The movie Australia provides a reasonable picture of what these stations were once like. During World War II, there was a great trek with cattle to prevent the Japanese taking them, but it travelled from north-western Australia in a southerly direction.
A 1946 movie The Overlanders, also based on this journey, starred Chips Rafferty, Australia’s answer to John Wayne.
You can see some clips from this movie on a National Film and Sound Archive website. Not so schmaltzy as the movie Australia, the Overlanders shows that Aboriginal stockmen were a vital part of the whole industry.
You can also take a peek at some clips from another movie, We of the Never Never, made in 1982. It was based on a novelised autobiography by Jeanne Gunn which, in keeping with the times, was published under her husband’s name Mrs Aeneas Gunn.
Jeanne only spent a year at Elsey Station (number 4 on the map above) before her husband died, but she provides a contemporary account of life on a station at the close of the 19thCentury. This story looks at the question of whether whitefella women had a place in the outback, and at the relationships between Aboriginals and whitefellas.
The book Kings in Grass Castles by Mary Durack (Patrick’s niece) is another classic story of Australia’s pastoral industry.
Like government records and other archival material, personal stories can tell us something about early Australia, but both sources should be approached with an open mind. Daisy Bates' book The Passing of the Aborigines – there’s that old vanishing race story again – was on one of my reading lists at school, but it has since emerged that Daisy was either a pathological liar or something of a fruitcake, (possibly both).
The families I came from all settled in north eastern Victoria around 1840-1850, which was Daung Wurrung country. There are many stories of my own family that have been passed down to me, but none of them refer to Aboriginals. In this case, silence probably speaks volumes.
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