Goodbye Carnegie Bill

In the wake of this week’s apology to orphans and “children of the empire”, I was telling the story of Bill Ferguson to Peter Severin from Curtin Springs Station.

Peter smiled as I provided a brief summary of Bill’s extraordinary life, but waited until I’d finished. “I knew Bill very well,” he said, surprising me. “He was a good bloke. He came to me and said he’d help me put a bore in, and off we went and did it. It was called New Moon Bore.”

The story was a perfect fit for Bill Ferguson, who took quiet pride in the fact that no matter where he stopped in his journey, he had tried to make a difference.

“Wherever I’ve gone, I’ve established something, “ Bill told me in an interview for ABC local radio in Alice Springs in 1997, “ whether it be windmills, stockyards, horse-breaking, anything like that. And I’m remembered by that mark. Oh, that’s old Bill. Old Carnegie Bill’s gone though there.”

Bill was taken from his mother as a baby in Scotland, kept by “the nuns’ in a Catholic orphanage and, while still a boy, shipped off to another in Bindoon, north of Perth in Western Australia.

Bindoon was a step up up from Scotland, where he recalls he was beaten “black and blue’’ by the nuns for trying to escape on numerous occasions. But Bill managed to break away and create his own destiny before he was a teenager.

“Farmed out’ by the orphanage in Perth to work for nothing, he was brought back by the farm owners on their way to take a holiday. They left him at the gate with a five kilometre walk to the orphanage. Bill waited till the car had gone, and walked away from the gates and into his life as a bushman.

Bill soon made friends with an Aboriginal boy, Henry Fraser, and found an acceptance he hadn’t known since he was taken from his mother. The pair worked at Carnegie Station, where most of the people in the district were Aboriginal.

“i’ve never lived with a white family in Australia. It was easier to get on with the Aboriginal people. They accepted me and I accepted the. When I was them, i accepted their ways. I didn’t push my ways.’’

Henry, Bill and Henry’s family then walked their way from Laverton to Ayers Rock, and Bill spent most of the rest of his life in Central Australia working on stations and around Alice Springs, where he stayed at Old Ilparpa, near the quarry there.

He met Patricia Button in 1974 and took on the job of helping her raise four children. ‘’He grew Neville , Nigel, Michelle and me like his own children,” Tahnee said at Bill’s funeral this year.

Bill got sick a few years ago. He was always lean, and I was impressed to see him pull out of it after wasting away to a gaunt, skeletal state. We’d met more than a decade earlier, when he was setting up the Tyeweretye Social Club. Apart from his dry humour, I most remember him making coffee by pouring boiling water on ground coffee in a jam jar.

Bill had a dream. It was the dream of a practical man, not an idealist.

He believed it was possible for Aboriginal people to drink without drinking themselves into a stupor every time they did. If there was no way of putting the alcohol genie back in the bottle, surely the only answer was to create places where people could learn to drink in a civilised way.

“He was passionate about it,’’ said Peter Severin. “He used to say to me how crazy it was that people could buy alcohol but had nowhere they could drink it.”

Bill’s long-term plan, which of course never eventuated, was to create four drinking clubs for Aboriginal people, in the north, south, east and west of Alice Springs. It was a radical concept, and in the face of opposition that continued to grow, he was forced to accept a flawed compromise: one club.

I recorded my ABC interview about his life as an orphan of the empire with Bill at the club, while he had still high hopes for its future. Families came and children played in the grounds. Meals were served and drunks were not. Yet, for a host of reasons, mostly beyond his control, the club failed. Bill was bitterly disappointed that the mark he had made on Alice Springs was abandoned and left to languish on Len Kittle Dive.

It still stands, unused, a scandalous waste of prime land and infrastructure, while political conversations about the need for controlled drinking venues for Aboriginal people come and go and police pour out hundreds of litres of “illegal’’ alcohol every weekend.

Bill left other legacies, however. Taken from his own family, Bill grew up four children – Neville, Nigel, Michelle and Tahneee “like his own” … as Tahnee put it at his funeral.

“He never said no. He gave family and friends things whenever they were down and out. he was a true friend to all who knew him, and a proud grandpa to Jymiel,’’ she said.