An Outback Nurse Read online

  There was a risk of vast amounts of silt pouring into the dam from the lower reaches of the river near the cattle station, so the government paid for fencing, ploughed up over 40,000 hectares and planted buffel grass before the station was closed down. All the cattle were sold or sent to other Vestey stations.

  A new Negri racecourse was being organised on Nicholson Station, but that would take a few years to complete, so we all went to the Halls Creek Races. Our camp was set up on the outskirts of town, and it wasn’t quite as luxurious as our last Wave Hill camp at Negri had been. Of course, being in a town we didn’t have to bring too much food, and could always get ice for the cold beer.

  My friend Smiddy flew up via Perth and arrived in the middle of the night, having somehow procured a lift from Derby on a road train. Lots of friends were there for the one day of races and one day of rodeo. We didn’t do well with our racehorses that year, but we had a great time.

  37

  Drought and flooding rains

  Months later, Ralph contacted Milton, who was working in New South Wales, and offered him the position of head stockman at Gordon Downs. Milton accepted and took over the running of the one and only stock camp at Gordon.

  When he first arrived we were still in drought: it hadn’t rained in three years.

  Because the artesian bore provided plenty of water for the homestead, we didn’t notice the lack of rain. The lawns always looked green; the vegetables, flowers and shrubs were watered. Out on the black soil plains it was a different story. With hardly any feed for the cattle, many were sent off to Vestey stations in the Territory. At least we didn’t have cattle dying everywhere.

  Occasionally we’d look to the sky, see dark, threatening clouds, and think, We’re finally going to have a storm. The girls would rush around pulling the canvas blinds down on all the gauzed, glassless windows. Upstairs in the bedrooms, the windows had tin louvres that provided some protection. But all we received was excessive wind, tons of dust and a very thin layer of mud.

  Then, early in 1966, it really started to rain. We were actually in the eye of a cyclone that had settled over Gordon. It rained for seven days: 450 millimetres in total. It was wonderful! Our boys were so excited—we all ran out in the rain, jumping up and down and screaming with joy. We were so thankful.

  The chook and goat yards were flooded, so my dear brother-in-law Milton brought half-drowned chickens and goat kids up to the kitchen. They were put into the men’s dining room, beside the kitchen where the fridges were kept. Staff never used it, but the chooks and goats were well accommodated. Meanwhile, the laundry girls brought all the wet washing over to the kitchen; linen was draped across chairs everywhere. I was trying to cook and look after the flood victims as well, until Ralph decided Milton could give the chef a break.

  How happy was I! I left the cooking up to Milton and disappeared into the house to catch up with other chores, have more time with my children and get into that special book I was dying to read. Milton was a good cook and got on really well with the girls, so everyone was happy. Especially me.

  Just after it stopped raining, a RAAF Iroquois helicopter was sent from Wyndham to search for a missing stockman on Gordon Downs. He wasn’t one of ours. He’d been driving through when the cyclone hit and was marooned by floodwaters. They did find him but he wanted to stay with his vehicle until the road dried out. After giving him some rations, the chopper dropped in to Gordon to let us know the situation. They told us that there was a continuous stretch of water from Wyndham to Gordon: that’s an expanse of about 1600 kilometres.

  Channels of water were running down the hill in front of the house, turning and continuing down the road towards the Aboriginal camp, which luckily was on higher ground.

  And what was Dasher doing? Chasing and barking at the rushing water. There were hundreds of fingerlings, all swimming down the stream. Dasher chased them for days. To get some peace and to give him a rest, we had to chain him up.

  Where had they all come from? Fish eggs are laid and, as the water dries up, they fall down cracks or are covered with mud and dust. When the big rains come during a good wet season, which should be annually, the eggs hatch and swiftly grow to adult size, five to six centimetres in length. They swim up any moving water, mate and again leave millions of eggs to survive until the next big rain. I’m sure it rained fish one year at Wave Hill, as we found fingerlings on the tennis court and lawn after one storm, and there was no running stream to bring them there.

  In June 1967, a journalist from the Territorian newspaper in Darwin came to do a story on properties in the East Kimberley area, following the wonderful rains. The headline read: ‘The Kimberley’s King Size Season’.

  The Kimberley has some of the finest cattle country in the world but up until then had been subjected to a series of bad patches. For three years in a row no rain fell, or very little. The next two seasons produced widespread and steady rains. The response of the country and the cattle was remarkable. In fact, it was hard to look back and believe that a drought had persisted for so long. Fat cattle stood knee-deep in oceans of Mitchell and Flinders grasses. The billabongs were brimming and the creeks and rivers flowing fast.

  Truly a land of drought and flooding rain.

  38

  The Wave Hill Walk-off

  1966

  One morning in August 1966, when we were having smoko on the lawn at Gordon Downs, a vehicle turned up in the driveway. It was Gus Ringler, who’d just driven from his home at Nicholson. The ‘grapevine’ was our source of news from the other stations, and our main bringer of information was Gus. As the improvement overseer, he frequently visited all the Vestey stations. We would hear about the new nursing sister at Wave Hill, or that there was a new manager at Kirkimbie, or who’d moved to what station. Gus was a mine of information.

  After he’d been warmly welcomed by all the staff, Ralph inquired, ‘What’s been happening in the country?’

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ Gus said. ‘The Aborigines have walked off Wave Hill and gone on strike. Of the 240 Aborigines on the station, only three remain.’

  We were flabbergasted. We’d left Wave only twenty months before. Everyone had seemed happy. There were no complaints about conditions; the Aboriginal employees and their families in the camp were fed and clothed. Their health was always a priority, with a nursing sister there at all times. However, it was the wage issue that was the big concern. Wages paid to employees, both white and Aboriginal, were set by the Pastoral Workers Award.

  As far as I know, the rate for an Aboriginal man was $6.82 per week plus keep for himself, a wife and one child; the total keep for the family group was assessed at about $14 per week. A white stockman’s wage was $23 per week plus keep. By my calculations, with 140 family members residing in the camp, the one hundred adult Aboriginal workers were supporting 1.4 family members each, plus themselves, with food, clothing, accommodation and health care. All but the health care was provided by the Vesteys.

  After the walk-off there was much publicity in all the newspapers, blaming the pastoralists for failing to meet their responsibilities as employers. They were expected to do the government’s welfare work—to play a ‘paternalistic’ role. Government programs for Aboriginal people in the Territory were shockingly inadequate in their enforcement. They just didn’t seem to have an answer for the assimilation of the most neglected minority in our Australian culture.

  The head of the Gurindji tribe, Vincent Lingiari, had broken his leg in the stock camp in 1965 and was flown to Darwin Hospital. There Dexter Daniels, the Aboriginal organiser for the Northern Australian Workers’ Union, together with Frank Hardy, a non-Aboriginal novelist and political activist, had visited him.

  At the Native Wage Case in 1966, before the full bench of the Arbitration Commission, the pastoralists and Peter Morris proposed new rates of pay for workers, stressing that while these were still low, full wages for all Aboriginal people would see a reduction of at least 50 to 80 per cent in Abori
ginal employment, as well as a major disruption to their way of life.

  According to Mr Morris, at a lecture he gave to the Australian History section of the Wonthaggi University of the Third Age in September 2006: ‘I do remember that throughout the Native Wage Case, the unions did not produce one Aboriginal witness. I believe this was because it wasn’t the Aborigines pushing for the wage claims.’

  In March 1966, the Commission decided to delay until 1968 the payment of award wages to male Aboriginal workers in the cattle industry.

  On 23 August 1966, after he returned to the station, Vincent led his people—the stockmen, the gardeners, the house girls, the pensioners and the children—on a thirteen-kilometre walk to Wattie Creek. This was a sacred place of spiritual significance—and that’s all it had to offer these people, who named their new community Daguragu. Not only did the Aboriginal employees lose their jobs, but they also had to move off their country and away from the parental supervision of the station management.

  Historians and witnesses have long debated the facts of the Wave Hill Walk-off; one supposed fact is that the Aboriginal people were only given bones and offal from the killer for food. My memory is that every week we had three killers at the homestead and one in each of the stock camps: seven killers for the whole station, among 270 people. That’s four kilograms of meat per person per week.

  All the workers were fed; they had beef and bread, tea and sugar. They didn’t like vegetables, or milk in their tea. Houses were built for them but they found them too hot, as we did in our quarters, and if someone died in one of the houses the Aboriginal employees never went back inside. Every wet season they would go walkabout for a couple of months and on their return were always eager to get back to their duties. They’d seemed proud of their jobs and contented in their situation.

  The strike went on for years. It was well supported and made headlines around Australia. The focus of the campaign soon spread to include issues about ownership of traditional land. The Wave Hill Walk-off became the first claim for traditional land in Australia.

  Gurindji Blues

  By Ted Egan

  Poor bugger me, Gurindji

  Me bin sit down this country

  Long time before Lord Vestey

  All about land belongin’ to we

  Oh poor bugger me, Gurindji

  Poor bugger me, Gurindji,

  Man called Vincent Lingiari

  Talk long all about Gurindji

  ‘Daguragu place for we

  Home for us Gurindji’

  But poor bugger blackfeller, Gurindji

  39

  Months of measles

  In late November, our stock camp was dismantled for the year. All the staff went on holidays. Ralph and I were looking forward to a lovely quiet family Christmas at Gordon Downs. However, over the next two months the whole Aboriginal camp—men, women and children—went down with the measles. Not all at once, just a few cases every couple of days.

  An infectious and virus-borne disease, measles affects the respiratory system. Symptoms are fever, cough, runny nose, red eyes and a generalised skin rash all over. There are some quite nasty complications: pneumonia, otitis media (middle ear infection) and acute encephalitis (inflammation of the brain).

  My patients arrived at the homestead flushed with high temperatures, their eyes watery, saying, ‘Me proper sick, Missus.’ I needed them nearby so I could monitor their conditions; and as the storekeepers Des and Dulcie were away on holidays, I made their lawn the isolation ward.

  Twice a day I would take temperatures. If it was elevated, the family would give the patient a shower with the hose, under my instruction; and when the patient was afebrile, I would give them two Panadol. Often if you give paracetamol to a patient with a temperature, it will make them vomit.

  The epidemic started in early December and finished at the beginning of February when our little boys went down with this awful disease. Thankfully, everyone recovered without complications.

  There have been many changes since 1902, when Mrs Aeneas Gunn wrote We of the Never Never on Elsey Station, 115 kilometres east of Katherine. It was now possible to raise a family in the bush without fear of sickness. However, the health of everyone on the stations still depended on the manager’s wife, nursing sister or not.

  Every morning after smoko, anyone with a medical problem came up to the homestead to see the missus. In the large pantry—where food was kept warm before dinner—was the medicine cupboard, stocked by the Flying Doctor Service when it came every month.

  After visits by the eye specialists, who came up either from Sydney or Perth via Wyndham, I instilled eye drops twice a day for a fortnight to every child to treat trachoma. Just like at Wave Hill, everyone had to be inoculated for TB, and given Sabin for polio, plus triple antigen, the vaccine for tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough. The Royal Flying Doctor from Wyndham picked up any medical emergencies.

  Tiger, the bore mechanic’s offsider, was struck by lightning during a violent storm when travelling on the back of a truck. Milton said, aghast, ‘He’s bloody turned white!’ He had turned white all right, but he was back to his original colour by the time he returned from Wyndham Hospital. He had a few weeks off and then happily went back to work.

  In 1966 a medical team from Darwin turned up to examine all the Aboriginal residents for Hansen’s disease, more commonly known as leprosy. They took a scraping from the ear of each person. Several weeks later we received a telegram from the flying doctor telling us to have Charlie, our Aboriginal chief dairyman, ready the next day for evacuation—much to our consternation, we were informed that he had ‘infectious leprosy’! He was the only person with this disease at Gordon Downs. Ralph, Milton and I drove him out to the airstrip.

  Leprosy has affected humanity for thousands of years. Caused by bacteria, it creates dry lesions randomly on the body. When these become infected, fingers and toes can shorten and deform—not fall off as we all thought. Most leprosy colonies have closed down, as it can be cured with medication these days. But there are still colonies in India, China and Africa.

  We were extremely anxious because Charlie was in charge of milking the cows every day. He’d bring two buckets of milk up to the kitchen, where one was boiled and the other put unboiled into the separator and turned into cream. This was the area of concern: the unboiled milk could have carried the bacteria.

  The sister on the plane said, ‘One can only be infected with Hansen’s disease by very close contact.’

  This explanation didn’t allay our fears. But time goes on and you stop thinking the worst. Charlie would have been sent to a leprosy colony, but I don’t know what happened to him after that.

  Another medical situation that was most unusual began one morning when Old Sammy, a relieving vegetable gardener, didn’t turn up for work. When we questioned Rosie, his daughter, she told us, ‘Dat Sammy, him bin sung.’

  She meant that members of the tribe had pointed the bone at him. This was a type of execution, initiated by the tribal leaders for whatever reason. One has to be born into this culture to believe its effects. I found the situation very hard to relate to, but although I offered Old Sammy’s family extra food to give him, he refused to eat or drink, literally wasting away day by day.

  In three weeks he was dead.

  40

  An unwelcome trip

  Life continued on as usual at Gordon Downs. Then, one morning, I felt a lump in my breast. I was devastated, but I tried to pretend it wasn’t there. Tomorrow morning it will be gone, I thought. But it wasn’t.

  Ralph had gone out to the stock camp early that morning. I’d told him about the lump, and we were planning to discuss it that evening. However, as I was feeling very anxious, I sent a message over to Des the bookkeeper with one of the house girls, asking him to please contact the flying doctor asap.

  Later that morning a plane flew in to pick me up. Ralph was surprised that I was leaving so quickly, but my policy with any medical problem has a
lways been to see a doctor and get treatment, the sooner the better. The girls, Larrikin and Sarah, were wonderful. They knew how to look after my beautiful boys.

  In Wyndham Hospital, after being examined by the doctor, I was back in a plane and heading for Derby to see a surgeon. The hospital was quite modern, thankfully. My surgeon, Lawson Holmes, was brilliant with a great sense of humour, often cracking jokes and full of fun.

  Like many young women, I’d recently discovered the Pill. I was happy with my three children and didn’t plan on having more at that stage. Unfortunately, Dr Holmes explained, the hormones in the Pill could be the cause of my lump. ‘Now, don’t you worry,’ he added, ‘I’m sure after you have your period, the lump will disappear. In the meantime, as you’re a trained nurse, you can help in the Medical Record Department.’

  No lying in bed feeling sorry for myself: after breakfast I was off to work. Four days later, my period started, but the lump remained. I was taken to the theatre. The lump was removed under general anaesthetic and sent to pathology in Perth.

  A few days later, lying on my hospital bed, I had a visit from Dr Holmes, and this time he looked unusually gloomy. ‘The results have come back for half of the tests and they’re okay,’ he said, ‘but the rest have to be done again.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’

  I couldn’t sleep; I worried about leaving my boys motherless.

  The next day on his rounds, Dr Holmes—maybe guessing my anxiety—ordered me, with a flourish of his hand, to work in Central Dressings. ‘Off you go,’ he said, implying no nonsense. This was the department where all the instruments, trays and dressing packs were sterilised.