TELLING SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY: the life history of Alexander Donald (Pwerle) Ross (1915 – 1999) Terry (Anne) Whitebeach M.A. (Edith Cowan University) Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Faculty of Law, Business and Arts – Charles Darwin University June 2006 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS Page 1. Alexander Donald Ross circa 1994 1 2. Map of Kaytetye Country 13 3. Sketch map of Barrow Creek 173 4. Barrow Creek Telegraph Station circa 1900 174 5. Staff and others at Barrow Creek Telegraph Station 175 6. Scale plan of George Hayes’ and ‘Jim’Pepperill’s pastoral lease, Neutral Junction station, Central Australia, showing adjacent pastoral leases 181 7. Map of Central Australia and northern South Australia, showing George Hayes’ and W. (Jim) Pepperill’s original pastoral lease, also other pastoral leases held in 1918 182 8. George Hayes’ original house at Neutral Junction Station with recent additions 185 9. Alec Ross, Frank MacDonald and George Hayes outside the original homestead at Neutral Junction station 192 10. George Hayes’ Garden on Neutral Junction station 1927 262 11. Don Ross and companion circa 1989 355 ii ABSTRACT This thesis is focused on the life history of Alexander Donald Ross, a Kaytetye senior man, of both Kaytetye and European ancestry, jointly authored by Alexander Donald (Don) Ross and Terry Whitebeach, a Tasmanian writer with European and Aboriginal family connections. Don Ross was born in 1915, approximately half a century after the first contact between Europeans and Aboriginals in the Northern Territory, and worked most of his life in the developing Northern Territory pastoral industry. He owned a cattle station, Neutral Junction Station, near the Barrow Creek Telegraph Station, on Kaytetye land, in Central Australia, between 1947 and 1952. During a lifetime spanning most of the twentieth century (he passed away in April 1999) Don Ross’s life was influenced greatly by changes in the pastoral industry and by social and political changes related to the rights of Indigenous people, which affected both the family lives and the employment conditions of Indigenous pastoral workers in the Northern Territory and throughout Australia. The thesis employs Don Ross’s narratives of his childhood, relationships and working life, which were compiled from interviews and conversations with a series of people (including the author of this thesis) to explore aspects of the period and region in which he lived. Relevant archival and other historical material are also employed as part of this investigation of the ‘life and times’ of Don Ross. Two significant aspects of Don Ross’s life, his skill as a stockman, and his ambiguous legal and social status as a man of both European and Kaytetye iii parentage, and the concomitant limits and freedoms his classification as ‘half- caste’ awarded him during different decades of the twentieth century, are crucial to this investigation. The thesis also investigates the processes whereby a life history is mediated through, and affected by, the perceptions and cultural position/s of the researcher, writer and receiver of the story, the perspectives revealed in the historical documents and records of the time, and successive interpretations of this material. Thus, it addresses the complex and contested historical, historiographical, literary, cultural and cross-cultural and personal processes of receiving, researching, compiling and narrating, from another time and place, and through the multifaceted lenses of memory and history, another person's life history; the implications and responsibilities of telling someone else’s story. iv DECLARATION I certify that this thesis does not incorporate without acknowledgement any material previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any university; and that to the best of my knowledge and belief it does not contain any material previously published or written by another person where due reference is not made in the text. Signed: Date: v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My greatest debt of gratitude is to Alexander Donald Ross for his friendship, his patience and good humour and for the amazing stories he told. I appreciated deeply the opportunity given me to participate in documenting both his personal story and aspects of the history of the Kaytetye people of Central Australia. I am grateful to all those people, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who also agreed to record their history and their memories, and who permitted these narratives to be included in this thesis. I thank Graham Ross for actively encouraging me to write his father’s life history, and I thank him and other members of the Ross family for sharing their memories of their father and grandfather and for providing support, advice and valuable feedback on drafts of the manuscript. Particular thanks to Alec, Dawn, Donna, David, Jenny, Ginger, Ronda and Chris Ross for their vision and participation. Institute for Aboriginal Development linguist Myfany Turpin began the recording of Don’s stories and invited me to continue. She provided linguistic information, translations of Kaytetye documents and oral histories she had recorded with other Kaytetye people, feedback on subsequent drafts of the manuscript, and access to a variety of relevant documentary material as well as to information given her by Kaytetye colleagues and friends. I offer my thanks to her and to her colleagues in the Kaytetye Dictionary program. vi I sincerely thank my supervisor, Professor David Carment, both for his initial acceptance of a former literature student as a History candidate and for his impeccable supervision of my research. He has given me significant scholarly guidance, provided me with ongoing and efficient administrative support and encouraged me to persevere during periods of illness and protracted convalescence. He has been a more than generous mentor. I thank Dick Kimber, Central Australian historian, for his intelligent and cordial participation, his close and exhaustive reading and editing of an early draft of the text, and for giving me access to his wide knowledge of the characters and events of Central Australian history. I also thank colleagues at the Institute for Aboriginal Development and Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education in Alice Springs for discussion on cultural and historical matters. I owe a particular debt to Rosie Riley for her support and cultural guidance. Heartfelt thanks to the librarians in the Off Campus library service of Charles Darwin University, who were painstaking and efficient in their efforts to supply me with books and articles. (And thanks are due also to our rural mail contractor in Tasmania who, once I had left the Northern Territory, delivered an endless stream of book parcels to my door for more than two years.) vii Thanks are also due to the staff of the National Archives of Australia in Canberra and Darwin, in particular, Phyllis Williams in Darwin, and to the Northern Territory Archives and Northern Territory Library staff. I thank Francis Good, the manager of the oral history collection at the Northern Territory Archives, for his friendship, discussion and assistance. Thanks also to the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra for funding the recording of the oral histories and for giving me access to their photo archive. Thanks to staff member Grace Koch for advice and support and for permission to reproduce her photos. Thanks to the librarians in the State Library of Tasmania in Hobart, and to my son and daughter-in-law in Alice Springs who responded to my frantic pleas from Tasmania to track down local history references in the Alice Springs Library for me, who reported their findings by mobile phone, then copied and sent me the material I needed. My deepest thanks, finally, to my dear partner, David Collins, for his intelligent interest in my work, his ongoing support and good humour and his patient navigation of the IT software and hardware glitches over the last several years! viii ix Figure 1: Alexander Donald Ross circa 1994 Photograph supplied by Dawn Ross 1