A National Trust (NT) talk by Bob Beadman, 19 September 2025 at Burnett House
Preamble
Advances in Technology, and LAW
Trevor Menzies’ excellent talk on 15 August 2025 about the amazing history behind the establishment of Australia’s State and Territory borders was very enlightening. The audience was fascinated by the progression of technology from chains to sextants to theodolites to satellites, particularly how modern methods pointed to discrepancies in the original work. The nightmare prospect of correcting the location of those original borders was quickly dismissed.
Not surprisingly, really, my mind went down a different path. I was thinking of the breathtaking arrogance of the British in stealing a whole Continent by declaring it Terra Nullius and then proceeding to have boffins draw lines on maps of Australia, sight unseen, while in an office in London!
(Most interesting is that the boundary between Western Australia and the Northern Territory, separating the Great Sandy and Tanami Deserts, has never been surveyed. These are the Traditional Lands of the Pintubi people, the subject of tonight’s talk).
This arrogance continued into the middle of the Twentieth Century. Post World War 2 the British decided they needed a facility for Rocket Testing and the compliant (subservient?) Australian Government made available a vast tract of land in South Australia and established the Woomera Rocket Range.
Worse was yet to come. Mother England decided they needed to establish a facility for Nuclear Testing, and Australia made available another tract of land in South Australia, now known as Maralinga (Monte Bello in WA was also used for nuclear testing). Both sites are highly dangerous to this day containing contaminated radioactive material.
Colonialism?
Our famous surveyor, the late Len Beadell, will feature in this tale later, as will my old mate Yami Lester who was blinded by the radioactive nuclear cloud that crept across vast areas of country after the tests. Beadell pushed the roads through much of the country – I think the original plan may have been to assist in tracking the rockets,
Advances in ATTITUDES, and the LAW. These developments are more profound than those in technology. It would have been unimaginable in 1788, or even 1948, that most States and the Commonwealth would have enacted Land Rights legislation. Especially the Commonwealth’s Native Title Act, which followed the Decision of the High Court in the Mabo case, which demolished the legal fiction of Terra Nullius forever.
Or that the High Court of Australia would have found that the Gumatj people of the Gove Peninsula of the Northern Territory were entitled to compensation for the way the Government trampled their rights in the awarding of leases for the mining of bauxite in the 1960’s.
We even have some States create Truth Telling commissions to assist in correcting the whitewashing of the historical record.
The truth about the violence of the advancing Australian Frontier is starting to expose the sanitized history written by the conquerors. A couple of recent examples are Dr Robyn Smith’s chilling book ‘LICENCE TO KILL: massacre men of Australia’s north’; and the wonderful ABC TV program Back Roads where in a recent segment on Mataranka presenter Kristy O’Brien told us that the great Australian classic ‘We of the Never Never’ was tampered with in 1931 to delete the passages about the harsh treatment of Aboriginal people by the cattlemen.
Who would have thought . . . .?
The crisis at Papunya
In the early 1980’s I was the Regional Director, Central, of the Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs based in Alice springs. My area of responsibility covered the Pitjantjatjara lands of South Australia, the Ngaanyatjarra and Pintubi lands of Western Australia, and the lower two-thirds of the Northen Territory up to Elliott. Alison Anderson was then the youthful and forceful Town Clerk at Papunya.
Around 6pm one evening when I was about to leave the office, I answered a telephone call from Alison Anderson. Telephone call? Let me remind people of technological advances on another front. Forty years ago, there were no mobile phones, nor were there landline telephones to remote communities. Two-way radios (pioneered by Alfred Traeger for the Royal Flying Doctor Service) were the connection to the wider world. Alison was able to establish radio contact with the RFDS, who could patch her into the telephone network and on to me.
Alison: “You must come out to Papunya immediately. The Pintubi are threatening to spear the entire Council.”
We will come back to this drama later.
First some background.
I have long held an interest in peoples who for one reason or another have continued to live in harsh, remote areas isolated from other societies. National Geographic Magazine whetted my appetite early on with tales about the Sahara Desert Bedouin nomads, or the Indians deep in the Amazon jungle, or the Inuit in the icy blizzards above the Arctic Circle. But not much about our own Indigenous peoples who remained isolated. (Or avoided subordination – think about it.)
Fortunately, the plight of the Pintubi was well known to me. I thank the late Jeremy Long for educating me.
When I arrived at the old Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1973 as a bushy-tailed social reformer, I was introduced to the Deputy Secretary. He was 6’5” (1.96 metres) tall and I thought that they were pulling my leg when told his name was Long. My weak attempt at humour did not go over well with the aloof, taciturn man.
Initially I wondered what a man like him was doing in that Department, only to learn of his extraordinary history.
Jeremy Long was a member (led?) of reconnaissance parties into the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts in 1957 and again in 1964 to offer relief to the Pintubi people in times of great drought hardship. A huge humanitarian effort. Wally Braitling, of Mount Doreen Station, also accompanied them. These Deserts are hardly ‘lands of milk and honey.’ The party met forty-eight people on that first trip in 1957, and all but three had never seen a white person before.
Some would have you believe Government Patrol Officers (certainly their title was unfortunate) risked their lives by venturing into the hostile Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts to round people up and force them into settlements. Those critics did not know Jerry, as I do, and they have certainly not witnessed his reunions with Pintubi people, as I have. And if force was involved, how then did a group elect to remain in the desert only to come in during 1984? The other viewpoint believes the answer lies in the fact the country was gripped in a terrible drought and that it was an act of humanitarian consideration that Government officials went to the trouble they did risking their lives in hostile country. As we know, there were no satellite telephones then. Sextants were no doubt used to map movements. The plight of the Pintubi during that terrible drought was nevertheless conveyed by the bush telegraph, and it was pitiful, which was the real reason they were offered an alternative.
(Douglas Lockwood authored a book around then titled ’The Lizard Eaters.’)
When linguists first sat with Pintubi to record the language they were stuck for a while on the word ‘putchika.’ Eventually, after a circuitous method of deduction and descriptions of various animals, a feral cat was identified. Cats had preceded white people into those remote lands by an estimated fifty years, as had the slang pussy cat. A favourite tucker.
Mainly because of these Government visits the Pintubi people moved into the comparatively comfortable communities (civilisation?) around the fringes of their homelands. Places like Balgo, Jigalong, Warburton (in Western Australia), Kaltukatjarra, Yuendumu and Papunya in the Northern Territory.
This tale is about Papunya. Pintubi people were always outsiders, migrants if you like, on someone else’s country. They longed for home. They camped (there were no houses for them) on the western side of Papunya nearest home (West Camp). In the early 1970’s they tried to move nearer home to a place called Yai Yai, about forty kilometres west, with the help of a well-known figure in the Territory, Jeff Stead OAM. Jeff’s camp was allegedly so untidy that the Pintubi women would sweep it weekly. The group reluctantly moved back to Papunya.
The case of the Pintubi illustrates much about the nature of Government settlements, and whether they were concentration camps into which people were forcibly herded, or beneficial dictatorships serving a crucial role in staging the people for Integration or Assimilation, the policy of the day.
(Later, in the early nineteen eighties I took Long back into that country to find he was revered by those people).
Pintubi return to ancestral lands.
I return now to Alison Anderson’s radio/telephone call.
She pleaded with me to come out straight away because the Pintubi people were threatening the Papunya Councillors with spears. She achieved a temporary peace with the help of the Police, on a promise that I would attend the next day.
I took the late Yami Lester OAM, a Yankunytjatjara man, as an Interpreter. As I had earlier mentioned, Yami was blinded by the radioactive fallout from the Maralinga nuclear testing. His superior voice recognition skills, and his excellent grasp of multiple languages, made him special. Was there a compensatory reward at work here?
After a series of meetings, the separation of the outstation resource budget, and encouragement from me, the Pintubi headed west in substantial numbers. I call it an Exodus – they were intent on returning to their spiritual lands, their ancestral lands. A rag-tag convoy of decrepit vehicles, probably imported from Adelaide, and purchased from the used car yards of Alice Springs.
In a matter of months there was a mass relocation of hundreds of Pintubi people from all points of the compass to Walungurru (Kintore Hills) about four hundred kilometres west of Papunya. There is a rough road heading through there, the Gary Highway, named by the surveyor I previously mentioned Len Beadell. Walungurru is about twenty-five kilometres south of it on the Sandy Blight Junction Road.
I camped one time at Walungurru with Charlie McMahon, the one-armed didgeridoo player of Gondwanaland fame, when Dick Kimber AM pulled over. He had been in the Gibson Desert for about six weeks with a group of Pintubi men and his seven-year-old son doing site clearance work for a mining company. Both father and son had sandy blight, if not scurvy (the Barcoo rot).
The only equipment then at Walungurru was a bore with a hand pump designed by the Centre for Appropriate Technology (CAT) in Alice Springs. CAT was funded by my Department. There were no other facilities. About three hundred people went through the next summer, with temperatures up to 53c, on that one pump. (Now there is a fully fledged township, with school, health clinic, police, powerhouse, houses).
0n, on, west to Kiwirrkurra (considered the most remote community in Australia)
Because of the build up of population at Walungurru we commissioned a bore drilling program further west, over into Western Australia, and successful bores were equipped at Pollock Hills (Kiwirrkurra), and Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route (Kunawarritji). It is now about 1984.
A group of people quickly moved to Kiwirrkurra and began to hunt out in an ever-widening radius. A hunting party found fresh footprints. There was great trepidation, fearing spirit people (Kadaitcha men). And no doubt the bush people found fresh wheel tracks. There was a stand-off for months I believe.
The Kiwirrkurra people sought advice from an old man back in Papunya, Freddie West Tjakamarra who came out to help and he recognised a footprint and named a woman he had not seen for 21 years. Think about that. She had elected to stay in the desert with her family when the others moved to Papunya in 1964.
Smoke signals were sent by both groups; confidence built and contact eventually established.
A lot of nonsense was written about forcible removal from areas in the fallout of the Blue Streak Rocket Testing from Woomera, and how this family was overlooked.
As I have said, Kiwirrkurra is remote. Way beyond the fences. So far out that if you keep going you are coming back in. It must be one of the driest locations in the driest continent, with average rainfall I imagine well under 200mls. Yet in 2001 it suffered devastating floods, and the community was evacuated.
The Pintubi Nine
The group that elected to leave their traditional, nomadic lifestyle in the Great Sandy Desert and join their close relatives at Kiwirrkurra quickly became known as The Pintubi Nine. They comprised of two sisters and their seven children. I was told that Warlimpirrnga, the eldest son, was the head of the group after his father’s death. His legs were like leather from a life of walking through spiky spinifex hunting.
We knew that when the news of this remarkable reunion leaked to the outside world the people would become a media sensation. They sure did. We also knew that the group would have no natural immunities to common illnesses like colds, measles and that they must be shielded/quarantined/isolated.
After three and a half years in Alice Springs I was by then back in Canberra, but I returned to try and manage the media scrum, and to minimise intrusion by outsiders including government officials of every kind on the new world of The Pintubi Nine. That included me. I would have loved to visit Kiwirrkurra, but I did not.
(My Field Officer, Speedy McGinness inescapably did in the course of his work. Speedy now resides on traditional Kungurukun land in the vicinity of Batchelor. The McGinness family is widely known and respected).
Several of The Pintubi Nine became famous artists, commanding big prices. They contributed funds to the upkeep of the Purple Bus. The Bus, and Purple House in Alice Springs, have played a crucial role in providing dialysis services over a vast area to people with kidney failure.
Central Australia faces a critical health challenge due to high rates of kidney disease. Sufferers require dialysis three times weekly. Port Headland is 1200 km west, and Alice Springs 800km east. Commuting by road for dialysis is impossible. Leaving one’s community when you are sick and need support is tragic. Mobile dialysis facilities are lifesaving.
As well as countless Indigenous people, Jack Thompson AM credits Purple House with saving his life.
DESERT
Why are the Pintubi so drawn back to such a harsh region? I can imagine, but I will never fully know.
Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson and her partner Nicolas Rothwell have just published a book YILKARI A desert suite. A description of the book on the rear cover, presumably by the publishers says, ‘Their exchanges touch on ways of knowing and speaking and imagining that are only in reach in the desert.’ A review of the book said, ‘It is guiding you toward your own awakening to Country, toward an experience of the Australian landscape that goes beyond what is visible . . . .’
A deep bush pet meat shooter out from Timber Creek was horrified at a suggestion that he move to Manly on the grounds “It is a long way from anywhere.”
A road maintenance contractor is perfectly satisfied with his old grader, flatbed fuel trailer, round shouldered caravan, and Landcruiser ute. He would relocate every week in a unique road train as he finished another thirty kms of track.
Pintubi have taken me to a soak between sandhills cross country through scrub higher than the vehicle with no visible navigational prompts with unerring accuracy.
I have taken Pintubi cross country, south from Kiwirrkurra, west down a pass through the Sir Frederick Range and over into Western Australia south of Lake Macdonald. We pushed across country for hours, rocking over spinifex humps and scrub. I pulled up on a claypan worried that debris build-up would catch fire from the heat of the exhaust and we would be properly isolated. As I jumped out of the vehicle I was shocked to see the country behind me alight like the towering inferno. The men in the back were laughing their heads off and pointed to a match box, and declared “Poor bugger, better burn ‘im.” They were so sorry for country that had not been burnt for about twenty years.
I was also taken to a place called Ilpilli, about 250kms west of Papunya and about ten kms south of the Gary Highway. It is a soak, and cannot be seen from the main road, screened by a series of low hills. I refer to it because it features in the fabulous tales about Howard Bell Lassiter and the lost reef with gold laying around. One of the many searches to rediscover the reef around 1930 involved a bush airstrip here and an aerial search well to the southwest. I recall the focus was on the Clutterbuck Hills location.
I sense the pull of the quietness, and the smells, and the Milky Way.
‘Home is where the heart is.’
And Jeremy Phillip Merrick Long OAM, the taciturn Deputy Secretary, became fully animated when I was appointed to Alice Springs. We then had something in common – Pintubi country. I was fortunate to have his company on several trips. I learned a lot. I also met his old Pintubi mate Shorty Lungkata Tjungarrayi – quite the couple. 6’5” and about 5’5”. Their reunions were wonderful.
We would pull off the road whenever we encountered another vehicle. Jerry would want to chat with the occupants, and in short order he would surprise them by naming their siblings and their parents. His knowledge of the country and its occupants was amazing.
Edward Joseph Egan AO (Ted) can be blamed for these recollections. He contacted me in late 2021 to tell me of Jerry’s passing. They studied together at the Australian School of Pacific Administration to become Patrol Officers. This long lamented, and never replaced, Institution produced quality people to work on the coalface of cross-cultural settings in the Northern Territory and Papua/New Guinea.
Jerry gone. My memory banks went into overdrive.
Bob Beadman
Darwin
September 2025
