An Outback Nurse Read online

  Nancy acted as hostess, offering me a cup of tea from the hefty cast-iron pot and welcoming me to the station. ‘Lauris and I are very pleased to have another white woman to support our ranks amid all these men,’ she said warmly.

  After smoko, Tom said, ‘You should meet Emilie, your house girl, who’ll clean your room and do the washing and ironing.’

  We could hear some tittering just outside the verandah, where the Aboriginal ‘dining-room girls’ were waiting to take the crockery away. They also wanted to catch a glimpse of ‘dat new sistah’, so Tom called out to invite them in.

  Four Aboriginal women walked in: Emilie, ‘Mad’ Maria, Connie and Alice. They were all in colourful cotton dresses, had bare feet and very clean, combed hair, and could not stop giggling until Tom called out, ‘Karjinga, cut it out, you fella.’ Karjinga is a Gurindji expletive that Tom was fond of using.

  Emilie was quite plump, with a wide, cheerful smile and twinkling eyes. At first glance she reminded me of Scarlett O’Hara’s Mama in the movie Gone with the Wind. Pansy looked after the smoko and radio areas. Marian and Mad Maria were in charge of the jackaroos’ and men’s quarters; Alice looked after Tom’s quarters; Vera, Polly and Linda were the regular dining-room girls; Ida ran the soup kitchen; Topsy helped me in the hospital; and Connie, Elsie and Barbara helped in the main kitchen, Hilda and Cushion in the laundry. They were often moved around, depending on who was pregnant or on walkabout.

  Later that afternoon I was taken over to the main kitchen where the rest of the white male staff—known as the ‘old men’—ate. ‘Old men’ were white and half-caste workers other than jackaroos and stockmen: the boundary riders, saddlers and bore mechanics. There was Harry Huddleston, the saddler, a perfect gentleman; Colin Wardell, the fencer; Alec Morton, the butcher/baker; and the cook and grader driver, Tommy ‘Swannie’ Swan. Their table was always set with a plastic cloth and a jar of bright-red, home-grown chillies marinating in brown vinegar. One day Swannie offered me a chilli, which I’d never tasted before. My reaction had the men in fits of laughter as I tried to wash out my burning mouth.

  Next stop was the store. It contained the groceries: bags of flour, potatoes and pumpkins; clothing for the Aboriginal women and children; stockmen’s clothes—practically anything you can think of from the early 1960s was in that store. An order was sent to Sydney every six months and the goods arrived by truck.

  Across from the store was the compound for fencing and building materials. Next were the jackaroos’ quarters, consisting of six rooms in a row, with a verandah on both sides. The rooms had no windows but four doors each, making them well ventilated. There was a recreation room at one end and a shower room at the other.

  On the opposite side of the large flat courtyard was the main kitchen, the servery for the Aboriginal workers, the bakehouse, the meat house and the saddlers’ shop, and further down were the men’s quarters, followed by storage sheds for buggies, saddlery and stock-camp gear.

  At the northern end of the station area was the post office cottage, where Nancy and Bill Walton lived. Fifty yards away, another corrugated-iron cottage was occupied by the bookkeeper, Ces, and his wife and baby. Each family had an Aboriginal house girl to help with the cleaning and laundry. And fifty yards further west was a second set of men’s quarters.

  Between the cottages and the jackaroos’ quarters was the wood heap, with Chisel in charge: a very sweet, very large Aboriginal man who was completely dedicated to his vital job of fuelling the station’s stoves and wood heaters.

  I was amazed by the organisation of the station. Everyone, white and Aboriginal, had their jobs and seemed to do them so enthusiastically. And there was great respect from one to another, black to white and white to black.

  Dinner was at six-thirty. Tom had told me to come to the smoko area when the bell rang, which I did, and we all went into the dining room together. Everyone dressed for dinner, which meant long-sleeved shirts, long trousers and ties for the men. Tom sat at the head of a very long table. I learnt that I should sit to his right and the overseer to his left, followed by any visitors to the property and then the boys according to seniority.

  In the corner of the dining room was the carving table, where Pansy, Linda or Polly would place the food they’d kept warm in the pantry stove. Tom would carve the beef, asking everyone in turn, ‘Roast or corn?’ Tom and I would ladle the food onto the plates and the dining-room girls, dressed in a uniform of cotton aprons and matching caps, would collect the plates, serve each person to the right and take away from the left.

  After dinner, coffee and tea were served on the smoko verandah, and then everyone would wander off to their rooms to read, write letters or sleep. When there were visitors, we would stay a bit later, chatting and having supper—which, I discovered later, I was also responsible for! The lighting plant was turned off at ten o’clock, so no one stayed up very late.

  On that first night I lay in bed thinking about how negatively I’d felt about coming to an Outback station. I’d been expecting conditions like the early pioneers had experienced: raw timber houses with bough sheds and dirt floors. How wrong I’d been. Life here was extremely civilised, and maybe quite exciting—well, except for the pit toilet!

  No, I’m not leaving yet, I thought to myself. I can’t wait to see more of this fascinating station.

  8

  My first day

  Early the next morning, six-thirty to be precise, Emilie appeared at my door.

  ‘Sistah,’ she said, ‘cuppa tea?’

  I was amazed to learn that every morning, half an hour before breakfast, when the first bell rang, each staff member was brought a cup of tea by the house girls. At 7 a.m., when the second bell rang, everyone would meet on the smoko verandah to wait for Tom. As he arrived, all stood and followed him into the dining room in order of seniority: the sister first, followed by the overseer, the stockmen and the jackaroos.

  My first breakfast at Wave Hill was steak, eggs, toast, tinned butter and jam. As dinner had been, it was cooked by Swannie the relieving station cook and then carried to the pantry by the dining-room girls, who would put the hot food into the stove to keep it warm until everyone sat down. The food was then carried to the serving table.

  After breakfast it was time to see my clinic. Tom escorted me past the main kitchen, stepping over open drains to a galvanised iron building, about six by four metres. Instead of windows it had push-out iron shutters held open by planks of timber. There was a small sink in one corner and a bed in the other. A table and chair sat in the middle of the cement-slab floor, under which lived a million cockroaches that were only seen at night when the whole floor would be crawling with them. Thank the Lord I wasn’t called out at night very often!

  That first morning I had quite a number of patients, but they came to see me more out of curiosity than a need for medical assistance. The stockmen, women and children lined up outside, waiting their turn to see the new sister. The children came in droves; whenever they got too rowdy I’d wave a syringe in the air and give a bit of a cackle, and they would disappear.

  During my time as nursing sister I was called on to attend to many different cases. Lacerations, centipede bites, red-back spider bites, broken limbs, colds and flu, accidental gunshot wounds, the usual children’s diseases, and pre- and postnatal care. There were no diabetes or renal problems experienced by the Aboriginal residents when I was there, because they didn’t have soft drinks, rarely had sweets except sugar, and had no fatty takeaways.

  Medical supplies and equipment were issued by the Aerial Medical Service: dressings, bandages, suture needles, threads, cough mixtures, antiseptics and commonly used medications. Antibiotics and anti-venom were kept in a kerosene fridge on the far wall. One of the doctors who came on their regular monthly visits informed me that the anti-snake venom, if given for the wrong bite, could kill quicker than the venom itself.

  I always got a sinking feeling when I was called out of normal hours, wondering what disaster I
was going to find. Although I had nursed at one of the best training hospitals in the country, it was too large a place for every nurse to work in every facility. I hadn’t done a stint in emergency and this worried me. I hadn’t even done any suturing; luckily, the first time wasn’t for too large a laceration, and afterwards I felt relief, gaining more confidence for next time. Of course, if I wasn’t sure exactly what to do, I would get on the two-way radio and talk to a doctor or nurse in Darwin, and later Katherine.

  When it came to my midwifery duties, I discovered that Aboriginal women didn’t express their pain when they delivered their babies. If they said they were in pain I knew there was a complication. Otherwise, they would squat under a tree and push, and there the baby was. Then someone would come to me and say, ‘Sistah! Dat Violet bin hab him piccaninny.’ As soon as the mother was feeling up to it, usually only a few hours later, she’d come to the clinic with her baby for a check-up. I was told about one of the dining-room girls who’d waited on the table at breakfast, delivered a baby and was back to work by lunchtime.

  I concluded it was best for the Aboriginal women to have their babies the way they were accustomed to. And if an expectant Aboriginal mother had a complication, she would be examined, the Aerial Medical doctor consulted, and then she would be airlifted to Darwin. Miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy and pre-eclampsia were all possible causes.

  Whenever an Aboriginal baby arrived, the mother and my assistant in the clinic, Topsy, would want me to name the child, which was such an honour. The baby also received an Aboriginal name.

  In the same building as the clinic was the soup kitchen, where Ida cooked for all the station children under about four years of age. Ida would get vegetables from the garden and meat from the main kitchen to make stews and soups. The Aboriginal girls and women would sit and eat on the flat dirt outside the hospital; there was no grass. The twelve or more adorable children came to the soup kitchen every morning, benefiting from the extra nutrition.

  In the 1940s the mortality rate for Aboriginal children was very high. Toddlers had difficulty surviving once their mothers had another baby and began to share out the breast milk. Also, the number of Aboriginal births was very low. I remember being told that at Waterloo and Rosewood stations, very few of the Aboriginal people had children together. This was not the case at Wave Hill when I was there; there were plenty of babies born with a relatively low mortality rate.

  After breakfast I would check the soup kitchen, then wander around to the jackaroos’, men’s and visitors’ quarters to see how the housegirls were going making beds, sweeping and doing other household jobs.

  Smoko was at nine in the morning and we would all gather for a cuppa and a chat. The hospital was usually open after smoko, morning and afternoon, unless one of the stock camp work groups was in and needed more supplies.

  Once a month I took the mothers and babies up to the store, to weigh the little ones and chart their progress. When the doctor came each month from Darwin, we’d vaccinate with Sabin and triple antigen, and test for TB. Sometimes I had to go out to the stock camps to vaccinate those who’d missed out.

  There were members of three different tribes at Wave Hill. The Gurindji were the original nomadic people of the area, while the Warlpiri were originally from Hooker Creek. The third tribe were the Mutpura. At first I found it very difficult to work out who belonged to each tribe.

  Some of the men had two or three wives; one stockman had five, as he’d inherited three when his brother died. When a man became middle-aged he would take a younger wife to look after him and his first wife as they got older. Years later, Emilie told me that her husband, Algie, one of the stockmen, was going to take a young wife. I asked her if she was happy. ‘No, me don’t want that,’ she said, but it happened anyway and they all seemed to get on well.

  Every Aboriginal person belongs to a certain skin group, which has come down from common ancestors and determines who can talk to whom. These groups prevented any form of incest from occurring. Male and female cousins were forbidden even to look at one another, so sometimes I would be told, ‘No, Missus, him cousin alonga me, me no look at him.’ In an effort to keep track of everyone, I started keeping a skin-group record book.

  The Aboriginal workers and their families lived at a camp across Five Mile Creek from the homestead. The creek was dry most of the year. The camp—built by the Vesteys according to the Pastoral Award for Aborigines—consisted of galvanised houses on stilts. They were not inhabited when I arrived, as in each one a member of an Aboriginal family had passed away, and the other members were forbidden to return. Instead they built humpies out of iron sheets, old bags and wooden planks, just as we whites, as kids, had made our cubbyhouses. These people seemed happier living as they had done for centuries in humpies rather than houses—and it was much cooler, too.

  The laundry was situated about twenty metres from the back of my quarters. It had two wood-burning coppers. The sheets and pillowslips were boiled, clothes were washed in several tubs, and clothing ironed with Mrs Potts irons: heavy, steel-plated things that were placed on the stovetop to heat before and during use. In the afternoon the Aboriginal women would congregate here and play cards while they waited their turn to iron their charges’ clothes.

  A wonderful tradition in the Territory is to have a siesta after lunch. At Wave Hill, lunch was at twelve o’clock; siesta was until one-thirty. The women had longer, sometimes until smoko at three.

  One afternoon when I was very much enjoying a siesta, I heard a great commotion coming from the laundry. It sounded as though someone was being murdered. I went to investigate. There was six-foot Hilda with a heavy Mrs Potts iron in her outstretched hand, about to bring it down on Vera’s head. I raced over, grabbing Hilda’s arm, only to have her glare at me and start to bring the iron down on my head. The other girls came to my rescue, grabbing Hilda and dragging her away. Never again would I try to intervene in a fight or argument between Aboriginal people.

  The other white women on the station, Lauris and Nancy, lived in corrugated cottages on the outskirts of the complex. I only ever saw them at smoko and when everyone got together for a special occasion. Of course, Lauris was busy with her baby, Roger, but I wonder now, years later, with only three white women on the station, why we didn’t get on well together. We each led our own lives. Maybe my shyness was mistaken for aloofness.

  9

  A Wave Hill awakening

  It was Saturday night, my first weekend at Wave Hill. Tom had consented to all the stock camps coming into the station for the weekend, as often in the middle of the stock season the boys wouldn’t see the homestead for up to six weeks.

  After dinner we all went over to the recreation room for a staff get-together. The room had push-out windows all round, and was large enough to contain a table-tennis table, a billiard table, and several bookshelves filled with an assortment of books and magazines. Johnny Cash’s ‘El Paso’ was on the record player; that song will always remind me of the old Wave Hill.

  The boys were having a few beers, courtesy of Tom, and as I didn’t like beer I probably had a soft drink. Tom asked me to dance; we moved around the room, a mountain of flesh between us. The boys seemed content just to drink. After the second dance with Tom, I noticed that the married couples had left. I, too, said goodnight.

  Arriving at my donga, I put on my pyjamas and got into bed. Suddenly, the door burst open and there was Garry, one of the stockmen. He was very drunk and was demanding that he talk to me.

  I was in shock. I felt quite frightened. Somehow I managed to say, ‘Excuse me, I don’t want to talk to you. Would you please leave.’

  I knew that Garry had been in love with the previous sister, who’d left six weeks before I arrived. ‘I have to tell you a few things,’ he said. He was leaning over me, shaking his finger at me, and raving about how Tom would proposition me. Garry explained that he’d come to warn me about what had happened to the previous sister—so on and on he went!

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sp; In between his drunken babble, I kept hysterically shouting, ‘If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to start screaming.’

  Suddenly, this totally drunken moron interrupted me and said, ‘You don’t have to do that. I’ll scream for you!’

  With that, he went outside, hollering at the top of his voice. I don’t know what he was yelling because as soon as he’d departed I jumped out of bed, frantically raced to lock the three doors and collapsed on the bed in dread. I heard a commotion outside: voices raised, swearing, a scuffle, then a knock on my door.

  ‘You all right, Sister?’

  It was Tony Clark. He and Ralph Hayes had come running when they heard Garry yelling out. Tom, meanwhile, had seen Garry leave the recreation room and followed him. When he walked out of my room, Tom flattened him, so he was lying on the ground by the time Ralph and Tony arrived.

  To my Knights in Shining Armour, I called out, ‘I’m okay, but just go away and leave me alone.’

  In retrospect, although I was terrified at the time, I think Garry was lonely, miserable and drunk, and probably wanted some female company. He’d also noticed me and Tom dancing and thought he should warn me: but there was no need, as Tom always treated me like a daughter, and I think he was protective of all young women.

  I didn’t sleep much that night and when morning arrived I knew I had to decide on one of two options. If I was worried about my safety I should pack my bags and leave—but I realised I didn’t want to leave. Wave Hill and its people fascinated me.

  Tom came around before breakfast, full of apologies. He told me that Garry was being transferred to another station. He also praised his boys, Ralph and Tony, and hoped that I would stay. He informed me that Ralph had become the new overseer.