August 23.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Gurindji resistance
The Gurindji resistance and walk-off.
On the morning of 23 August 1966, in the remote Northern territory, Aboriginal leader Vincent Lingiari led 200 Gurindji, Mudburra and Warlpiri workers and their families – 90 percent of the staff of Wave Hill cattle station – from a century of servitude. They rejected the pleas of their British multinational employer 'Vestey's' to return, re-occupied an area of their own land at Wattie Creek, and fought until the nation's leaders – and its legislature – came to their cause…
Carrying blankets, billycans and babies, with dogs ranging alongside, the Gurindji walked west...following a fence-line to Gordy Creek. All but the most elderly and 'pumpers' – men minding bores on remote parts of the station – were part of the exodus...
The destination Lingiari had chosen was the Victoria River bed by the drovers' common, fifteen miles distant...To avoid confrontation, or worse, the group stayed off the road, following the fence. Walking in the sun for hours, the karu (children) became thirsty, and in the gulch of Gordy Creek, the women stopped and dug for water...
For eighty years the Gurindji had been confined; dependent on the rations and pensions paid (or not) at Wave Hill station. Even a teenager at the settlement sensed the enormity of the occasion:
...I just saw them...this magical group of people, coming up over the river bed, over the hill and walking towards us. I remember the feeling was of excitement... There was an awareness in me of how monumental it was – 'This is a really big thing!'. [1]
...it became apparent...that the Gurindji were not merely protesting about wages. Lack of pay was one issue. It also emerged that the Gurindji believed they possessed the right to choose the conditions in which they worked, on land they saw as their own.
...In their new circumstances, supportive whites provided insurance against harassment...As little as forty years earlier, some people's parents had been killed by pastoralists or their hired hands...the last massacre in Gurindji country occurred in about 1924 on a small knoll, midway between Vestey's cattle station and the police outpost at Bow Hill. Decades later, an old man remembered:
They been coming with the horses and found this mob [at] Blackfellow's Knob. They trying to race away from them but they shot them like a dog...One or two can get away. They shot that bloke climb up the tree… [2]
NTAS, Darwin, Essie Warmuth [step-daughter of Bill Jeffery], Interview Recorded by Charlie Ward January 2010, NTRS 3609, BWF 11.
See Pincher Nyurrmiarri, cited in Daguragu Land Claim: Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, (Canberra, Australian Government, 1981).
Acknowledgment: Charlie Ward, A Handful Of Sand – The Gurindji Struggle, after the Walk-Off, pp. xxvi, 5 and n.4, pp. 30-32 and n.4, pp. 34, 37.