A road story
In Darwin and strapped for a quid.
Bob Ellis at Sacred Sites gives me a job on the island in the creek that empties onto Mendil Beach. As part of a deal with the new casino owners, some Tiwi burial poles had to be erected on the five square metre lump of land. Cemented in to deter the cultural thieves. A handy fifty dollars. Petrol money.
For good measure Bob threw in the 'loan' of an anthro's swag and I head for Daguragu country and the famous 'Wave Hill' community.
South through Katherine, then Timber Creek and Top Springs and down to spend a few days with the Kalkarindji mob. So hot. Hot enough to risk a swim in the 'Victoria.' Crocodile snack.
Further south to Lajamanu (Hooker Creek to whites). Ahead the Tanami (classified semi-desert) and no pitstops for some 300k. Another 400 to Yuendemu and much the same again to Alice.
Filling the tank and jerries at the store the bowser owner was non- committal about the Tanami Track. Hadn't been down there in a long while he said. Maybe check the police station his only offering.
Back of the cop shop there was a barbie in full swing. Most of the purely white mob looked well on the way to getting pissed.
Alongside the fence I got out of the moke as a big lump of authority weaved over. I made my query.
He looked at me, then at the vehicle and stared at it in a strange sort of way like he saw but but wished he hadn't. He exhaled slowly like a silent belch.
"In THAT?" he said and his 'that' carried tones of disbelief, doubt as to sanity and desire to express hilarity.
"Yair," I said, "I just wanted to know how the track is." He took a swig from his can and opened his mouth. I forestalled him.
"I've got a full tank and two spare jerries, enough for Yuendamu. Thirty litres of water. A machete. A shovel. Block and tackle, Two spares (a lie). Five litres of oil. Enough grub for a week (half a lie). The moke is in good nick (a dodgy one that)."
Counting these items off I asked. "Anything else I'd want?"
This recitation of foresight left him still looking like he wished that none of this was happening.
"What do you know about blackfellers?", he asked.
"Some of my best friends are blackfellers," I tell him.
Then, with heavy emphasis. "Yer don't say. Well, there's a carload on the road between Bilgoa Mission (over the W.A. border) and Yuendemu. You'll NEED some best friends if you meet up with that lot. They're on the piss."
He tossed off the rest of his beer and told me to please myself. He had an open mind.
As I got into the moke he turned back and said. "Ring us from Yuendemu or Alice when you get there. We're the dopey bastards who have to go looking for you if you get stuck."
An open mind, eh? Often those who claim to have an open mind seem to have a cosmic wind blowing through the cavity leaving behind nothing but the dust of intellectual activity. A bit unfair. After all, he was only a half-pissed copper doing his job. I've met many worse.
Through town again and I see what I'm looking for. The family are around the fire in front of the house. Different from the coppers. His business was around the back out of sight. I ask the question again.
The non-crossing over parallel again. He eyed the moke.
"Where you headin?"
"Alice."
"Should be right. Look out for some Tanami mob. You can't go wrong with them."
Good enough for me old feller. I was off. Lajamanu's view of the world beat Hooker Creek's any time. All ends up.
Kipped the night down the road apiece. The mossies were ecstatic. Eat him here or takeaway, one said.
About fifty kilometres down next morning and a big problem. The track, barely discernable at best, petered out into volcanic like outcrop. No way round to the left with thick brush shelving down and the continuing rolls and waves of rock rising to the right. Whatever sand might have filled the former ruts had been gouged clear by heavy seasonal rain. Like real recent. I sized up whether the moke would fit with one wheel on the narrow remaining crown between ruts and the other along the rock ledge. After another long consultation with herself we decided it might. No option anyway except the thought of eating crow back there. The caper was good for fifty metres, then around a curve into what couldn't be seen and the hope that this was the worst.
I reloaded to get the weight even, backed off slammed the stick into first and let rip. Blowing one afterwards I knew I'd made it but not sure how.
Fairly easy for an hour or more. The engine protection plate whispered and swished the grassy tufts on the track ridge with the tyres on either side deep in the worn ruts. Several stretches of jolting stratified rock, some gravel and then nearly over the top into the dry Winnecke. The track dropped down sharply, across two metres of rocks and just as steeply up the other side. No place here for other than a short wheelbase. Shades of Luna Park and a scared lair, so down with a scream, crash through the bottom and up the opposite bank. A bit of tortured scrabbling and madly spinning fronts and we're over. A man's mad, a split second difference and the arse would have been sitting back on the rockbed where only a crane would lift it out. That would cause unbounded joy in Hooker Creek police HQ.
Going steady in the wheel ruts so the steering was automatic. Mid afternoon the track widens out and there ahead are two battered four wheel drives to one side. About a dozen people, old, middle and young kids. A couple of men saunter over when I pull up.
One asked if I had any fuel to spare. His black lips were ringed with a white crust. The older men and women stayed in the shade of their dust coated vehicles as a fire burnt back from the road some distance. It spread through the dry grass in a slowly extending arc and a couple of young fellers appeared indistinctly through the smokey haze.
They were following the line of fire.
The speaker shrugged when I said no diesel. He said they were pretty skint for tucker unless the boys (indicating the fire followers with a jerk of his head) picked up a perenti or other food fleeing from the flames. So I handed over the tinned stuff and tea, sugar and powdered milk.
He said that Supplejack Station was 'over there', pointing westward. Not far. Maybe they had spare fuel. Would I drive him there? What could I do? So he hopped in and as he directed me off the track and through the yellowed grass and dust covered scrub he said to call him Jack. "Tanami Jack they call me."
We drove a 'not far' long way. Skirting dry gullies, patches of gibber, stands of small trees, he never stopped his hand gestures to indicate the way. Me? I was lost to the wide world while he knew every nuance of wilderness of plain and scrub. After a 'not long' time we came to the station fence and then the closed gate.
A man walked down the fence line preceded by two lean dogs. They came through the wire to my side of the moke. A half tail wag and then around to the other side and immediately one leapt towards him, snapping bared fangs at his thigh. I lifted a boot and lashed out. The whitefeller yelled an order and the dogs rejoined him. Without any other expression he said. "Wadder yer want?"
Sitting tight, Tanami explained the problem. "Got no diesel to spare," was the grunted reply, "all I can do is radio phone Hooker Creek and ask them to send someone out to pick you up."
Then, pointing to the faint smudge of smoke on the distant horizon. "You bastards lit that fire," he said. "A man ought to leave you for dead." A bit strange seeing that this mob had been living off the land for yonks doing just that.
"Come on," says Jack, "This arsehole means what he says."
On the way back I wax indignant on the mentality of those who train their animals to be racist. The only comment my companion made was that a lead lunch would fix that little matter. I hoped he meant the owner.
Back at the stranded vehicles, a shake of hands all round and south again.
Parts of the track disappeared. This meant scrub bashing to find it again and getting sand bogged more than once. With the moke slewed in deep drifts, a cursing, bush slashing and stacking and digging out exercise would follow before escaping from my own folly.
End of day and a scarlet sunset over the W.A. border. The plateau spread out and down bringing me out of the auto-drive haze of a mind in neutral. No creeping change of scene but a sudden explosion to the senses. An ever widening valley merged into a seeming infinate spread of width and length. To the immediate left the track dropped below the striated wall of the escarpment reflecting the bloodied sun in browns, yellows, russets, through to the deepest red to match its sinking source of heat and fire.
To the right a gradual shelving away to the shimmering distance, a long descending arm embraced a broad stretched of wetlands almost as multi-hued as its opposite except that the colouring was more pastel. Blue to light greens mostly and the billabong was flecked with the white and speckled bodies of countless birds. Some feeding the shallows, others wheeling, spinning and diving to the ruffled surface. Still others flew high, twisting and darting after insects.
Some laugh when I say you can keep your singular, everlasting green of Cairns and Darwin. Give me the varigated surprises of the so-called desert. This picture was mind wrenching. And I was straight.
So I stayed the night. But sleep came hard. How come a bastard like that Supplejack owner or manager can hold a long term lease to run beef on Aboriginal land? No wonder the country's on the skids.
Still, tomorrow was Rabbits Flat and food. I'd heard about this roadhouse owner having a French wife who was a bit of alright. As a cook. Lucky I picked up this yarndi in Darwin. It takes the hunger edge away. The trouble is - it makes you think too much. Last memory is of the near thousand of bulldust me and the bomb had to go.
Down off the plateau early next morning and the plains surface, much harder, makes the treads sing a different tone and the side-on westerly makes the canvass hum, the rigging twang in a drawn out guitar chord of different pitch, while an indeterminate drumming from the rear completes the ensemble.
A couple of hours on and the Tanami road junction. To the right the border and Bilgoa mission (whatever happened to those to watch out for?), to the left Rabbits Flat, home and vision of plain sailing. The Lajamanu snack quite gone and my stomach complains that my throat is cut.
A solid concrete block, obscenely cutting the plains symmetry, and I pull up at the bowser. "Jesus Christ," says the bloke, "I've never seen one of those out here, before." Inside he takes a tin-foil dish from the freezer and puts it in the oven. The great French cook wasn't home. That's how it is out here. But her heated steak and kidney was cordon bleu, whatever that is. Down in a flash.
Except for me and him the place was deserted. Over a couple of green stubbies he whinges about his troubles. Reckoned that the newly elected comrade Hawke would hand the country over to the blacks and unionists.
He needn't have worried.
He wasn't real happy about all this Land Council stuff and its land claims on behalf of traditionals. "Now take this Tanami Jack and his tribe. Hopeless arseholes. Never learn anything. Cheeky too. Should have them back on reserves. You can't tell me anything about those cunts. Country's fucked for want of a tough leader" and so on. I let him rave and only casually thought on the way out of sabotaging his thumping motor/generater so his grog that he sold at exhorbitant prices to his contemptable byers would heat up and his supply of frozen steak and kidney would rot.
I still regret that. First thoughts are often best.
That evening, 'the Granites' explored, I kip down before the long drag to Alice Springs.
The hard packed desert road unwound behind and the volumist, mushroom grey dustcloud followed. Mid morning and something appears lump-like on the horizen of the dead straight road. It enlarged and turned into a battered Valiant sitting dead centre. Noone in it. For three days the track and road sides had been adorned every so often with its prototypes. All mute monument to rapacious second hand healers. But this was somehow different.
I soon found out that it was indeed different.
A black and dusty figure appeared from a clump of bushes. In his fist he held an empty flagon. A second young man followed with a part full ditto. Then a third, a fourth and a fifth ranged alongside. This was it. It had to be. "That lot on the piss," so fondly referred to by the sobrietous copper.
I eased out of the seat. We looked each other over. The flagons glinted in the century heat.
So I said. "Jesus it's hot. How about a swig?" The young feller stared at me and slowly handed me the wine. You ever drank hot Moselle? Deadly. I tried not to gag.
'Where are you blokes from?"
"Yuendemu," one said.
"Then you must be the mob been over to the Mission?"
"That's us. Been playing footie." That's keen. 300k for a game? The local juniors are cream puffs. That's 300 each way of course.
"So how'd you go?"
"Thrashed them." And from the empty flagon bloke. "We was drunk when we left Yuendemu, drunk when we got there, played drunk and thrashed them." Maybe some slight exaggeration all round.
"And still drunk," I offered.
"Nah", he said," we ran out. You get any cans from that dickhead at the roadhouse?"
To settle that and other maybe questions, I said, "No budda" (money).
"Got any spare petrol? We run out."
Another request that demanded a yes.
So we emptied two thirds of a jerrycan into their heap. They had some sort of contraption rigged up with a hose through a water filled jerry held on the front seat. Somehow it passed through the cooling system in lieu of a clapped out radiator. Remarkable.
It must have worked because after magnanimously waving aside their thanks and invitation to stop and visit at Yuendemu I took off. An hour later they race past in a cloud of bulldust and yahoos.
Another hour and there they are in the middle of the strip again.
A front wheel had collapsed and all they wanted was a washer to take up the gap between nut and hole. One other wheelnut seemed sound.
Not to worry, they said. We'll fix it somehow. They probably did and if not another corpse, stripped of all usefulness would line the desert road.
One asked for a ride. Sick of those other drunks he said. And so to Yuendamu.
We drove into the store-cum-petrol stop. A new Range Rover stood in the square, glinting in the sun. Some teenagers were circling it and systematically smashing every window with rocks and accuracy. Too keen to get home, I didn't ask why they were shitty on the Northern Territory Health Dept., or at least its vehicle.
300k and many hours later, the lights of Alice and home to bed.
EPILOGUE:
Several years later on Bill Peach's 'Best of Four Corners' (I think it was) the boss of Supplejack Station and the proprietor of the Rabbits Flat Roadhouse were interviewed on the ABORIGINAL PROBLEM.
U N B E B L O O D Y L I E V A B L E !
In Darwin and strapped for a quid.
Bob Ellis at Sacred Sites gives me a job on the island in the creek that empties onto Mendil Beach. As part of a deal with the new casino owners, some Tiwi burial poles had to be erected on the five square metre lump of land. Cemented in to deter the cultural thieves. A handy fifty dollars. Petrol money.
For good measure Bob threw in the 'loan' of an anthro's swag and I head for Daguragu country and the famous 'Wave Hill' community.
South through Katherine, then Timber Creek and Top Springs and down to spend a few days with the Kalkarindji mob. So hot. Hot enough to risk a swim in the 'Victoria.' Crocodile snack.
Further south to Lajamanu (Hooker Creek to whites). Ahead the Tanami (classified semi-desert) and no pitstops for some 300k. Another 400 to Yuendemu and much the same again to Alice.
Filling the tank and jerries at the store the bowser owner was non- committal about the Tanami Track. Hadn't been down there in a long while he said. Maybe check the police station his only offering.
Back of the cop shop there was a barbie in full swing. Most of the purely white mob looked well on the way to getting pissed.
Alongside the fence I got out of the moke as a big lump of authority weaved over. I made my query.
He looked at me, then at the vehicle and stared at it in a strange sort of way like he saw but but wished he hadn't. He exhaled slowly like a silent belch.
"In THAT?" he said and his 'that' carried tones of disbelief, doubt as to sanity and desire to express hilarity.
"Yair," I said, "I just wanted to know how the track is." He took a swig from his can and opened his mouth. I forestalled him.
"I've got a full tank and two spare jerries, enough for Yuendamu. Thirty litres of water. A machete. A shovel. Block and tackle, Two spares (a lie). Five litres of oil. Enough grub for a week (half a lie). The moke is in good nick (a dodgy one that)."
Counting these items off I asked. "Anything else I'd want?"
This recitation of foresight left him still looking like he wished that none of this was happening.
"What do you know about blackfellers?", he asked.
"Some of my best friends are blackfellers," I tell him.
Then, with heavy emphasis. "Yer don't say. Well, there's a carload on the road between Bilgoa Mission (over the W.A. border) and Yuendemu. You'll NEED some best friends if you meet up with that lot. They're on the piss."
He tossed off the rest of his beer and told me to please myself. He had an open mind.
As I got into the moke he turned back and said. "Ring us from Yuendemu or Alice when you get there. We're the dopey bastards who have to go looking for you if you get stuck."
An open mind, eh? Often those who claim to have an open mind seem to have a cosmic wind blowing through the cavity leaving behind nothing but the dust of intellectual activity. A bit unfair. After all, he was only a half-pissed copper doing his job. I've met many worse.
Through town again and I see what I'm looking for. The family are around the fire in front of the house. Different from the coppers. His business was around the back out of sight. I ask the question again.
The non-crossing over parallel again. He eyed the moke.
"Where you headin?"
"Alice."
"Should be right. Look out for some Tanami mob. You can't go wrong with them."
Good enough for me old feller. I was off. Lajamanu's view of the world beat Hooker Creek's any time. All ends up.
Kipped the night down the road apiece. The mossies were ecstatic. Eat him here or takeaway, one said.
About fifty kilometres down next morning and a big problem. The track, barely discernable at best, petered out into volcanic like outcrop. No way round to the left with thick brush shelving down and the continuing rolls and waves of rock rising to the right. Whatever sand might have filled the former ruts had been gouged clear by heavy seasonal rain. Like real recent. I sized up whether the moke would fit with one wheel on the narrow remaining crown between ruts and the other along the rock ledge. After another long consultation with herself we decided it might. No option anyway except the thought of eating crow back there. The caper was good for fifty metres, then around a curve into what couldn't be seen and the hope that this was the worst.
I reloaded to get the weight even, backed off slammed the stick into first and let rip. Blowing one afterwards I knew I'd made it but not sure how.
Fairly easy for an hour or more. The engine protection plate whispered and swished the grassy tufts on the track ridge with the tyres on either side deep in the worn ruts. Several stretches of jolting stratified rock, some gravel and then nearly over the top into the dry Winnecke. The track dropped down sharply, across two metres of rocks and just as steeply up the other side. No place here for other than a short wheelbase. Shades of Luna Park and a scared lair, so down with a scream, crash through the bottom and up the opposite bank. A bit of tortured scrabbling and madly spinning fronts and we're over. A man's mad, a split second difference and the arse would have been sitting back on the rockbed where only a crane would lift it out. That would cause unbounded joy in Hooker Creek police HQ.
Going steady in the wheel ruts so the steering was automatic. Mid afternoon the track widens out and there ahead are two battered four wheel drives to one side. About a dozen people, old, middle and young kids. A couple of men saunter over when I pull up.
One asked if I had any fuel to spare. His black lips were ringed with a white crust. The older men and women stayed in the shade of their dust coated vehicles as a fire burnt back from the road some distance. It spread through the dry grass in a slowly extending arc and a couple of young fellers appeared indistinctly through the smokey haze.
They were following the line of fire.
The speaker shrugged when I said no diesel. He said they were pretty skint for tucker unless the boys (indicating the fire followers with a jerk of his head) picked up a perenti or other food fleeing from the flames. So I handed over the tinned stuff and tea, sugar and powdered milk.
He said that Supplejack Station was 'over there', pointing westward. Not far. Maybe they had spare fuel. Would I drive him there? What could I do? So he hopped in and as he directed me off the track and through the yellowed grass and dust covered scrub he said to call him Jack. "Tanami Jack they call me."
We drove a 'not far' long way. Skirting dry gullies, patches of gibber, stands of small trees, he never stopped his hand gestures to indicate the way. Me? I was lost to the wide world while he knew every nuance of wilderness of plain and scrub. After a 'not long' time we came to the station fence and then the closed gate.
A man walked down the fence line preceded by two lean dogs. They came through the wire to my side of the moke. A half tail wag and then around to the other side and immediately one leapt towards him, snapping bared fangs at his thigh. I lifted a boot and lashed out. The whitefeller yelled an order and the dogs rejoined him. Without any other expression he said. "Wadder yer want?"
Sitting tight, Tanami explained the problem. "Got no diesel to spare," was the grunted reply, "all I can do is radio phone Hooker Creek and ask them to send someone out to pick you up."
Then, pointing to the faint smudge of smoke on the distant horizon. "You bastards lit that fire," he said. "A man ought to leave you for dead." A bit strange seeing that this mob had been living off the land for yonks doing just that.
"Come on," says Jack, "This arsehole means what he says."
On the way back I wax indignant on the mentality of those who train their animals to be racist. The only comment my companion made was that a lead lunch would fix that little matter. I hoped he meant the owner.
Back at the stranded vehicles, a shake of hands all round and south again.
Parts of the track disappeared. This meant scrub bashing to find it again and getting sand bogged more than once. With the moke slewed in deep drifts, a cursing, bush slashing and stacking and digging out exercise would follow before escaping from my own folly.
End of day and a scarlet sunset over the W.A. border. The plateau spread out and down bringing me out of the auto-drive haze of a mind in neutral. No creeping change of scene but a sudden explosion to the senses. An ever widening valley merged into a seeming infinate spread of width and length. To the immediate left the track dropped below the striated wall of the escarpment reflecting the bloodied sun in browns, yellows, russets, through to the deepest red to match its sinking source of heat and fire.
To the right a gradual shelving away to the shimmering distance, a long descending arm embraced a broad stretched of wetlands almost as multi-hued as its opposite except that the colouring was more pastel. Blue to light greens mostly and the billabong was flecked with the white and speckled bodies of countless birds. Some feeding the shallows, others wheeling, spinning and diving to the ruffled surface. Still others flew high, twisting and darting after insects.
Some laugh when I say you can keep your singular, everlasting green of Cairns and Darwin. Give me the varigated surprises of the so-called desert. This picture was mind wrenching. And I was straight.
So I stayed the night. But sleep came hard. How come a bastard like that Supplejack owner or manager can hold a long term lease to run beef on Aboriginal land? No wonder the country's on the skids.
Still, tomorrow was Rabbits Flat and food. I'd heard about this roadhouse owner having a French wife who was a bit of alright. As a cook. Lucky I picked up this yarndi in Darwin. It takes the hunger edge away. The trouble is - it makes you think too much. Last memory is of the near thousand of bulldust me and the bomb had to go.
Down off the plateau early next morning and the plains surface, much harder, makes the treads sing a different tone and the side-on westerly makes the canvass hum, the rigging twang in a drawn out guitar chord of different pitch, while an indeterminate drumming from the rear completes the ensemble.
A couple of hours on and the Tanami road junction. To the right the border and Bilgoa mission (whatever happened to those to watch out for?), to the left Rabbits Flat, home and vision of plain sailing. The Lajamanu snack quite gone and my stomach complains that my throat is cut.
A solid concrete block, obscenely cutting the plains symmetry, and I pull up at the bowser. "Jesus Christ," says the bloke, "I've never seen one of those out here, before." Inside he takes a tin-foil dish from the freezer and puts it in the oven. The great French cook wasn't home. That's how it is out here. But her heated steak and kidney was cordon bleu, whatever that is. Down in a flash.
Except for me and him the place was deserted. Over a couple of green stubbies he whinges about his troubles. Reckoned that the newly elected comrade Hawke would hand the country over to the blacks and unionists.
He needn't have worried.
He wasn't real happy about all this Land Council stuff and its land claims on behalf of traditionals. "Now take this Tanami Jack and his tribe. Hopeless arseholes. Never learn anything. Cheeky too. Should have them back on reserves. You can't tell me anything about those cunts. Country's fucked for want of a tough leader" and so on. I let him rave and only casually thought on the way out of sabotaging his thumping motor/generater so his grog that he sold at exhorbitant prices to his contemptable byers would heat up and his supply of frozen steak and kidney would rot.
I still regret that. First thoughts are often best.
That evening, 'the Granites' explored, I kip down before the long drag to Alice Springs.
The hard packed desert road unwound behind and the volumist, mushroom grey dustcloud followed. Mid morning and something appears lump-like on the horizen of the dead straight road. It enlarged and turned into a battered Valiant sitting dead centre. Noone in it. For three days the track and road sides had been adorned every so often with its prototypes. All mute monument to rapacious second hand healers. But this was somehow different.
I soon found out that it was indeed different.
A black and dusty figure appeared from a clump of bushes. In his fist he held an empty flagon. A second young man followed with a part full ditto. Then a third, a fourth and a fifth ranged alongside. This was it. It had to be. "That lot on the piss," so fondly referred to by the sobrietous copper.
I eased out of the seat. We looked each other over. The flagons glinted in the century heat.
So I said. "Jesus it's hot. How about a swig?" The young feller stared at me and slowly handed me the wine. You ever drank hot Moselle? Deadly. I tried not to gag.
'Where are you blokes from?"
"Yuendemu," one said.
"Then you must be the mob been over to the Mission?"
"That's us. Been playing footie." That's keen. 300k for a game? The local juniors are cream puffs. That's 300 each way of course.
"So how'd you go?"
"Thrashed them." And from the empty flagon bloke. "We was drunk when we left Yuendemu, drunk when we got there, played drunk and thrashed them." Maybe some slight exaggeration all round.
"And still drunk," I offered.
"Nah", he said," we ran out. You get any cans from that dickhead at the roadhouse?"
To settle that and other maybe questions, I said, "No budda" (money).
"Got any spare petrol? We run out."
Another request that demanded a yes.
So we emptied two thirds of a jerrycan into their heap. They had some sort of contraption rigged up with a hose through a water filled jerry held on the front seat. Somehow it passed through the cooling system in lieu of a clapped out radiator. Remarkable.
It must have worked because after magnanimously waving aside their thanks and invitation to stop and visit at Yuendemu I took off. An hour later they race past in a cloud of bulldust and yahoos.
Another hour and there they are in the middle of the strip again.
A front wheel had collapsed and all they wanted was a washer to take up the gap between nut and hole. One other wheelnut seemed sound.
Not to worry, they said. We'll fix it somehow. They probably did and if not another corpse, stripped of all usefulness would line the desert road.
One asked for a ride. Sick of those other drunks he said. And so to Yuendamu.
We drove into the store-cum-petrol stop. A new Range Rover stood in the square, glinting in the sun. Some teenagers were circling it and systematically smashing every window with rocks and accuracy. Too keen to get home, I didn't ask why they were shitty on the Northern Territory Health Dept., or at least its vehicle.
300k and many hours later, the lights of Alice and home to bed.
EPILOGUE:
Several years later on Bill Peach's 'Best of Four Corners' (I think it was) the boss of Supplejack Station and the proprietor of the Rabbits Flat Roadhouse were interviewed on the ABORIGINAL PROBLEM.
U N B E B L O O D Y L I E V A B L E !
