Photo SMH. 

Jakamara Nelson, who died last month, was six years older than the community in which he spent most of his 80 years: Yuendumu. The story of his life reflects the huge changes to people and policies that have taken place in Central Australia in those eight decades.

I was fortunate to meet this influential Warlpiri man a few times in his later life, when he shared with me parts of his life story. It began at the pastoral station of Mount Doreen, where Jakamara’s father was a sheep herder. He would have four wives and nine children, of whom Jakamara was the fifth.

The life of his people before the days of white settlement was still close in people’s memories, and Jakamara recalled stories told to him by his famous grandfather, Minyina.

These included tales of a bloody dispute between tribes in the early 1920s. As Jakamara related it, warriors from the north had come down in a raiding party to kidnap women while many of their men were taking part in a ceremony some distance away. When the men returned, they found many old people and children dead.

Jakamara’s grandfather was one of the scouts who successfully sought out the killers and avenged their deaths – as well as getting their women back and taking some of theirs.

A few years later, many Warlpiri were murdered in the dreadful Coniston Massacre, triggered by the killing of a single white man. So perhaps the concept of Yuendumu appealed to the Warlpiri as a safe haven as well as a reliable source of food, water and services.  Jakamara was six years old when his parents told him they were going to move to a rations depot that had been set up there by the government.

As Jakamara told me in an interview for the Central Land Council’s great oral history opus, Every Hill Got a Story: I can only remember my parents saying to me: “Look, the cattle station can’t support us. There’s no tucker, but they’re going to set up a ration depot, or a settlement” — where people from other communities as well, like cattle stations surrounding Yuendumu, were also asked to move in.

Also, people living in outlying countries – their homelands – heard about a place that was built there to bring in all the people, because there was easy access to food, medical needs and also education. So, gradually, people from outlying countries came into Yuendumu and established some community in those early years.

Jakamara’s descriptions of the early days at Yuendumu evoke the decisions people had to make virtually on the run, as they sought to balance elements of traditional culture with the rough serve of western civilisation that was suddenly on tap. Yuendumu offered people regular rations with the expectation of some work from the men in return. Some of this was in building, some in creating and maintaining several productive veggie gardens that supplied the community with fresh fruit and veggies. Meanwhile at night there were large corroborees, and people felt free to engage in traditional pursuits to some extent.

Around about September, October, when they had plenty of rain, that’s when the food was plentiful, like vegetation, that’s when we used to go on what they called walkabout. The extended family used to join up with us as well for an exodus, if I can put it that way, and we used to go on this big trip to certain places where there was plenty of water and plenty of game about, easy to pick. Bush tomatoes, berries, a lot of kangaroos and emus and turkeys.

It was a long time ago, 1947, 1948, 1949. I vividly remember we had a lot of camp dogs as well, that were trained to bring down kangaroos twice their size. It was a pretty good experience for me to watch all these dogs bringing the kangaroos down. They were very strong. We used to call them kangaroo dogs, because they’d been trained to do that particular job.

Another fascinating shift took place in the way people used their leisure time. In an interview for the National Library of Australia sport project, Jakamara described a game men played at Yuendumu when he was a boy, which had been played for generations.

The sport that Aboriginal people enjoyed most was Jabbu Jabbu.

It was sort of rags and grass tied up into a ball, like a ball of wool, four or five centimetres maybe more thick in circumference that they used to pass on to selected members of the team. There were two teams and they didn’t wear any numbers or guernseys, they were naked, but they knew automatically without asking what person to throw the ball to.

It was leisure time for the people when they had nothing to do. The ball was passed from one person to another. No kicking, just throwing and of course high flying. Men used to fly up there to hold on to the ball.

Jabbu Jabbu was on the way out, although it had been  good preparation for what was to come. In the 1950s, Yuendumu’s Baptist missionaries (whom Jakamara praised for the respect they held for Warlpiri culture) and government superintendents introduced the community to Australian Rules. They showed them how to do drop kicks and torpedo punts. In the 60s, along came Ted Egan as the superintendent, described by Jakamara as “the one who really drummed the style of Aussie Rules football in our minds”.

Before long, Jakamara was one of the community’s leading footballers. Dressed in khaki army shorts and white singlets, he and the rest of the Yuendumu team would hop aboard a Government-supplied truck on Friday afternoons and begin the five-six hour journey to meet their competitors in the inter-settlement competition that had been created.

Jakamara’s (and Yuendumu’s) first game was against Haasts Bluff at the age of 18.  He played ruck. As Jakamara recalled, Yuendumu won. It marked the beginning of Yuendumu’s ongoing love affair with football, with the Yuendumu Magpies competing with other communities between April and October and playing amongst themselves in five local teams in the hot months. In the coming decades, Jakamara would see football become a kind of social glue binding disparate communities together through often fractious relationships.

People who used to regard certain communities as being rubbish and people being awkward to live with and work with and play with, by lifting up their standard of football a lot of recognition and praise has been won by those people, who had been in the bad books of our people in central Australia. It’s a healing force, and a sort of forgiveness: people aren’t that bad. They’re very good at the sports, but they’re not good as far as public relations are concerned.

By this time Jakamara had received what he described as a “standard education” at Yuendumu, up to grade five. He recalled that he enjoyed school and he enjoyed attending – which was just as well, because truancy was not a viable option in those days.

The parents were told if the kids can’t go to school, you won’t get any rations. We used to get rations at the end of every week. If the kids missed out on school, the manager or superintendent in those days would be told that so-and-so’s children didn’t attend school, and they’d deduct  maybe tea or sugar. But we knew that if we didn’t go to school, parents would be punished, by not getting proper rations, like flour, tea and sugar, tin of meat, a bit of tobacco, chewing tobacco, jam, butter, those sort of things.

Jakamara got his first job apprenticed as a diesel mechanic in 1959 after he’d left home and taken part in ceremonies. He got extra education from the Baptist missionaries Tom and Daisy (Pat) Fleming. The tuition helped him to become one of the first Aboriginal teachers after he’d finished his apprenticeship.

He spent five years as a teacher, just as the age of self-determination was dawning. In Jakamara’s words: To a certain extent it didn’t work, and some of us just lived on and carried on with the life and accepted the responsibility given to us by the Government with this self-determination and the land rights thing, self-governance.

After five years, Jakamara gave up teaching to become an assistant community advisor. He was also active as a facilitator in the homelands movement, and, in the spirit of the commitment he had made to self-determination, eventually became an outspoken critic of the NT Intervention.  But as he looked back on his life ten years before he died, Jakamara saw himself as a middleman between two cultures, communicating from one side to the other because of his fluency in both cultures.

So, while he sometimes considered himself  “stuck in the middle”,  he emphasised this was “not to say that I should chuck away what I’ve been taught in the western world or forget about my culture.” Like many of his generation brought up under now discredited policies, he clearly valued not only the skills he had learned from both worlds, but also found a unity between those worlds in their spiritual perspectives — while acknowledging they were “kind of different”.

Getting back to the creation … we believe in God and we use the Tjukurpa. It covers everything, the history, the cultural significance, which lies in the history of our present day living, and we don’t ignore that. We sort of grow by that and make a comparison with the Christianity. We don’t know what God looked like. It hasn’t been explained to us. We just use that term Tjukurpa. We follow the dreamtime story of the Tjukurpa. 

Bill was born in London in 1910, and after his family moved to Perth when he was two, he later began travelling around the state, working in mines from when he was 18. After serving as an armorer  in World War Two, he moved to Tennant Creek in 1947 and worked in various jobs in the mining industry, including constructing shafts at Samuel’s Mine, developing the Whippet lease and managing the workers at Noble’s Nob Mine.

In his later years, living with his wife Marjorie at the Gunyah, Bill pursued his love of painting and music and became well-known for his landscapes of the Barkly region. When I met Bill he was more interested in showing me his “recording studio” which consisted of various tape recorders in his attic (where he also painted). Bill played a few instruments, most famously the piano accordion, and would lay down one track, and play it while quickly moving to another recorder to put down another track. On the day I met him he was recording some marching music for the coming Anzac Day parade in Tennant.

Bill had a quick and lively mind and a pretty sharp memory. He told me a few stories that afternoon, one of the most memorable relating to his role fighting the disastrous Campbell’s Store fire. This is how Bill remembered that terrible day in his own words:

I was surface foreman at the Noble Nob Mine in those days. I was in charge of all the unskilled labour in the mine. I’d built my house and was married by then. I got married in 1950. I told you how I came to get married. On my way to Queensland, I stopped here, put a couple of shafts down. My old mate died and I married his widow, with a ready-made family and a block of land, so I built a house on it, and that’s how I come to be here!

But anyway, you were talking about Campbell’s Fire. I had a bit of local notoriety for building septic systems, because in those days there was no sewerage. An old mate of mine was a tailor here,  Otto W., a German, one of the old pioneers here. I was installing his septic system and digging one of this trenches when I noticed smoke down the back lane. I was 200 or 300 yards away and I knew it was something more than somebody just burning rubbish in the back yard, so I dived down the lane and I found it was Campbell’s building. Arthur Campbell had converted a store into quite a big affair. He was agent for Shell and he had drums of spirit, and diesoline and petrol and he was the local agent for newspapers and all the rest of it. Anyway this place was on fire, and there was no water available immediately, but they did finally get a truck with a tank on it, and a pump. And of course I and the others got hold of the business end of the hose. We were waiting for the water to come through and the pump was giving some trouble. Finally it got going and we pointed the water at the base of this fire.

I noticed this greenish blue flame and I said to a mate next to me, Al MacDonald:   “That looks like a fracture burn.” Fracture is the prospector’s name for dynamite. It’s in sticks. I said that looks like fracture burning. Because it will burn, it doesn’t explode, it’ll burn. It only explodes if it’s given a sharp shock with with a detonator.

Al MacDonald said: “Yes that’s where he keeps his weekend fracture.” That’s about all I can remember. I got blown out in the middle of the road. My first impression was  of a tram coming down the hill and me trying to stop it. I must have been blown about 40 or 50 feet, and an empty drum followed me and hit me — that’s what broke one of my hips, and I also had some internal trouble with shrapnel that went in.

I do remember landing on the road and then of course I passed out. And an old friend of mine, the local schoolmaster, realised it was more than just a transient injury and he organised me to the hospital. There was three of us. One chap died, another chap lost a leg, another chap, his profession was a journalist and he lost his right hand. Another chap, strangely enough — it wasn’t anything to do with the fire, he was standing back but apparently he had his mouth open at the time of the explosion, and his stomach was ruptured!

Anyway the ordinary Adelaide to Darwin plane was due, the old DC3, and they got all the passengers off it and put us on. They took the chairs out and put the stretchers in it. There were eight of us as I remember. One died on the way up. It was late in November.

About three weeks later, after the operations I had to have, I was wheeled around the wards with a  piano accordion, playing music for the kids in the children’s ward at the Darwin Hospital!

It’s a long time ago, and the memory’s a bit dim now, but it’s an experience I wouldn’t like to go through again.

Bill Fullwood died a few years after this was recorded in 2005, aged 95. This picture shows the attic in The Gunyah, where he painted and made music in the house he built from scrap iron. It was taken last year.

Alice Online is pleased to publish the eulogy to the late Peter Fannin, as presented at his funeral last month by his grand-neice Omanisa Ross. Peter, who died last month, will be widely remembered as a botanist who shared his knowledge of Central Australian plants with thousands of visitors to Uluru, and also as one of the key figures in the development of the Papunya Tula art movement.  But as Omanisa’s eulogy reveals, these were only two aspects of Peter’s persona; musician, teacher, advocate, philanthropist and philosopher were among the many others. This picture shows Peter with one of his nieces, Kveta Deans, and her portrait of her uncle, which had pride of place at his funeral service. Among those privileged to have known this former Territorian of the Year, it seems to capture his intrepid, inquiring and generous nature.

Peter was born in 1930, in a copper mining camp in Tasmania, in one of only six wooden houses on a platform built into the side of a mountain. The nearest town was Rosebery. There were no roads leading from the camp into town, so when Margaret went into labour with Peter, her husband Arthur had to run a good long way into town to fetch the doctor, along a dirt track beside a steep ravine. It was pouring rain and he had to use a lantern to light his way in the dark.

Peter Evans had a two year old brother named David, and four year old sister called Anne. Margaret umpired hockey games in her spare time, blowing her whistle and running back and forth in a sea of mud covered in handfuls of snow, while Peter watched from his pram, and Anne and David chased each other over the seats.

When Peter was two years old, the Evans family moved back to Melbourne from whence they’d come, eventually settling near Kew Junction, a busy Melbourne intersection. Peter had an adventurous spirit, even at this age, and was renowned for wandering off. One day, when he was three years old, the entire family set out in search of him, calling his name. They found one of his shoes in the middle of the busy intersection, and they went into every shop along the street, asking: “Have you seen a little red-haired boy?” Eventually they found him in the barber’s shop, sucking on a lollypop and getting his hair cut.  

In 1935, when Peter was five years old, he almost lost his mother to post-pregnancy septicaemia, which had a 99% mortality rate at the time. For six months, while Margaret was in hospital fighting for her life and Arthur was working long hours to pay the hospital bills, the children were cared for by Margaret’s mother Lucy, who came from Tasmania to look after Peter, Anne, David and baby Bill.

The family moved quite a few times before they eventually settled in Burwood, having lived in nine houses over nine years. Peter enjoyed the four-mile bike ride from Burwood to Box Hill for school each day, especially the very steep hill he careened madly down, narrowly avoiding being hit by oncoming traffic. Later he joined the boy scouts and discovered the joys of bush walking and camping, and when he became patrol leader, Peter changed name the name of his group from “Woodpeckers” to a more suitably Australian “Eagles”.

In 1940, when Peter was 10 years old, his little sister Helen was born. Helen grew up watching her adored older brothers cleverly pulling electrical devices apart and putting them back together again, and making bikes and gadgets like crystal radios, with a wire attenna touching a crystal to catch a signal. “He was a very kind brother to me,” says Helen. “He and Dad, when I was four and a half, made me a pram for my dolls, out of plywood. I also remember him showing me quicksilver, or mercury. My older brothers loved experimenting with chemistry, which all went fine until one day there was an explosion…  After that, Dad built them a purpose-made lab in the back yard so they could dabble without blowing the house up.”

Peter’s parents had met while studying metallurgy at university. They both had an interest in science and a passion for higher education, which they encouraged in their children, but when it came Peter’s turn for high school Peter dug his heels in and said “I don’t want to go to high school like Anne and David. I don’t want to follow after them like peas out of a pod. I want to go to Tech!”

Helen tells me her parents initially supported Peter’s decision but everyone at Box Hill Tech said “He’s too bright to be here! He should be at high school.” So they sent him to high school but he refused to do any work, and in the end they gave up and sent him back to Box Hill Tech. From here, he went on to Melbourne Tech, where he studied electrical engineering. Peter excelled in technical drawing and was dux of the school in mathematics, a top scholar who quietly pulled his teachers aside to offer corrections when they made mistakes in their calculations.

When Peter was 15, just after the war in 1945, his youngest brother Owen was born. Two years later Peter’s father took over as assistant superintendent of Port Kembla Copper Works and his younger siblings moved to NSW with their parents. Peter, Anne and David stayed in Melbourne to continue their studies. Tech was chugging along just fine, but then Peter discovered the piano teacher who lived across the road, and her piano…. Enchanted, he decided he’d like to become a composer and study music, so he moved in with his parents in NSW and went to Wollongong High School so that he could go to university after all. Peter’s sister Helen points out that for a 19-year old to do this at that time in history took a lot of courage, but in spite of that, he was placed sixth in the state for physics.

After graduating, Peter enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts at Sydney University, and did a double major in maths and music. He switched from piano to recorder, which was all the rage at the time, and began playing in small groups alongside violinists and pianists. In 1951 the University of Sydney awarded him the Frank Albert Prize for his musical prowess, and after completing his degree, Peter did a post graduate diploma in teaching. Peter’s first job was a year spent as a library assistant in the NSW State Library, including six months as the librarian at Gladesville Mental Hospital. In his spare time, he worked on musical compositions and a thesis on the physics of acoustics, with a special interest in the electronics of speaker systems. He also enjoyed bushwalking and rock climbing – without safety gear of course – in the Royal National Park in Sydney.

From 1956 to 1967, Peter worked as a maths and science teacher in various schools throughout NSW, with a brief three-year stint at the Bureau of Meteorology in the early ’60s. In 1966, Peter’s beloved older sister Anne moved to Alice Springs to work as a school doctor, and Peter decided to follow her. The Beatles had been going strong for most of the ’60s and there were various student riots. Things were in turmoil and Peter just wanted a quiet life. While teaching in the Riverina and Deniliquin Peter had discovered he enjoyed working with Aboriginal students and admired the fine artistic skills that shone clearly though in the drawings they did for science projects. He also liked the wide horizons and the space of the Riverina with the bush all around, so he was naturally attracted to inland Australia and Aboriginal people were part of that magic.

Peter initially got work teaching at Alice Springs High School in 1967, but lasted only two terms. Peter absolutely adored children and was a brilliant teacher when children wanted to learn, but the school students weren’t particularly interested in maths and Peter wasn’t inclined to discipline them. Disheartened, Peter resigned and pursued a growing interest in the native plants of central Australia, first working as a nurseryman at the local council for a few months, then as an assistant Park Ranger out at Uluru, where he climbed the Rock and fell in love. “I’ve found my spiritual home!” he declared in letters to family.

In 1969, Peter began working with his brother-in-law Victor as a chainman with the Surveyors department, and recommenced the science degree he had begun before coming to Alice Springs, studying by correspondence. In his spare time, Peter collected and propagated seeds. The following year, Peter went back to NSW to finish his science degree on campus, focusing his attention on botany. “Efforts have been directed to starting a commercial nursery,” he wrote in a job application to National Parks in central Australia. “Some hundreds of fuchsias are now established at my present address, and early results with several casuarina species are promising.”

Peter completed his science degree in 1971 with a new name, having changed it part way through from Evans to Fannin, because there were far too many Peter Evans in the world, and his mail (and pay) kept getting mixed up with someone else’s. Unfortunately, the only work available for a graduate botanist in Central Australia was school teaching, and this time it was Aboriginal children at Papunya. ‘I was given the post primaries, a secondary class.’ Peter told me years later. “I was reasonably good at Luritja by that stage and by using their language, and writing in their language, we got along quite well.”

Peter shared a house with Geoff Bardon who was instrumental in getting the Papunya Tula art movement going, and quickly became enthused with Geoff Bardon’s art project. When Geoff’s health broke down a few months after Peter arrived, Peter took over and by the end of 1972, became the first manager of Papunya Tula Artists. Anthropologist Dick Kimber believes that the artists responded to Peter’s interest in plants by giving greater attention to their totemic ‘bush tucker’ plant foods. Dots were a conventional means of depicting plants in the Aborigines’ ground paintings.

Peter got the artists painting on canvas instead of board, coordinated the first overseas exhibition of Aboriginal art, and was instrumental in helping resolve conflicts between the central desert mob and the more southerly groups regarding the depiction of sacred items in paintings. In the argument about whether to reveal or conceal, Peter insisted that the artists be allowed to resolve the issue amongst themselves, rather than having the government funded Aboriginal Arts Board dictate what they should paint.

As Vivien Johnson points out in Papunya Painting, Out Of The Desert, being the man with the Papunya Tula cheque book put a lot of pressure on Peter’s friendship with the painters. “Judging by the volume of correspondence in the AAB files, Fannin spent nights in Papunya hunched over his typewriter, punching out a steady stream of beseeching letters to the AAB for more funds to bail out the struggling enterprise.”  In one of my favourite letters from this time, Peter wrote:

“Australian Aboriginal cultures differ from one another quite a lot. They have in common, however, a low regard for material possessions. Folk villains stole not gold or luxuries, but sacred objects. Heroes sometimes destroyed villains, but they are more often remembered for creating people, complete with ideal personalities, and for devising ritual. In central Australia, formulating of the marriage rules, and the ideal marriages that became possible as a result, are remembered with particular affection…

“The potential value of the Papunya Tula Art movement is twofold. It can help the world at large to gain insight into a non-materialistic society at work. As humanity simply will not survive unless the present dominant materialistic culture is modified, it is hard to over-estimate the value of such models. From an Aboriginal point of view, proper respect for their treasures, as represented in this art, could help the new culture that they must devise to be better than the despair and dependence which is being forced upon them.”

Peter left Papunya three and a half years later in mid-1975, in a state of nervous exhaustion, after doing a job that is now considered hard work for four people. In a letter to his niece a few months later, he asked her to thank her then boyfriend. “I hope, Kvet, you occasionally get around to telling Russell he’s wonderful. If Russell hadn’t gone out and collected these paintings when I was in no fit state to collect anything, I’d have nothing to show for a perfectly good nervous breakdown. Altogether there are fifty or so of them. They’re certainly one of the best Papunya collections extant. I hope they’ll always be there to brighten up the lives of all people and to point out the respect due to Aboriginal culture.”

After recovering his health, Peter began working as a labourer and field assistant at Uluru Kata- Tjuta in 1976, and established their first informal herbarium. In 1978 he started what were to become internationally famous plant walks, inspiring a love and fascination for plants in visitors of every age, who came from all over the world to see the Rock.

“I’ve invented a tiptoe through the daisies,” he wrote, in one of his letters to family. “I take the customers out for an hour each day and try to tell them a bit about what you can eat and what you’d better not eat, and how marvellous the Desert Oak and straggly old Mulga are, and why ants are wonderful, and how hot the dirt gets even ten feet down, and a great deal else.”

Peter loved going on treks into the most isolated places of inland Australia. Sometimes he went with friends and family, like the 1977 expedition he made into the Western Australian outback with his sister Anne and her husband Victor, as Anne described this journey in a letter to her mother. “Darkness fell,” wrote Anne, “and Pete went scouting with his torch and out of the darkness I heard ‘Bloody hell!’ which I have never heard Pete say before and I waited for him to emerge from the dark, not quite sure which kind of ‘bloody hell’ it was. He came bringing a branch with gum nuts the size of a teacup: absolutely incredible! We certainly were in Western Australia and couldn’t help wondering what the flowers would have looked like! They were on the most nondescript of the mallees, as if to make up for its ordinariness. So it was christened ‘Bloody Hell!’. There was no other way to describe it.”

This shared expedition was one Peter remembered fondly for many years, but most of Peter’s expeditions into the inland were solo affairs. “Anyone is a distraction when I’m talking to my desert, so I like to go alone,” Peter explained in one of the many letters he wrote on his typewriter beside the campfire at night. His mother adored these campfire letters that Peter sent her, and she showed them to her friend, editor of Women’s Weekly. There was some talk of having them published for a while, but Peter wasn’t keen on editing out his more technical botanical observations, and decided against it.

My Aunt Kveta, the artist who created this incredible portrait of Peter, wanted to read to you from one of Peter’s campfire letters, but she couldn’t be here today, so I’m going to read it for her…..

During his 39 years at the Rock, Peter lived for most of this time on the Aboriginal community of Mutitjulu. When I was a child, Peter would come to Alice at the beginning of the school holidays to collect my mother Shell, my brother Kim and myself in his EJ Holden, Flowerpower, and take us back to his home. Getting bogged and unbogged was our favourite part of every trip to and from the Rock. Peter was convinced Flowerpower did it on purpose to keep us entertained, and I grew up thinking everyone spoke to, and about, their cars as though they were alive.

“I believe there is a spirit in everything,” Peter explained. “And with my good Irish ancestry I call these spirits leprechauns, and the destiny that shapes our end, as far as I can see, seems to delight in tweaking the nose of people who it’s shaping…

“Shakespeare says it best: ‘There is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.’ I think all of us experience embarrassment losing something around the house and for the third or fourth time searching, there the bloody thing is, in full view. According to me and the leprechaun theory, you’ve got some intelligence that laughs like mad when this happens. Heaven only knows what the actual reality is.”

As his biographer, Peter gave me access to his diaries. Inside the covers I found a strange mix of complex maths equations alongside technical drawings for various contraptions he was designing, musical inscriptions and a strange fairy tale about bears eating porridge and a cat in a box that wasn’t alive or dead. “I can’t understand a word he’s saying!” I complained to my daughter at the breakfast table one morning. She took the diary from me and after a moment of quiet reading, she handed it back. “It all makes sense to me,” she shrugged. “We learned about the Goldilocks Puzzle and Schrodinger’s Cat in philosophy class.”

As children, my brother and I delighted in Peter’s telescope, binoculars, microscope and magnifying glasses but our favourite toy was Peter’s yellow ultralight glider, Flap. We would fight over the driver’s seat, pretending we were pilots, pulling levers and pressing buttons. Peter applied his creative engineering skills to the task of modifying every gadget he owned, and Flap was no exception. Reading through his glider stories in his letters to friends, I’m sometimes amazed he made it into ripe old age! “Test flying the modified plane will, of course, be done with a lot of care,” he wrote to family. “First a lot of time no higher than I’m prepared to fall, and then a lot over 1000 feet with a good parachute at the ready.” His friends and family weren’t convinced. “Peter you had better perfect your anti-gravity machine before you commit Flap to the air,” wrote his friend Hal Wise. “There are so many ultralight planes falling out of the sky these days that a man has to carry an umbrella for protection.”

Peter’s living arrangements were very humble and he was entirely comfortable roughing it. When my grandparents planned a visit to the Rock while Peter was away flying, he left a letter for them along with a key to his caravan:  “There’s still a big hole in the caravan floor and the mice and black-biting-ants are quite vigorous. By all means trap and spray a few if you like. I’ve nothing in theory against it; I just don’t myself. I’d have to write a book to tell you how to light the temperamental old refrigerator. So don’t try. Caravan and tent cooler work OK, but tent is still uninhabitable from 10am to 9pm.” In 1989 Peter got lavish and upgraded to a demountable, affectionately dubbing it ‘the donga’, with one of the major bonuses being that his emu friend, who had a fondness for weetbix and banana skins, couldn’t climb the steps.

In 1998, Peter finally managed to place his collection of Aboriginal art in an ethical public collection with a good reputation. I spoke with Peter’s sister Helen a few nights ago and she recounted a conversation she’d recently had with her brother Owen about how truly remarkable their brother was. The reality is, Peter could have sold his collection to overseas buyers for $5 million. Instead, he sold the collection to the Australian National Gallery for $1 million, because he was determined to keep the collection together, and in Australia, for all Australians to enjoy. To cap it off, Peter gave a very large percentage of that 1 million back to the artists and their families, setting a precedent regarding royalties being given to Aboriginal artists. I was commenting to family recently that Peter truly had found his place, people and purpose at Mutitjulu, because he didn’t change anything about his life after he became a millionaire. “That’s not true,” one family member commented. “He started having two bananas a day instead of one!”

In 2011, Peter was included in the Who’s Who in Australia and a few years later, in August 2013, the director of National Parks sent Peter a letter acknowledging his work as a ranger and volunteer in providing natural history expertise, assisting in the replanting of native species and weed removal programs, as well as the development and maintenance of the parks herbarium: “Your support for the Mutitjulu Primary School and the parks Junior Ranger program has been invaluable, and your plant walks for visitors at the Cultural Centre during the winter months on Thursdays and Sundays are widely appreciated – not just by the visitors! Your contribution and commitment to the joint management of the park has been exemplary, teaching Anangu, park staff and thousands of visitors about the natural history of the park. As Director of National Parks, I would like to express my sincere appreciation for your dedicated contribution to the park.”

In 2015, Peter had to leave his beloved park and move to Old Timers at Alice Springs for health reasons. It was a difficult couple of years for Peter, but that didn’t stop him leaving a trail of kindness in his wake. Peter gave generous donations to the Royal Flying Doctor Service, the Purple House, Olive Pink Botanic Garden, and countless others. Most importantly, Peter decided to leave his fortune to Papunya Tula Artists, bringing the money full circle, back around to where it started, bringing it home. Peter was always generous, even before his windfall million, as he liked to call it. He supported all of his family, especially our careers and our creative dreams, and he was always there for us when we really needed him, with his family emergency fund.

We had a tricky time scheduling this funeral so that as many of Peter’s family as possible could be present with him on this sad day, but there were loved ones who couldn’t make it, many of whom sent flowers, like Peter’s cousin Jane Pittman and the Pittman family, Peter’s friend Derek Roff and the Roff family, Peter’s niece Kveta and the Deans family, Peter’s sister Helen, her son Nevin who is Peter’s godson, and her daughter Emily, who is in England doing amazing research work with a WHO Fellowship. When she heard the news about Peter’s death, she wrote to us saying “I’m so sorry that such a strong, ethical, kind, clever, dedicated and loving member of our family has been lost to us. But I’m so grateful to have known him and so utterly inspired by Peter himself and his self-determined approach to life and death. It feels like it’s now up to the rest of us to continue to carry the mantle forwards in terms of making the world a better place. Kind of scary! We are now front line. Tomorrow I will submit a paper that will hopefully make a significant difference to a newly described pre-natal and early onset genetic muscle disorder. I will see if I can get this paper dedicated to Peter.”

The date chosen for today’s funeral has also meant that Peter’s Papunya Tula family couldn’t be present, as much as they dearly wanted to be. In my mind and heart, I’m imagining a bridge of light stretching between here and Darwin, where our Papunya Tula mob are gathered for the opening of a very special art exhibition that celebrates the magic and beauty that Peter fell in love with all those many years ago. I feel as though Peter’s spirit is in both places today. I’d like to read you a message from the Directors, shareholders, artists and staff of Papunya Tula Artists:

“Please accept from all of us here at Papunya Tula Artists our sincere condolences and heartfelt best wishes today as we farewell our dear friend Mr. Peter Fannin.

“Today we are in Darwin for the opening of an exhibition that in so many ways reminds us of Peter himself. It seems a beautiful and somewhat fateful coincidence that these two dates have aligned, but at the same time it’s left us with a sense of loss and distance between the two occasions. Please know that today we will be celebrating Peter’s spirit here in the Top End along with you all there in Alice Springs.

“It’s commonly known that Peter’s involvement with Papunya Tula Artists goes directly back to the very beginnings of the Company and the Western Desert art movement itself. Through his work as the Art Coordinator in the early 1970’s, Peter was fundamental to the development of the Company and the creation of artworks produced at the time, many of which are now internationally acclaimed.

“Peter was passionate about Western Desert art and this passion was matched only by his respect for the Aboriginal people themselves who he held in the highest regard.

“Long after he finished working for the Company Peter maintained his interest in the goings-on of Papunya Tula Artists. He would regularly visit the gallery to catch up on recent events, and took great pride and fulfillment in the continued success of the Company. In particular the generational shift that had occurred since his time with the early artists, and knowing that their sons and daughters were now practising artists themselves gave Peter a great amount of pleasure.

“Peter was very concerned with the living standards in remote communities and matters relating to the social social welfare of Aboriginal people. These were issues very close to Peter’s heart. He took great interest in projects that Papunya Tula Artists had established, none more so than the remote dialysis unit which Peter supported wholeheartedly – both financially and in kind. This also applied to the Kintore Swimming Pool to which Peter made donations through the Company to assist its staffing and maintenance.

“Papunya Tula Artists would like to acknowledge the tremendous support offered by Peter over the decades and sincerely thank him for all he’s done. No one in the Company’s history has been so generous.

“He will forever be remembered by us as a humble and honourable man of the absolute highest integrity.”

To finish with I’d like to leave you with some words from some of Peter’s oldest and dearest friends, the Rogers family in NSW, who have known Peter, who they call “Red Fred”, for 51 years:

Although Peter came from the coast here, he belonged to the centre

His heart, his soul, his spirit, his mind

Peter was tied to the dust in the centre

He was tied to the heat of the earth and the cold of the rocks,

the birds that soared and the emu that pecked him and pinched his tucker

the laughter and the sadness, the tears

His greatest hope was to see Lake Eyre when it flooded

He wanted to drive down when it flooded

He wanted to see the water spill into that salt pan

He wanted to see it go lapping across the dry parts

And get reflected in the sun and the wind

He wanted to see the wind touch that water across what was dry saltpan

Peter wasn’t earth-bound, he was so far above us. Peter soared, and in soaring Peter belonged so much to the people he loved. Peter was the freest spirit.

Now you’re free, Red Fred to go wherever you want, Fly free Red Fred.

Love from all our family, the Rogers.

Author Russell Guy will be guest speaker at Author Talk at the Alice Springs Library is next Thursday, 4th June at 5PM

No armchair social critic or Facebook cut-and-paste philosopher, author Russell Guy has clearly had his perspectives hammered out on the anvil of experience.

As revealed in his recently released novel, Dry Crossing, the poetic imagination and eye for life’s oddities that made Guy’s radio play What’s Grafton To You is Rangoon To Me a cult classic has been shaped by decades as a journeyman on roads less travelled.

Dry Crossing is in itself a road novel that takes us on a journey of a lifetime. We share the ride with its chief protagonist, Dizzy Roundabout, the only non-Aboriginal member of a rock and roll band apparently resigned to endless touring. Dizzy wants more

Guy’s sketches of life and landscape in the inland are often haiku-like, eschewing the beauty-spot vernacular associated with outback-as-tourist-destination and powerfully evoking its increasingly unsung glories: the birds and the stars, for example. Other times he departs from the narrative to linger longer in scenes that simultaneously illuminate Dizzy’s burnt-out state of mind and the desolation of humans and human settlements left behind by the mainstream. One of the book’s most memorable scenes takes place in a wrecker’s yard, as Dizzy ponders the poignant left-behinds of an unknown traveller.

These slow-downs, accompanied by flash-backs, punctuate the lively pace of the narrative in first half of the book and prepare us for Ziggy’s eventual crash as he collides with the consequences of his unresolved contradictions. Up until that point we get a sympathetic and often amusing portrayal of the manic lifestyle that keeps Ziggy on the roundabout. The conversations and events that pepper the story are convincingly rendered.

Guy has chosen to write a short novel, probably for the sake of maintaining momentum, and leaves us wanting to know more about his lost love and the other members of the band. But more detail might have cluttered the storyline, which strays occasionally but always quickly returns to Dizzy.

Dizzy’s tale has unfashionable themes that may become fashionable again as society reevaluates its shallow infatuation with atheism and recognizes the inexplicable gift of grace and the need for meaning and redemption in our individual lives. – D.R.

A little more than three years later, our dreams were in tatters. I remember weeping as one of my cousins expressed his satisfaction that Gough had been sacked by the Governor-General and his hope that the Australian electorate would vindicate the dismissal. I could not begin to imagine how someone I knew to have a good heart and a kind soul could entertain such an obviously wrong-headed thought. The next day, full of emotion and revolutionary fervour, I hopped on the back of a truck full of suburban anarchists, waving angry placards and heading for one of the mass rallies that were being held all around the country to protest the infamy of Sir John Kerr’s action.

All was in vain.

Yesterday, to my surprise, my tears flowed again when I heard that the man who rocked our lives had received his final dismissal. It was many years since my free subscription to Australia’s biggest political fan club had lapsed. Indeed, I have often sympathised with codgers around my age or a little older bemoaning the perceived deterioration in Australia’s social fabric that Gough had begun: the welfare mentality, the countless couples who have split their families without ever trying to work through their problems, the national addiction to credit at individual and corporate levels, and the bitter schisms between Australians over issues that only proliferate with the years. These are widespread phenomena in the western world, but, say the codgers, it was Gough who brought us up to speed with the handcart to hell.
They are exaggerating, of course. There were also many things we welcomed then, however cautiously that are now things that most of us would fight to keep: Aboriginal land rights, national medical insurance, legal aid, and fault-free divorce, to name but a few. Gough and his band of merry men pointed their arrows at worthy targets that had had too many days in the sun. But unfortunately Robin Hood was not Whitlam’s role model. Rather, this classical scholar saw himself as Gough the Great, slashing through all the Gordian knots he could see as quickly as possible. He wielded a two-edged sword, elating and deflating millions at the same time as he carved out a place in history for himself.

As he performed, ordinary Australians had to deal with phenomena many of them had never encountered: 20 per cent inflation and skyrocketing unemployment. Whitlam not only took from the rich to give to the poor (who increased in numbers because of his policies), he simply printed money to finance his Government’s three-year spending spree. His government’s financial management practices were incompetent and irresponsible.

On the night Gough died, SBS’s Lateline replayed an interview with convicted US spy Christopher Boyce in which Boyce criticises Australians for allowing “the CIA’s man,” Sir John Kerr, to sack Gough. The claims are all part of the Gough legend, and so many secular humanists seem to need such legends to sustain them, so it wasn’t surprising to see Boyce getting a replay. Once I would have cheered him on. Now I understand how my cousin felt all those years ago. Gough knew the rules; the conservatives had control of the upper house, however Machiavellian the process they’d used to cement it. Gough knew he would lose a second double dissolution for sure, so, like a spoilt child, he threw a tantrum and refused to do the right thing. Then it was Kerr’s turn to cut Gordian knots. In the process that resulted, it was not Kerr but Whitlam who exacerbated the deep divisions that had been created over the previous three years, by impetuously encouraging deluded followers like me to “maintain your rage”. Thousands did just that, but just as many, or more, continued to rage against Gough himself.

Gough Whitlam delivered much-needed reforms. In that sense he was the “right man in history”. But he harmed both his party and his country because he was unable to deliver true leadership to either. Second time around, my tears were for the opportunities Gough wasted as much as out of nostalgia for the tremendous excitement and sense of magic and possibility that he had briefly created. It was a wild little ride, and I thank you Gough.

Dave Richards

Jason Shilton

Then there is one other type of call I get.
Again it’s from the desert.
“HELLO” I say bright and fresh and into the day
then “hello” I say
softer this time, when i realise
it is the caller who never speaks.

I listen and wait, humbly reverent
to a tenuous link over awesome distance
for this caller only seems to want to hear my voice, to confirm that
I’m here.

I can never be irritated or impatient or hang-up
I’ve got open desert on the line – the wind blows softly out there
“Hello” I whisper hoping they’ll speak and show their identity.
A few more precious heartbeats
then I hear the gentle click of the receiver
carefully and secretly replaced by a child’s hands.

Neil Murray, 1999

In 2009 my then girlfriend and I got jobs as youth workers for The Mt Theo Program, a substance misuse organisation based in Yuendumu – one of the Northern Territory’s largest Indigenous communities. Yuendumu is a Warlpiri community about 300 km north west of Alice Springs.

I turned nineteen two weeks before we headed out. I’m not sure exactly why we decided to do it – a combination of youthful enthusiasm and white Australian guilt, perhaps. I’ve always had a distinct distaste for ‘volunteer work’. Maybe I am just a cynic, or maybe years of reading my parents’ The New Internationalist magazines left me feeling that there were better ways to do good then raising $7000 to go to Timor and put together a hut. But, as a child of former bush workers it felt like an obligation to see the bush properly before I left for university.

I’d like to think that we went in with realistic expectations. We were doing it for ourselves, and any good we did was a bonus. Living in Alice gives you a grounded expectation of bush work.

We were out there for around nine months, five of them in Yuendumu and four in Nyirrpi, a neighbouring community of 200 people, running our own stand-alone youth program. Because most of the young men I worked with were my age or older (even the much younger men looked like they had years on me) I pretended to be 25.

Over the course of those nine months I worked twelve hour days, attended funerals and sorry business, drove close to 15,000 kilometres and helped stop one attempted suicide. I contracted swine flu and pneumonia, and my partner, my dog and I were exceptionally lucky to survive when our Hilux rolled about two hundred kilometres out of Alice.

A number of young men and women helped lead the community programs. I remember one of my favourite workers not showing up one day. He was one of the guys I relied upon to help keep the younger kids in line and to set a good example. When I asked where he was, one of the others told me he was back in prison after smoking too much gunja and beating his wife in a jealous rage.

To say that working in Yuendumu was a formative experience is an understatement.

When we left in December to start university in Brisbane we told ourselves that we would be back. Mt Theo needed holiday relief workers during school holidays and we planned to go back, make some extra money and see our friends during the following year.

It never happened. Uni and city life got in the way, my partner and I split up and I moved south to Melbourne. Every time I go home to Alice I think about going back out to Yuendumu for a visit, but I never quite make it. The further away I get from the bush, the harder it is to make myself go back.

While I was in Yuendumu I worked with a man named Evan. He also went by ‘Pulunja’, ‘Cold Beer’ and a host of other names. We used to go to the rehab outstation together on weekends to look after the kids on court ordered sentences there.

After I left Yuendumu, my phone would ring every two weeks or so, usually from a blocked number.

“Hello?”

“Ay Jukamurra! It’s Pulunja! I’m in Alice Springs!”

“Ay Pulunja, yuwayi – how are you?”

As soon as I know it is him I lapse unconsciously back into a accented mix of Warlpiri and English.

“I’m good, is too hot here! Where are you?”

“I’m in Melbourne.”

“Melbourne? You go to the footy on the weekend?”

Pulunja has called me every couple of weeks for the past three years. We rarely talk for very long – usually about Mt Theo, the weather, or the footy – and occasionally we don’t speak for months. After a particularly long absence I messaged a friend in Yuendumu to see if he was ok. He had been in hospital. A week later he called to tell me he was all right.

He calls from mobiles and pay phones, from Alice to Nyirrpi or communities in WA. It is almost impossible to get in touch with him, although I admit I haven’t really tried, relying on the fact that he will eventually call. The last time we spoke he told me he was organising a trip to Melbourne to see me, and that I needed to organise a tour of the MCG for him. I promised I’d do my best.

Our last conversation was about three months ago, and I’m a little worried. I hope he is ok. Pulunja is my last tangible link to the desert. I hope I hear from him again soon.

This article has also been published in The Big Issue

In their years at the Alice Springs Steiner School, the 12 year-olds in Noel Ferry’s class have always  had at least one treat to look forward to on the first day of  every term: What has Noel put on the blackboard this time?

Noel’s blackboard draft for third term

One of the pillars of Steiner or Waldorf education is the child-teacher relationship, and Noel has managed to fulfil the Waldorf ideal of staying with the same class from year one through to year six. As he explains in this short film, those six years have been as much a journey for him as they have for his students – and in one sense a second childhood, with the kind of education he would have liked first time around.

The milestones of this journey have been the chalked artworks that have appeared and disappeared , sometimes monthly. As you will see, each has taken days to plan and execute, and seconds to erase. – D.R.

And Dark Was The Night

As he transformed the opening of Alice Springs artist Moss’s retrospective exhibition at Araluen Arts Centre last Friday night into a moving pageant, Jungian psychologist Craig San Roque engagingly honoured the role of the artist in our lives, illuminating what is right of front us but so often remains unwitnessed .

He also reminded us of the power of art itself, standing outside the artist, who becomes a conduit for messages that reverberate timelessly, in many forms, though all human cultures.

If you couldn’t make it to the opening, this video captures some of the feeling of this special event.

Craig’s “direction”  was inspired by a scene from Russian film director Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia – a film which also had a profound effect on Moss, who adapted  its most famous scene for his painting And Dark Was The Night. In the film, the central character is persuaded  by Domenico “an old man of unique derangement” (as San Roque describes him in accompanying notes) “to walk though waters while shielding a candle flame from a cold wind. If accomplished, Domenico insist, this act will save the world.”

And Dark Was The Night was unfortunately missing from this remarkably comprehensive collection of the prolific Moss, but the scene from the film itself was looped on a large screen in the centre of the exhibition.

Pete Lowson leads Drum Atweme in the Alice Springs Desert Festival parade

Beat a drum loudly for unassuming local hero Pete Lowson of Alice Springs, yesterday awarded the Order of Australia. Pete’s dedicated work reminds us of the power of music to transform young lives.

Pete Lowson started up Drum Atweme eight years ago under the auspices of Tangenetyere Council – as he put it in an interview he gave me for Land Rights News last year , “to give a chance for kids in town camps to explore music”. In the process many have begun explore the world as well.

“The idea of Drum Atweme was not to keep them as musicians but so they would have the confidence and social skills to be able to do a lot of other things,” says Lowson. After their first public performances, Drum Atweme found themselves being snapped up for national events being held in Alice Springs, such as 2008’s Big Story Country conference.

Since then there’ve been many parades. welcoming ceremonies, appearances on national TV and interstate gigs, the Adelaide Fringe Festival, the World Youth Performing festival and National Bank conferences in Melbourne among them. “The Fringe Festival, that was amazing,” Lowson recalls. “We took two boys and 12 girls, and five of the girls had never seen a city before. So what they do and what they see becomes part of the gig, and what makes the gig really important. It’s not so much where we might play, it’s what the kids experience and what they do. It’s experience – simple things like getting on a tram and going to the beach, for example.”

Since the early days, Drum Atweme has became a big part of life for many kids, with 130 schoolchildren taking part in drumming activities with the group every week, and a significant core of players who perform regularly every week. The benefits are profound. “For one thing it’s really therapeutic,” says the good-natured Lowson, obviously speaking out of a lifetime of therapy. “If you bang on a drum, you can get rid of a lot of frustration – and it’s easy to connect to and put rhythms together. “It’s also a highly transportable thing to take around, especially with the kids we deal with – and accessible. When you get 20 kids together and go Ba da ba da, – do that! they go ba da ba da back.

“There’s been this big connection with beat. When you talk to the grandmothers and the families they absolutely love it, and they absolutely connect with it. There’s a very close connection to their culture. They’ve got a close connection with that rhythm and hitting that stick into the earth. They encourage their kids to do it. ” With the young drummers performing about 60 times a year, Lowson has been rewarded by watching the experience change children who are often almost chronically shy outside their own environments.

 “Their self-confidence has grown tenfold and that has spread into their lives in general, “ he says. “They’re more confident about how they approach people and things, and most importantly able to say yes or no to a situation. Instead of everyone telling them ‘You’ve got to do this,’ they can start having the confidence to make their own choices.”

Lowson is passionate on this subject: “You see it too often with Aboriginal people in general, they just take it, they cop it. They’ve had 200 years of copping it, and I reckon it’s got to change a bit. Change is going to happen with the kids, not to be angry or violent, but to able to be confident and say to someone, ‘No I don’t want to do that” and not take the situations that are given to them. Often that’s what happens on the camps, and they just wear it, but they don’t have to, they can make a choice in their lives.”
Meanwhile, the feedback from teachers at the school is that the performing drummers have benefited from improvements in literacy and numeracy. “They’re using their language in the rhythms. It strengthens their language and their culture, they sing the rhythms in their language, and rhythms get changed around because the language is different.”

The performers are also getting an unusual early experience of the value of money and the earning of it. A bank account is set up at Tangentyere Council, from which the children can draw on their earnings at gigs for pocket money while travelling. The money is there if they need help, as in the case of two kids attending the local Catholic high school. “Their mother couldn’t afford the uniforms for them,” said Pete. “The girls were swapping around uniforms from other people and getting a bit embarrassed about it, and I said we’ll buy them for you, so we spent $700 on summer and winter uniforms for them. Now they’re as proud as punch.”

“Other kids have needed help with airfares because they had to get back to Adelaide for boarding schools and colleges. We’ve got 28 kids out of Drum Atweme in colleges. “It’s an unfunded account, which has no administration fees. Kids can’t get cash unless they’re on tour. They can get purchase orders, and when they go on tour they get ‘bling money”. They have to sign forms and they have to sign hobby forms for them. They have 100 per cent say in every part of that and we sit down and talk about those things when we’re away.”

The children are also encouraged to take part in planning activities. “If we’re going to book a gig, they come and meet the management, and then they’ve got a right to say ‘No we don’t want to do it, We don’t like the idea.’ And I’ll say , ‘Fine’ “

Perhaps a little disappointingly, 90 per cent of Drum Atweme members these days, with the boys tending to get more interested in football. Some of the girls have been playing for seven years. In the future, Lowson wants to take the band to communities in Victoria, to do workshops and reconciliation involving non-indigenous and indigenous children. “These are kids who have three or four languages. It would be great to take them places they can share their languages and tell other kids about their culture.

“It’s not just all drumming. Drumming is the tool. It can take them anywhere they want to go. They’re good at it and we like to expand it and change, but it’s got to change within them. I can chucked a hundred rhythms at them and they reject them all, but they will pick their own. They own it.”

Story by Dave Richards. Video: Drum Atweme leads the parade at the Alice Desert Festival in 2009

Harry was unique. Yes, everyone’s unique; but I think it’s fair to say that Harry was a little more unique than most – maybe even a little eccentric? He was tall and imposing at 6’8″; when people asked how tall he was (which they did often), he would answer with a playful smirk: “Two metres, one centimetre…!” Most were confused and a little taken aback by this response, but no one ever asked him to explain.

He enjoyed his own space; relishing opportunities for quiet reflection at his beloved jewellery bench, he could work for hours. He spent many of these with his little daughter Jaime on his lap, teaching her lapis from malachite, turquoise from tourmaline and so on. He delighted in talking to her in Dutch and sharing stories about his ‘treasures ‘. “Leifling, Brave, Brave,” he would say to her, their very own private conversation.

In the early years, he was a classic site on his oversized bicycle, with a home made box trailer at the back, Jaime perched inside with her little yellow safety helmet, strapped into an adapted baby seat; flying from the back of the trailer, a raccoon tail!

Harry was and is well-known for the unique styles of jewellery, which he handcrafted, and the other ‘treasures ‘that he made, such as pen and ink sets from a polished slice of banksia nut, a Margo Trigg inkpot with a wax casting of an eagle or some such thing, with a red tailed black cockatoo feather pen… These things were simply stunning! He worked with all natural materials; turquoise was a favourite, combined with bear claws, handmade silver beads, or beautiful pieces of red coral. Many pieces used antique Venetian beads from Moreno, or beautiful pieces of amber from Morocco; I remember being on the streets of Paris with Jaime as a toddler, trading with an enormous African from Morocco for a lovely amber piece. “This is for Jaime,” he said. I still have that piece in a travellers necklace he made reflecting different items from our trip!

Harry’s diverse skills also included a career working at Jay Creek with the Afghan cameleer, Solley Mahomet, learning camel handling and saddle making as well as nosepegging. I remember him helping his friend Sheila to peg her camel that she had on Kangaroo Island! I recently found out that he had also worked as a merchant seaman out of Lisbourne, Portugal, on the European trade routes.

Youngest son of Dutch parents, his family migrated to Canada when he was 12, already taller than his peers. It was apparently quite a difficult adjustment without a good understanding of English, and learning it at that difficult stage in his life. He left school early, preferring a life of adventure, travelling the world from the proceeds of his jewellery-making perfecting the art of ‘trading’ to satisfy his needs. When we were together, our family benefitted from this ability when we renovated our house, mainly paying for through trading ‘treasures’ for tradesmen’s services, or he would sell something at the market to pay for things that we needed.

Although he loved Alice Springs, his driving ambition was always to eventually build a house on Kangaroo Island and retire there to spend his later years. It was a long term project in which some of his good friends like Brian and Josie were instrumental in helping him to achieve. With the support and help of his friends, he did build their house but he was never to live in, although he did spend his last years living on Kangaroo Island where he had always wanted to be. During his final months there while in the Care facility on KI, Nigel Jefford, as the director of nursing, provided amazing support and comfort to Harry through visits to the house, sitting on the verandah and sharing stories. I would also like to acknowledge Nigel’s support for Jaime and myself during that period.

While, like all families, we had our struggles, Harry positively impacted all our lives. His legacy will remain with us for ever, most particularly through his beautiful daughter and my daughter Jaime. He opened our eyes to the world around us, he added texture and colour through his wonderful friends, many of whom are not here due to distance, health issues and other pressing commitments. He shared his world with us for a brief time and we are the better for it. Rest in peace Harry, released now from the prison and pain that is Alzheimer’s and dementia, you are finally free again.