TRIBAL MAN SPEAKS
“ … In them days you wasn’t even allowed to talk to a black fella …”
He thinks he is aged about 83 years. If this is so, he was born in 1924.Alec Kruger is now, of course, retired, and often he lounges in the shade of a tree to reflect on his harsh up-bringing as one of the part-Aboriginal children who were removed from their full-blood mothers.
Emotionally, Alec said: “I want you to write down my story for me, my friend. I can’t write much. Would you do that one small thing for me? We old fellows are not brain-washed. We lived like dogs and were treated like slave men in them early times.”
Alec’s full-blooded Aboriginal mother, Polly, was legally married to a white peanut grower in the Katherine region, Frank Kruger. The young mother and her two children travelled to Darwin for the dry season and, while there, a white policeman confiscated baby Alec and his older sister who placed them in the Kahlin Compound. Polly was compelled to camp outside the fence, hoping to catch a glimpse of her children from time to time.
“I was kept there for a couple of years, I suppose, and then they moved us kiddies down to Pine Creek because there were too many peoples in the compound. We stayed at Pine Creek for about another three years … You know when the Chinese gold rushes was at Pine Creek? It was only a small town. When I’d growed up a bit a fellow called Sam Irvine took us on a two-wheeled track all the way down to Alice Springs. I was only a kid then, about eleven years old … We was put in The Bungalow, as they called it. That was the old Telegraph Station in the old times.
“When I’d growed up a bit more they took me out to Love’s Creek Station. You know that place they called the Ross River Homestead, like they call it today. Now it’s a tourist place. But in the days I’m talking about it was a cattle station. All that country around there belonged to old Mr Bloomfield.
“I had to work there with a fellow called Tim Shaw, who came from the Alice Springs Bungalow, too. I was just a bit of a boy at that time. Maybe eleven. Something like that, might be.
“They made us kids work from daylight to dark. My pay was supposed to be put into a Trust Fund thing. On that station one water man got paid with flour. He had to share that with thirty people in the black’s camp. When old Bloomfield killed a bullock, he never gave any beef to the blacks – no, nothing. Them old Aboriginal people just had bush tucker. They got no hat, no pants, no dress. There were two Aboriginal girls on the station who did all the dirty jobs. They would get gaoled if they did anything wrong.
“One of our jobs was to sink three wells at a place called Arakillya, which was three day’s camel ride, out on the edge of the Simpson Desert. We were given ten day’s rations and told to stretch it out to a fortnight in blistering heat. The job took a week longer than expected, which meant a week without tucker (food). I finished up with Sandy Blight (trachoma) and dysentery.
“If we got caught talking to the blacks, you’d get a proper flogging. Or you might be out in the stock camp, say, and the white boss would send you bush to find water. If you came back with nothing, they’d tie you up to a rail and flog the shit out of you with a stockwhip.”
Alec’s accommodation was made from bush timber; on the top, for a makeshift roof, were gum branches and spinifex. His bed was fashioned with greenhide. He survived on a strict diet of salt beef and damper.
“We had to fill in a paper to say our money (wages) would be put away for us. All that time I worked there I never got a penny. I just got shirt and pants. No boots. Nothing. I had no house. I camped in a swag.
“After mustering, I was sent out to them little wells. I had to pull up water for them bullocks when they came in at night. On my own, that was.
“I worked there every day for about seven years. If we did something wrong, I got flogged with a stockwhip. Oh, I got flogged lots of times, my boy.
I left the station when I reached seventeen and a half. That was about 1941. About that time they moved the Charles River Mission out to Arltunga.
“I came into Alice Springs and I saw that recruiting officer, Johnny Underdown. I told him I was nineteen or something and they put me in the army. I stayed there until 1947. “I’ll tell you a funny thing. One day I went to the Katherine (Aboriginal) Compound while I was a soldier in uniform and I was removed by Sgt. Jim Manion. When he kicked me out he said I was cohabiting with a ward of the State. In them days you wasn’t even allowed to talk to a black fella.
“After the army, I went up to the Top End, went droving up the Murranji, Wave Hill, Vestey. I was there at Wave Hill when they went on strike. They all my countrymen. That old man, Lingiari, he’s my uncle. I did stock camps, breaking in horses. I worked all over the place – Winton, Cloncurry.”
In 1955 Alec Kruger, aged 29, married 19-year-old Nita Palmer in the Alice Springs Church of England. Together, the couple produced six children. Nita passed away some years ago following a lengthy illness.
The old man paused, his thoughts moving forward to the modern age, a time of confusion and disappointment.
He remembered: “In those days, when I was young, we yella-fellas, or half castes, had to wear a dog tag around our neck. We couldn’t go into a pub without that. Another thing, we weren’t allowed in town after six o’ clock at night. If you gave grog to a full-blood, you’d get six month’s gaol. Some policemen used to set us up: they’d give us paper money and tell us to buy a bottle for the black people. When we did it, they’d jump right on us and we’d get gaoled.”
The old bushman reminisced: “You know, when all these young Aboriginal fellows get around talking about the traditional owners of Uluru … them real owners of Ayers Rock lived in my backyard in Alice Springs. For years, I fed them. Everyone’s claiming they’re relations now. Bull shit!
“All these Aboriginal peoples from Love’s Creek, they won’t accept me today. But I know the whole (ceremonial) story. They don’t. These younguns making all the noise today, they don’t know anything, I tell you. Every corroboree I know. I’ve been through the law proper way. These young Aboriginal fellas around here can’t sing, can’t dance.
“Nowadays when they put you through the law they don’t learn nothing. All them people under sixty they know nothing of the old ways. They are just guessing.
“I will tell you something important now. Before I went away to the army, them old full-blood Aboriginal people asked me was I going and when I said yes they put a spear in a cave for me.The spear is still there today. I took the Land Council mob there and there it was, still there, and no one today knows how it got there. But my old Father did it.
the young Aboriginal people today, they don’t want to know us old tribal fellows any more. They go around telling stories about old ways, but they are only doing it for money. They are greedy for money.They’ve never gone through anything. They’ve never worked hard like we did. They’ve never had to live on green damper and get kicked around like in them hard old days.
“I don’t get any Aboriginal money from this mob around here. They reckon it don’t count because I went through the law at Love’s Creek and was thought of as family. They keep all that government hand-out money for themselves.
“Things have changed. Back in the old days of Alice Springs,” he smiled with gentle irony, “you wouldn’t have to lock things up and you could leave your swag in the street and come back a month later and it would still be there.”
Footnote: A comprehensive account of Alec Kruger’s life (co-authored by Gerard Waterford) has been published by I.A.D. Press in 2007 under the title “Alone On The Soaks – The Life and Times of Alec Kruger”.
