Visitors to Hermannsburg preparing for a camel trip in 1935
It’s ironic that such a solid and physical realisation of visual memory should prove the most intangible and least resilient of artefacts. Few of Dorothy’s models have survived, save some little birds treasured by her grandsons and great-nephew. As the childhood game tells us, paper trumps rock, and I am grateful that someone took the time to describe Dorothy’s modelled memories, for there are no others recorded.
Dorothy’s sculptures
Dorothy’s depiction of the famed Palm Valley has not survived. To imagine this remarkable sight in the middle of the great expanse of inland desert I search for other descriptions. Jeannie Gunn described a similar scene but it is at Warloch Ponds, 1000 miles to the north.
‘Two wide-spreading limpid ponds, the Warloch lay before us,’ she wrote, ‘veiled in a glory of golden-flecked heliotrope and purple water-lilies, and floating deep green leaves, with here and there gleaming little seas of water, opening out among the lilies, and standing knee-deep in the margins a rustling fringe of light reeds and giant bulrushes. All around the ponds stood dark groves of pandanus palms, and among and beyond the palms, tall grasses and forest trees, and here and there a spreading coolabah festooned from summit to trunk with brilliant crimson strands of mistletoe, and here and there a gaunt dead old giant of the forest, and everywhere above and beyond the timber deep sunny blue and flooding sunshine.’
Despite the vast distance that separates them across the inland, the Warloch Ponds palms are almost identical to the ones in Palm Valley. It’s strange that these palms only occur in two such disparate locations in the desert, so far apart. How they got to Hermannsburg from the north is a mystery that has long puzzled biologists – there seems to be no natural connection for their dispersal. Perhaps they are a relic of an ancient Gondwanan forest? I wonder what Edith made of them when she saw them, if she too was curious about where they came from.
Recently geneticists have found that the palms have been separated for only a relatively short time – about 15,000 years. Their separation cannot be due to ancient climatic changes. It has happened within human occupation of the continent. Someone witnessed this piece of biological history, but not all scientists are like Edith, willing to listen to the old stories and hear what others have learnt from patient observation. The German missionaries who protected their Aboriginal flock at Hermannsburg mission listened. Carl Strehlow was appointed to the mission in 1894. He was already a student of Aboriginal languages and had, at Cooper’s Creek, translated the New Testament into the Dieri language. He learnt Arrernte and Loritja, and began compiling an Arrernte dictionary and a new biblical translation, but his most significant legacy, perhaps, was his seven-volume account of local culture and customs, Die Aranda-und Loritja-Sämme in Zentral-Australien. He too, was puzzled by the palms, and took the time to ask, and listen to the answer.
‘There are beautiful 40 to 50 feet high palms here surrounded by gum trees and acacias and the herbs and flowers at their base release a sharp smell,’ says Strehlow. ‘How this palm got into the interior of Australia has not been established yet by science.’
The locals told him that ‘the gods from the high north brought the seeds to this place a long time ago’.
The Arrernte people knew where the palms had come from. Their ancestors (or ‘gods’ as the missionary Strehlow transcribed it) had brought the palms across the country from Warloch Ponds to Hermannsburg. The answer has always been there, in the oldest known stories on earth, for anyone willing to listen.
Dorothy returned to Hermannsburg in April 1937. In June, Edith left Melbourne to visit Dorothy for two and a half months, a trip she described in ‘Flowers of the inland’ (1937) and ‘Magic rain carpets the inland’ (1938). When I first read these articles, I couldn’t quite identify where she was or what she was doing. She was so determinedly looking outwards at the magnificent vista of inland flowers that I had no idea where to place the narrator. I should have noticed the caption on a picture of silvertails: ‘Trichiniums which still flourish in a vase three months and slightly crushed after their journey from Hermannsburg and Mount Gillen’. It wasn’t until I came across a reference to an article in Walkabout that I realised exactly where she was. Several more months passed before I connected her travels to Dorothy’s and realised why she was there.
Elizabeth Durack, visiting Hermannsburg in 1941, described it as ‘a sad and desolate place’.
‘The women, particularly the old women, were very friendly, drawing me into their shade and longing, it seemed to me, to involve me in conspiracy,’ she wrote.
Gladys had also spent much time with the women in Port Stewart, learning how to make dillybags, and catch young emus, cassowaries and cuscus, and keep them as pets. The Daily Examiner reported that ‘Mrs Thomas [sic] who is a bachelor of science, devoting herself mainly to botany, was especially interested in the fruits and roots which the aboriginal women use in cooking.’
‘I have seen a woman spend almost a whole morning,’ Gladys is quoted in the article as saying, ‘preparing a few fruits – baking them, pounding them, straining them through a dilly-bag, then mixing them with water and baking again. They have a great variety of ways of cooking the vegetable food which is their mainstay when meat and fish are not available.’
The only two articles Edith wrote explicitly about Aboriginal people were about food. One focuses on nardoo, an aquatic fern whose seeds are a staple part of the diet of many Indigenous communities and, more infamously, failed to save the inept explorers Burke and Wills. In the other, ‘One man’s meat’ published in Walkabout, Edith attributes the health and vitality of Aboriginal people
