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  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Marianne van Velzen 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

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

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76029 059 7

  eISBN 978 1 95253 302 0

  For Leonardus van Velzen

  and

  Maria Johanna Meijer

  in loving memory and gratitude

  They dared to lose sight of the shore.

  ‘Man cannot discover new oceans

  unless he has the courage to

  lose sight of the shore.’

  André Gide

  Contents

  Prologue: Alice Springs, 1933

  1 The Foster-Lynams

  2 Child genius

  3 J.F. Archibald and Smith’s Weekly

  4 Robert Clyde Packer

  5 Tasmania

  6 On the road, 1930

  7 M.P. Durack

  8 Victoria Downs and Darwin

  9 Land, sea and ‘Blue Moon’

  10 Adrienne Lesire

  11 Daisy Bates

  12 Jake and Minnie

  13 Gold fever

  14 Eric Baume

  15 Borroloola

  16 Perth

  17 The Silver Gull, 1934

  18 Adelaide

  19 From Alice to Dumas

  20 Writing books

  21 The silver river

  22 Radio star

  23 Exemption

  24 Travels with Bob

  25 Henrietta Drake-Brockman

  26 A dog and a caravan, 1947–48

  27 The Territory

  28 Eleanor Smith, 1952

  29 Art and age

  30 Mary Durack

  31 Bob

  32 Disasters and grandchildren

  The lady in the blue dress

  Epilogue

  Author’s note

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue: Alice Springs, 1933

  In the late afternoon of 7 January 1933 a crowd gathered along the railway line, clustering together on the small platform at the station in Alice Springs. The sand-beaten Ghan came to a quivering halt. As the doors opened and people started spilling out, the men and women at the back of the crowd craned their necks, trying to catch a glimpse of the travellers.

  They had come to see a particular group of medical scientists. An article in the Adelaide Advertiser had drawn attention to the arrival of a group of men who were to camp out in the desert for six months. According to the newspaper, the scientists would carry out tests on Aboriginal people to ‘ascertain how [they were] able to exist on small supplies of water in arid areas’.

  Among the scientists were the young doctor John Antill Pockley and the artist Arthur Murch. The latter had been invited on the trip to paint the ‘dead heart’ of Australia and lend a hand where necessary. After boarding the train in Adelaide, the young men had acted like schoolboys on an outing but disembarking in Alice Springs and realising that the crowd had gathered merely to see their strange troupe, they suddenly felt somewhat self-conscious.

  The seven men were going into the outback, braving temperatures of more than 50 degrees Celsius. They set out for the Hermannsburg Mission to meet anthropologist Theodor (Ted) Strehlow, the son of the first administrator of the mission post, Reverend Carl Strehlow. There they planned to live among the Aboriginal people and their task for many weeks would be to measure how much water these locals drank against water lost in their urine and sweat. It meant heat, dust, flies and, for the young doctors, an adventure like no other. Pockley nervously plucked at his three-day-old moustache as he disembarked. He and Dr Hugh Barry had decided to grow moustaches and beards on the trip.

  As he turned to the crowd, Pockley’s eyes caught the outline of a frail lady in the background scribbling away in a notebook. ‘The culprit,’ he thought. This lady reporter was no doubt responsible for the articles in The Advertiser that had attracted the unwanted crowd.

  His attention refocused when he noticed a tall man making his way through the sea of inquisitive heads. It was his friend, Dr David Brown, the only medical man in Central Australia. After a quick hello, Brown led the party away from the curious gazes and into the blistering sandy streets of the Alice. ‘I suppose you men would like a drink?’ he asked as he led them on. ‘I live next to the Stuart Arms, the oldest pub in town.’

  The pub was reasonably cool and the party positioned themselves around the bar, where they were handed cold beers by a scrutinising barmaid. ‘You blokes the professors?’ she asked haughtily. ‘Thought as much.’ Her eyes showed she had already passed judgement, no matter where they came from.

  As the bar began to fill, the men were introduced to a solicitor, the bank manager and the lady reporter, whose name was Ernestine Hill. Pockley was somewhat surprised and a little disappointed when the lady told him she was in town to cover the gold rush at the Granites rather than the scientists’ arrival. The promise of gold had turned into a disaster, but now the town was buzzing with the news of a murder. A body had been found near the Granites diggings and suspects were being held at the police station. There was a flicker of excitement in Ernestine Hill’s large fawn-like eyes as she lit a cigarette.

  Two of her fingers were the colour of egg yolk. Too much smoking, the doctor in Pockley thought. The young man also noticed that what he had mistaken for a frail posture earlier on, when he had caught a glimpse of her in the crowd, was actually wiry toughness. She was small and thin with inquisitive eyes and a pronounced mouth. A superficial observer could easily mistake her for quite a harmless soul—‘What a great asset for a journalist,’ Pockley thought. Dressed in trousers and a blouse, she blended in nicely with the outback crowd but, as soon as she opened her mouth, she betrayed herself. Her speech gave away an elite schooling. A little nervously, the reporter suddenly excused herself and sat down at a corner of the bar.

  She wrote in quick spasmodic jolts and would only tear herself away from the notebook to light up yet another cigarette. Hugh Barry nudged Pockley some time later and flicked his head towards the writing journalist. ‘Have you ever seen anyone smoke that much? She reminds me of the bloody Ghan on a run, all that billowing smoke.’

  After a few rounds had been drunk, the barmaid thawed and told the young men her name was Edna. She wondered aloud to Hugh Barry if the reporter was a spy. ‘You seen her writing? It’s all squiggly, like someone chopped the letters up. Not like any writing I’ve ever seen before. It looks I-rabic. She’s spying for the Afghans, I reckon.’

  ‘Some really strange people visit Alice, you know,’ she added after a moment’s thought. ‘Take you blokes. I nearly peed my pants when I heard that all these professors were coming thousands of miles into the desert just to measure Aborigine piss.’

  1

  The Foster-Lynams

  Ernestine Hill’s grandparents, Thomas and Catherine Foster-Lynam, were Irish Catholics. Her grandfather, Thomas Foster-Lynam, arrived in Australia on 26 June 1844 on the Briton. He was nineteen years old and according to his immigration papers could read but not write. Like most Irish immigrants, Thomas almost certainly arrived in Australia hungry and poor. He had fled his homeland as a free passenger to a land where too many of his countrymen had years before been dropped as convicts. Except for this fact, most Irish immigrants knew very little about their new country; they were simply happy to leave behind the bleak desperation of their lives in Ireland. Reasoning that nothing could be worse than living under English rule in their own country, the Irish, in great numbers, left their country in search of freedom. And although most Irish Catholic migrants regarded the English-ruled colony with some degree of suspicion, they adapted well and their political views tended to mellow over the years. Most were urban workers who experienced less official discrimination than they had in Ireland.

  Thomas Foster-Lynam was married twice. His first wife was Elizabeth Kennewel, who lived in New South Wales, and they had a child, Elizabeth, who died in infancy. Travelling up the coast to Rockhampton, Thomas met Catherine Ryan, who was twenty years his junior. They married, although it is unclear whether Thomas was divorced or a widower at the time. For the rest of his life he continued to travel periodically up and down the coast. His marriage to the young Catherine soon produced a
child, Mary, who died when she was only two years old, but in the same year, 1862, their second child, Margaret, was born. Nicknamed Madge, she would later become the mother of Ernestine Hill. Another seven children were born into the Foster-Lynam family: Ann, Thomas, Daniel, the second Mary, Denis, Katherine and Michael.

  In the second half of the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of Irish came to live in Australia, and today many Australians claim an Irish ancestor. At the time, three-quarters of Irish land was owned by the English Protestant conquerors, who leased it back to the Irish. If the rent wasn’t paid, livestock and furniture were taken and families ultimately faced eviction. For most of their existence, the Irish people had endured poverty and famine; Australia could give them a new future and especially hope. Thomas loved his new country and always placed Australia first and the Empire second.

  The European history of the area where the Foster-Lynams settled began in 1853, when the brothers Charles and William Archer, who were seeking grazing lands, visited the district that would become Rockhampton. They were acting on information from earlier expeditions by Ludwig Leichhardt and Thomas Mitchell, who had explored the area in 1844 and 1846 and thought it suitable land for grazing. The Archers founded Rockhampton on the Fitzroy River, which provided a convenient waterway to ship supplies for those who followed.

  The town’s first shop was built in 1856 and its first inn appeared six months later. The discovery in 1858 of gold at Canoona, about 50 kilometres to the north-west, resulted in a sudden influx of miners and prospectors. The rush was short-lived but the population increased dramatically. There was work to be found on the surrounding cattle properties but also in Rockhampton, which by now had grown into a town. Cattle was its main source of income and it became the beef capital of Queensland.

  The Foster-Lynam offspring were probably encouraged to learn to read and write, as most of them secured reasonably good jobs in their adult life. Religion was a big part of Irish life. Irish priests and bishops were arriving in Australia all the time with the intention of keeping the faith alive, and most Irish migrants were socially and politically aware.

  There was outcry and rage among the Irish whenever one of their countrymen was attacked by the authorities, or seemed to suffer discrimination. Madge was nine years old when Ned Kelly was roaming Victoria, his outlaw life becoming an echo of ‘old Ireland’—the common man struggling against oppression. But Ned was homegrown, and the police who finally captured him were as Irish as the outlaw himself. A romanticised version of his story spread throughout Australia and young Ned became a legend.

  By the time the Foster-Lynam children were adults their father, who had always had poor eyesight, was going blind. Thomas may also have suffered from mental issues. Whatever the cause, he became estranged from his family. He saw less and less of them, and finally cut himself off completely. Suffering from dementia and blindness, he eventually appeared on the streets of Brisbane as an organ grinder.

  He became a well-known figure in and around Brisbane, where he greeted the Queen Street pedestrians with the words: ‘Remember the music, ladies and gents.’ Old Tom was considered a nuisance by some Brisbanites, who claimed that the tunes he ground out on his ‘wheezy old organ’ were monotonous, but others appreciated his melodies and his ‘admirable disregard for the “eternal fitness of things” ’.

  During this period, Thomas’s family saw very little of him, although one of his sons, also called Tom, did help him from time to time. Thomas Foster-Lynam died in Brisbane at the age of 76. Presumably because they had lost track of him and no one knew his next of kin, his family did not claim his body and, as a result, his death certificate was compiled by a stranger and included one or two errors. Before his death, Thomas had acquired a considerable amount of property in Rockhampton. He owned a half-acre allotment at the corner of Fitzroy and West streets upon which two cottages had been erected. One was let and the other was occupied by his family. Thomas also owned a piece of land on William Street just opposite the showground. Nevertheless, he was buried in a pauper’s grave at Brisbane’s Toowong Cemetery on 7 July 1897. In an article in The Queenslander dated 17 July 1897, he was remembered as a Brisbane icon. Just one year later, in July 1898, his wife Catherine passed away, at the tender age of 57.

  For a woman in those days there were limited options in choosing an occupation. Madge had become a schoolteacher, a very respectable job for a woman at the time, and she taught at the state schools in Rockhampton and later in Brisbane and in Townsville.

  Madge, at the beginning of her teaching career, might have preferred to teach within the Catholic school system, which was established in 1860 in opposition to the state-funded schools, because of both her faith and the Catholics’ different approach to education. Catholic schools were run and taught entirely by nuns and had no funds to employ professional teachers. Madge would therefore have been able to work only in a state school. She must have thought highly of the Catholic school system, however, because she sent her daughter, Ernestine, mainly to Catholic schools and did teach at a Catholic school later in life.

  Madge remained single into her late thirties. This was not uncommon at the time, as the country was only sparsely populated and the men often worked on settlements and cattle stations. Two of her sisters were also unmarried; one of them, Mary, had become a nun and was living in a convent.

  It must have come as a surprise to everyone within the family when Madge introduced her fiancé, Robert Hemmings. He was a widower with a daughter, Ray. Madge and Robert met in Townsville, when Madge taught at the Ross Island State School.

  Robert had migrated from England as a child on a free passenger ticket with his parents, who now lived in Melbourne. He was a tailor by trade and involved in the Australian Natives’ Association (ANA) in Melbourne, so called because many of its all-white members had been born in Australia. The association played a leading role throughout the 1890s in the movement towards Federation; it also provided work, medical and funeral insurance for its members. The ANA claimed to avoid party politics, so some were surprised when they chose the prominent Victorian politician and ANA member Alfred Deakin to represent them in the Federation movement.

  Robert had been engaged in business for many years and had also worked as a freelance writer, publishing articles in the Melbourne Age. He later moved to Sydney for business and then to Queensland. He was working for Finney, Isles and Co. and G.R. Ryder Ltd as a commercial traveller when he met Madge. Being both English and Protestant, he initially must have represented the enemy to her family, but it would have helped that he was well known and highly respected in the Townsville area. Mixed-religion marriages could not be performed at the Catholic altar, an exclusion that some felt was a humiliation, but the couple married on 6 July 1898; Robert was 45 and Madge 37.

  Seven months later, on 21 January 1899, their daughter Mary Ernestine Hemmings was born. As a mix of English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, she must have found her life, even in infancy, filled with contradictions. Before she could talk, her parents thought she showed signs of great sensitivity and intelligence, and she was much loved and pampered by them both. Her literary talent emerged early and, as young as six, she wrote poetry with the help of her father. Robert and Margaret were both lovers of poetry and literature, so there was no lack of encouragement.

  Madge’s younger sister, Katherine, who became Ernestine’s Aunt Kitty or Kit, also indulged in the arts, writing poems and composing music. One of her poems, dedicated to Nellie Melba, was published in the Rockhampton Capricornian in 1909. The previous year, Katherine had written a waltz dedicated to her two nieces, Ray and Ernestine, called ‘Rayernie’. Aunt Kitty would play an important role throughout Ernestine’s life.

  Ernestine turned into a very shy little girl, softly spoken and with an imaginative mind. For her first years of schooling she attended the state schools in Brisbane and Cairns, but when she was nine and her parents left Cairns for Hermit Park, a suburb of Townsville, Ernestine was sent to St Joseph’s Convent School, located on the Strand.

  She was happy in Townsville, she later wrote. There was a mango tree in the garden that she and Ray climbed, pretending to be pirates as they looked out to sea. Her mother planted palm trees in the backyard, and when Ernestine visited the house in later years she noted how immense they had become, describing the sound of their large leaves rustling overhead as soothing whispers in the soft breeze.