one area, they live everywhere. They make their homes in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, countryside, Darwin, Tennant Creek, Alice Springs, Nuhlunbuy. This is my home, here. But us mob, our home is where we belong to, where our Dreaming, where our spirituality is.

4 RFDS – Royal Flying Doctor Service.

Is this what keeps you in Oodnadatta?

Yes. And when you go to Indulkana you think, ‘Why are these people still living here fifty years, seventy, eighty years in this one place?’ Because that’s the cultural spirituality, connection. The land is most important. It’s not any land, it’s got to be special land that is associated with that person’s Dreaming that was handed down for generations.

So what hopes do you have, then, for the future of your children and grandchildren here at Oodnadatta? (telephone rings)

Off the record?

I’ll just turn the tape off. (break in recording) Is there some general comments you’d like to make about Oodnadatta and living here as an Aboriginal?

One good thing that’s happening in the community is that the community formed – of course, in association with the Health Department and the Port Augusta Hospital – the Oodnadatta Aboriginal Health Authority Board, I think, and we’re just looking around for an Aboriginal name to fit it. That’s a good sign. I think if you really want the community to work for the community I think you should leave all that decision making back here in the community and the power base back in the community. But that’s a good sign that that’s happening with this thing. But overall, in general, I think Oodnadatta’s a good place to live. I think the people here, the second, third generation, fourth generation young people here in Oodnadatta are still going to be here in the next seventy, eighty years. And the cultural traditional spiritual activities will still be happening and the thing that we need to do now is to – it’s good to talk about the Museum, but when you look at a museum that’s only an English, not an Aboriginal, thing of keeping information. But Aboriginal people have shown throughout history, thousands of years, that they are the number one museum, collectors of the stories, the songs and dances. And so museum is something that it would be good if we had people coming here and saying, ‘Look, we’d like to spend a week out there with you guys.’ Well, we hope that will soon happen, we are looking at that; but in the meantime, yes, let’s go out and put whatever we can in this museum. So ..... here we go.

Well, thank you very much for your time.

END OF RECORDING.