Walking the Wet

The Northern Territory has only two seasons, the Wet and the Dry, according to white people anyway. It is easy to see why this is so. The variance between the two is dynamic. In the Wet one can expect torrential rain, flooding rivers, forty-degree heat in the shade and a million flies and mosquitos. In the Dry the temperature can drop to below zero overnight, the cold biting into your bones and sucking every bit of moisture out of your body. The blue skies are cloudless and the horizon endless.

The Aboriginal people live by six seasons. They feel the subtle changes in the temperature. They watch the movement of the animals, the receding water levels in the billabongs, hunting and gathering berries, nuts and bush medicines. The seasons and the landscape are fundamental to their spiritual stories.

I was just five years old and the eldest of three children when my mother left my father in Alice Springs and returned north to live in Katherine with her family. It was 1960 and within a few months she had met the handsome bachelor Bill Tapp who had just bought 1600 square kilometres of cattle country in the Northern Territory outback. My two teenage uncles were working for Bill Tapp and he had come to stay at my grandmother’s house on a rare visit to town. For Bill Tapp it was love at first sight and he told my uncle Jim that he was going to marry my mother within the first week of meeting her.

Before we knew it we had gone to live at Killarney station, 270 kilometres south-west of Katherine at the end of an indiscernible bush track.

We lived under a bough shed, four hand-sawn tree posts with branches thrown over the top for shade in the dry season and moved into an upturned water tank for shelter in the Wet season. For most of the year we camped out under the stars in swags, Mum and Bill Tapp in theirs and we three kids in ours beside them. The white stockmen camped under some trees about 100 metres away from us and the Aboriginal stockmen under humpies in the opposite direction. Mum did the cooking for everyone, about twenty people, on a large open fire using water carted on the back of a truck in drums. All the food was cooked in camp ovens under the coals or on a piece of mesh wire strung over the fire. Black billy cans of water simmered on the fire day and night, ever ready for the large pannikins of thick sweet black tea. Our toilet was a walk down the creek behind a bush and we bathed in a 44-gallon drum cut in half behind the water tank, where Mum also did the washing, which was hung out to dry on a barbed wire clothes line strung between two trees.

An Aboriginal family that had come to live with us had been wandering in the bush for a number of years. The group leader, Banjo, a tall handsome Gurindji man, had been on the run from the police for a tribal murder. Banjo and his younger brother Georgy had a deeply ingrained knowledge of the land and were invaluable in mustering, knowing where the water holes were and how the wild cattle and brumbies moved between them. I called Banjo’s mother, old Dora, ‘Mum’ and his wife Daisy ‘Aunty’. I loved the old ladies, who took all the kids, black and white, hunting for goanna and bush tucker along the dry creek beds. They told us stories about the ‘debil debils’ and gently covered our bodies with crushed charcoal to make us black and then painted red and white lines and circles to dance in the corroborees. Daisy cut me a special piece of red fabric for a skirt to dance in, and Dora made a small spear-like hunting stick to pry under rocks for lizards and goanna and dig out bush potatoes on the river bank.

Every year, after the first rains, Bill Tapp loaded all the Aboriginal people onto the back of the truck to take them back to Wave Hill station (later to become famous for the 1966 Wave Hill walk-off led by Vincent Lingiari) for their holidays and initiation ceremonies. The Aboriginal people from across the region gathered every year at Wave Hill and other significant places for their initiation ceremonies and to deliver young wives to their promised husbands.

My younger brother Billy and I loved to go on these trips. We rode on the back with the Aboriginal people, their swags and billy cans piled up high with newly made nulla-nullas, boomerangs and spears, all chattering in excitement. Bill Tapp sat in the front driving but we preferred to be on the back with Daisy and Dora, tucked between the swags with the wind blowing though our hair as they chattered excitedly about going back to the country to see their extended families. Old Dora had ten children and six of her daughters had been married off to their promised husbands at very young ages. She sometimes cried and sang songs for them. Her youngest daughter Nita, my best friend, was a year or two older than me. Dora resisted sending Nita off to her promised husband Vincent Lingiari for as long as she possibly could. Dora loved her children and missed them terribly. This sad set of circumstances was also a good thing because she loved us kids dearly and treated us as her own.

The road to Wave Hill was a rough and precarious trip of more than 250 kilometres of rocky ridges and steep creek banks. The truck was old and rattly and if we weren’t bogged in mud we were bogged in bull dust, or broken down with a leaky radiator or flat tyre. While the bush mechanics tried to sort the problem out we would most often wait on the side of the road until someone came by to help. I was pretty good at carrying rocks and logs to stack under the tyres to help provide grip in the mud or dust and the old ladies would look for bush bananas, berries and wild honey.

On one of the Wet season treks returning from Wave Hill in an empty truck, we got bogged to the axels and could not move. My cousin Robyn and I were about ten years old and Billy was eight. Despite hours of trying to chock up the truck with logs and anthills, it was sinking deeper into the quagmire. As it was unlikely that someone would come driving by soon enough, Bill Tapp led the way as we walked to a road-construction camp near Top Springs to get help. Barefoot, wearing only shorts and no shirts, we walked all day, stopping at creeks to cool off and picking wild berries and paddy melons along the way. We finally arrived at the camp at sundown, badly sunburnt and starving. The road construction was empty as the residents had gone to fill in their time enjoying the company and the bar at Top Springs, an outback service station, pub and store. We made ourselves at home in an old silver caravan set up as a kitchen where we ate tins of bully beef and baked beans before going to sleep in another caravan with beds.

Robyn was suffering from severe heat stroke and was running a temperature. Billy had large watery blisters all over his nose and shoulders. We were all sunburned and had very raw feet after walking through twenty kilometres of mud in the heat of the day. Billy and Robyn suffer to this day the consequences of that walk.

We spent the night in the camp and then walked another five kilometres into Top Springs to send a radio message home for someone to come and pick us up. The men from the construction camp were happily propping up the bar, they were sympathetic and kind and bought us cold drinks and lollies and a few large stiff drinks for Bill Tapp.

We were returning from Victoria River Downs on another of the wet season trips when yet again we got bogged and couldn’t get out. Bill Tapp sent Banjo and Georgy to walk home to bring a vehicle back to pull us out. We were caught on a big black soil plain with very few trees and spear grass over our heads. It was difficult to get about in the gluggy mud.

As we got hungrier and hungrier Old Dora decided that we would have to eat the grasshoppers that were whizzing around in plague proportions. Billy and I thought it was great fun as we laughed and pounced on the big fat green and brown insects. I felt no remorse as they were thrown alive into the leaping flames and turned with sticks. We crunched on the crisply burnt little bodies with relish. Bill Tapp did not join us in this culinary excursion but waited patiently; periodically walking up to the truck and kicking a few tyres or wandering out collecting more logs and rocks to chock the tyres. The grasshoppers didn’t taste so good, however those poor little insects served their purpose by providing a bit of protein, a few vitamins, and filling a substantial hole in the stomach. Though I have had the pleasure of eating goanna, wild turkey, buffalo, wild bulls, lizards and a variety of birds, I have been ever thankful that I have not had to eat grasshoppers again.

It wasn’t long before the wet seasons came to an abrupt end and we would be storing water in 44-four gallon drums and drinking water taken from tin tanks, cattle troughs and muddy billabongs. The old truck continued to break down regularly as it overheated, and we’d have to walk back home for help.

There was never enough fresh food because of the lack of refrigeration; however, there always seemed to be a magic supply of rum when the need arose. The food that was available was mostly out of date. The fresh beef only lasted a day or two in the stifling heat and then had to be salted. Flour was stale and full of weevils, and the salt and sugar set as hard as bricks in hessian bags. There were no dairy products and very few vegetables as we had a poor water supply. The Sunshine powdered milk was kept for the babies and everyone else drank large pannikins of strong black sweet tea. Most of us suffered from regular bouts of diarrhoea, bung eyes and boils.

We could never carry large amounts of food because we didn’t have any form of refrigeration so our food supply consisted of a piece of damper and dry corned beef, and we were always on the lookout for an extra bit of bush tucker, such as sugar bag, a juicy brush turkey and wild berries.

All the roads in the bush were bad and caused much damage to vehicles so that walking, or ‘Foot Falcon’ as we called it, was a common form of transport, as was getting about on horseback. Very few employees owned cars and most relied on the station for transport. It was not uncommon for people to walk from station to station during the Wet season when there was plenty of water around but you needed to have your wits about you and a means, such as a gun and matches, of catching and cooking some food along the way.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, one such walking incident turned to tragedy in the 1970s when one of the employees, an older man, Jack, who worked as a handyman and was a bit of a loner, decided to spend his well-earned holiday pay on an alcoholic bender at the local Tops Springs Wayside Inn. This was not an uncommon practice for many of these men who had left their history and their families down south and come north to live in isolation. Jack ran up a tab for accommodation and alcohol and when he ran out of money he decided to walk the forty kilometres back to Killarney without telling anyone. No-one at the station expected him to be returning home and no one was quite sure when, or how, he left Top Springs. The remains of his body were found a few weeks later by the side of the road.

There were no transport or freight services so food, medical essentials and mail were picked up when a truck was sent to town. Shopping trips were always put off until the last moment such as when food supplies were getting dangerously low or vital parts were needed for bores and vehicles.

By the mid 1960s our family had expanded by another three or four kids and we were going on the trip of a lifetime to Katherine for some Christmas shopping, only to be caught, again, on a creek about thirty kilometres from the homestead.

The truck lost traction going up a steep riverbank and kept slipping back into the river, which was running about halfway up the tyres. Mum, pregnant again, was pulling us of the back of the truck onto the bank as the truck slipped further down towards the river before it settled gently in the water. As the sun was setting it was clear we weren’t going anywhere that day. Bill Tapp set up a tarpaulin strung off a tree on the side of the road and Mum settled for the evening with a couple of pillows and a blanket with her gaggle of tired, sunburnt and hungry kids crawling all over her. As the dank dark wet-season night settled in, we tried to sleep under the little tarp in the pouring rain while being bombarded with mosquitoes as big as birds. It was a long, restless night of babies crying and everyone trying to get comfortable on the hard ground.

In the clear light of day the truck was finally leveraged out of the river and we proceeded to head off to town. Just a kilometre or so short of the main road, we not only got bogged again, but the battery on the truck also died. No amount of digging or cranking the engine was going to help in this situation. Bill Tapp sent a very faint message through Radio VJY in Wyndham, Western Australia, to ask them to contact the station and tell them to bring a tractor, battery and jumper leads out to us. After he sent the message he started to walk back home because the radio reception was so bad he could not be sure that the message had got through. He had walked about twenty kilometres when he was finally met by a couple of the men on the tractor.

Mum waited patiently under the little tree covered in flies while we played Cowboys and Indians around the anthills with our stick guns. We survived on black tea and a tin of Sunshine Milk to mix with the dirty red brown water along the roadside, and a few tins of spaghetti, baked beans and Sao biscuits that Mum always carried as a survival kit. She hadn’t anticipated that what was normally about a six-hour drive was going to take over two days and nights to complete. Finally getting into town and my nana’s house for a warm shower and clean bed was better than any Christmas present.

The Wet often had an impact on just how we would spend our Christmas. One year the truck, loaded with thousands of dollars worth of food and Christmas presents, was swept off a bridge into a raging river on the way home from Katherine when the driver became impatient waiting for the rushing water to drop low enough so he could drive across it.

The driver and his deaf friend, despondent and embarrassed, waited on the side of the road for hours until they were picked up by another traveller. The neighbours were able to winch the vehicle out of the river as it had landed on its wheels. The essentials such as tobacco, matches, Christmas cakes, fresh fruit and hams, Santa stockings and gifts, along with bags of sugar and flour, were all fish food at the bottom of the river.

They were not the most popular people on the station that Christmas, but at least the tinned food, beer and rum were saved. We laughed for years afterwards as the driver told the story of how he and Kenny surfaced after crawling out of the car windows, when Kenny immediately jumped straight back down into the raging river. When he didn’t come up, the driver went after him and hauled him out of the water. Kenny fought against him, yelling, ‘I’ve got to get my rum, my rum, MY RUM.’ He dove back into river and managed to salvage the bottle of Beenleigh Rum that was hidden behind the car seat.

Despite the hard times, the Wet season was a time of festivities and fun. No matter how wet or how many vehicles were broken down and how many roads we had to walk, Santa always made it to Killarney. The Santa sack got bigger and heavier with each passing year as our family continued to grow to a total of ten children. Santa always managed to leave at least one brightly wrapped present under the scrawny tree branch propped up with rocks in a flour drum wrapped in faded Christmas paper and a dusty broken-winged angel on the top.

No matter how low the food stores were, Mum always managed to come up with a rich Christmas cake with white icing and plastic ivy on top, a big hot roast dinner, and pudding with hidden silver coins and covered with thick creamy yellow custard.

Every Christmas we gathered around the Christmas table loaded with homemade food, pannikins of rum and homemade cordial. Sitting on chairs made from wooden tree stumps and upturned empty flour drums in the heat and rain, we sang Christmas carols and shared homemade presents. Life was tough, raw and simple but I had some of the best times, best food and the most wonderful family Christmases that any child could ever wish for.