Jacqueline Hammar - Daughter of the Territory

This book is for Old Darwin and the remaining few who still live there. For me, they are not names in history books but real people I knew and cared about.

First published in 2015

Copyright Jacqueline Hammar 2015

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Arena Books

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Email:

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 76011 201 1

eISBN 978 1 92526 645 0

Map by MAPgraphics

Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

Contents

Theres the land. (Have you seen it?) Its the cussedest land that I know... Some say God was tired when He made it; Some say its a fine land to shun; Maybe; but theres some as would trade it For no land on earthand Im one.

ROBERT W. SERVICE

Close to a hundred years ago, a young man not yet twenty years old rode with the Afghan camel teams over the red sand of the Centralian desert into the Northern Territory. He went on to ride the wild miles of the Territory as a trooper in the Mounted Police, when less than forty mounted men patrolled a country larger than Great Britain, France and Germany combined. He was to become my father.

When our family took root in the Territory, it was largely unpeopled, and inhospitable to Europeans. Men like my father came for the great adventure. The bush tracks they travelled were recorded as uncertain pin scratches on maps.

Four generations later, our family still flourishes under the guiding stars of the Southern Cross. We have ridden the hard ridges of the inland, travelled cattle through the old forgotten stock routes, and pioneered country where barefoot cattle kings, with no thrones but their saddles, patrolled their vast pandanus-bordered kingdoms. These adventures have been part of my life for nearly ninety years, passing through with the clink of spurs, the pad of bare black feet, and the night sounds of horse bells and corroboree.

In records of the Northern Territorys Genealogical Society, my parents are recorded as Pioneers of the Territory. As Pioneer Number 0376, my name has also been enclosed in these dusty files that are possibly never to be opened again, and never to tell of the births, deaths and tragedies of the lives within.

But I have tales to tell of pioneering in our time, of lonely white men and gentle black women, of murder and suicide, of animals and children, fire and flood. Men of the bush loved their hard, unbound life; wouldnt have considered another. The freedom and farness of the Outback suited them fine.

White women were very few and very far between on the hard ground of the old Territory. They dispensed hospitality to all who travelled bush roads. Newspapers repeatedly stated that: A far greater need than railways, naval bases, gold and garrisons is the Territorys need of white women.

In 1928before the days of radio, telephone and real medical aidmy mother came as a bride to live in a wide, wild-mans country. A trained nurse, she cared for the bush Aboriginals when they were sick: naked people wary of new ways, suffering the white mans diseases such as measles, yaws and leprosy. Late at night, many a lubra would come seeking my mothers help, guiding her through darkness with the light of a kerosene lantern to their camp.

The bush Aboriginals of our time were ever eager to hear a good yarn.

Tell me a story, Jack-a-leen, true-fella story, theyd say to me.

So gather around with the shades of these long-ago people of the old bush and Ill tell you our storyour true-fella story.

Overall brooded the silence and loneliness of the north, a land of appalling distances and the fastest and only way to bridge them, a man on a galloping horse.

GLENVILLE PIKE

These sand hills are suggestive of death by fatigue, thirst, and famine.

ERNEST FAVENC

Amazing is the record of heroism, and endurance, that is the history of the North Australian Mounted, they lived the hair-raising thrillers of a boys dreamdashing in their uniforms and wide hatshats that more than once had been the target of showers of spears, they laughed over stories that would electrify an author of adventure tales, scarcely one has not a life and death story to tell, but rarely tells it.

ERNESTINE HILL

My story begins with my father, Arthur Edward (Jack) Sargeant. Queen Victoria was still sitting steadfastly upon her throne in the early months of the year he was born. He and the twentieth century began their journey through time together.

At fifteen he left his home in South Australia and joined the army. There was no conscription during the First World War, with young men joining for adventure, for patriotism, or both. Perhaps my father presumed life in the army wouldnt differ much from life as the youngest of seventeen children in a strict Presbyterian household.

After lying about his age, he was given an ill-fitting uniform and sent on a 20-kilometre fitness march that resulted in the army doctors diagnosing ingrown toenails. These were smartly removed (and never grew again) and he was soon on a ship sailing off to war.

And what a war it was! One of guts, no glory, no glamour, and such appalling horror that a child soldier could only return from mud-filled trenches and bayonet charges on the battlefields of France as a man.

In his journal, my father tells a little of his war:

We went up through the Hindenburg Line recently taken by Australians, we were in trenches up to our waists in mud, I was on Lewis Guns, we were there for a week, it was my sixteenth birthday, and the men celebrated my birthday with sixteen lighted matches in a loaf of bread.

We were relieved by the first American troops to come into the front line, the 32nd Battalion. They seemed not to have good leadership for they tried to get through the barbed-wire entanglements where they were caught, and the Germans machine-gunned them, every one.

We were ordered out; the only way through the wire was to climb over the dead bodies of the Americans. There was no other way. There was a moon that night and it was a sight Ill never forget, men caught on the wire, their frozen grimacing faces, white in the moonlight.

My father caught the Spanish flu that killed thousands of fighting men. While he was lying in an army hospital, yet another flu victim was placed in the bed beside him. In the morning, seeing the bed empty, my father said with the naivety of a bush lad, Has he gone home, Nurse? The nurse replied, Yes son, hes gone home.