Eddie Connellan is one of the best-known men in the Northern Territory. Not yet forty years old, he gave up jackarooing, High School teaching and radio work, and in 1938 flew forty thousand miles over the Northern Territory in an amazing and exhaustive aerial survey in an old plane. Then, in 1939, he purchased two Percival Gulls, and at the suggestion of the Hon. John McEwen, Minister for the Interior, he contracted to carry ordinary mail by air from station outpost to outpost, in place of the slow, costly camel, packhorse, or motor-truck method. His first aerial mail-run was from Alice Springs via Mount Doreen and Tanami, both beyond the end of anywhere, then via Victoria River Downs to Wyndham and back to Alice Springs. It was pioneering in every sense of the word. He had to pacify those who thought he was mad, and gradually educate those who treated him with indifference. Landing grounds were crude, and in many cases non-existent. Between scheduled mail flights, Connellan gathered a few enthusiastic supporters and worked to build new airstrips and improve the few existing ones at places hundreds of miles apart, bumping over rough desert tracks with heavy loads of equipment and tools in an old Rolls Royce. It was a colossal task; and some hardened old pioneers bitterly resented the innovation until determination and grit and the full value of aerial service, which began to save lives, time, money, won most of them over.
Jack Kellow was Connellan’s first assistant pilot; and Connellan and several of the ground staff worked day and night to keep him up in the air, until war broke out and most of them joined up. The proposition reverted to something close to a one-man show. Few of his original staff returned; only two of his early helpers, Damien Miller and Sam Calder, came back, both with the D.F.C. Eddie Connellan’s own war service was not officially in the R.A.A.F., but it was certainly all round it and with it. His rapid organization of aerial mail routes and great knowledge of the Northern Territory was much too important to be lost; and he became an important courier and adviser to and from army camps and commando units, and helped the Americans to survey important landing sites, besides running regular mail services in all directions under tough conditions.
In July 1943 the Postmaster-General’s Department increased his annual subsidy to £5800 and asked him to organize a new and comparatively small fortnightly mail-run over the Hermannsburg, Tempe Downs, Angas Downs, Mount Irwin, Kulgera, Erldunda, Henbury circuit, to replace a number of costly ground contracts. This was the aerial run I badly wanted to travel over. By 1946 the subsidy had been increased to £10,000 to help him carry his mail deliveries and friendly service to lonely outposts, over the border into Queensland as far as Camooweal. It increased his fortnightly aerial mail routes to more than seven thousand miles, with at least seventy regular landing stops.
Connellan has gone on increasing his remarkable mail service, striving steadily towards his visionary ideal of linking every settlement within the Northern Territory. His fleet consists of two Dragonflies, a Beechcraft, an old Percival Gull, a Hawk Moth, and a closed Tiger Moth for aerial ambulance work under contract to the Flying Doctor Service, by which he covers the Northern Territory half-way up to Darwin. Perhaps the most amazing feature about his aerial services is that he operates at a considerable financial loss, and finances the loss from income received elsewhere; but Connellan has implicit faith in the future, and is organizing tourist flights and facilities wherever he can. Whatever the future may hold for him, his name will never be forgotten in the Northern Territory.
I walked out to his aerodrome, a mile from the town, and arranged to fly over the Hermannsburg to Mount Irwin mail-run. An opportunity to look down over the rugged land I had walked and scrambled on was too good to miss. A blitz-wagon called for me at sunrise and bundled me off to the large landing field south of the ranges; then the little single-engined Hawk dropped down over the top of the red wall, and I met Sam Calder, D.F.C., and a mechanic named Knight. Up we went and flew west at about seventy-five miles an hour. The plane was obviously old, but I had faith in it and the pilot. At five thousand to seven thousand feet it was possible to see the whole east–west system of parallel Macdonnell Ranges, and the watercourses cutting straight through ridge after ridge. Mountains and valleys were all on the march; from east to west was the order. The Roe River, Jay Creek, the Hugh, the Mueller, the Ellery, all slashed through hundreds of feet of red rock, and headed off southward, always south. We flew north of the Waterhouse Range, and south of a large dam on the Hermannsburg Mission lease, filled with water. Thousands of budgerigars, visible even from the plane’s height, swept across the dam, turned and banked, and rose and fell. Then we saw the James Range pierced by the wild canyon of the Finke to south-west; and the red, mysterious Krichauff masses beyond; and the western Macdonnells away to the north-west with jagged peaks towering up. Good old Sonder! A grand old landmark, unmistakable, jutting up bold and blue in the morning light. Sam Calder circled the plane a few hundred feet above the Hermannsburg Mission, then landed two miles to the northeast, threw out the mail to a deserted landing field; and off again, southward above the broad Finke between its deep red canyon walls towering above the white sand winding through the spinifex-topped plateau ranges. Calder signalled and pointed, then banked away west to Palm Valley and the Amphitheatre. The massive sandstone below was gashed with long box canyons. At that time I was far too excited to think of possible engine failure. That thought came later in retrospect. Every second of time was too important to waste, and the floor of the little plane was being littered with film-pack tabs. The plane seemed so much at home that the danger of flying over such a wilderness failed to dawn on me. There were razorbacks and peaks, rock monoliths, curved domes, slits and crevices; and hollowed-out pounds surrounded by red hills on every horizon. We turned south again, once more over parallel ridges; not straight in line like the Macdonnell ridges, but curving over many miles; convex, concave, scalloped, and straight up on edge or tilting over, in an unbelievable maze through which the deeply walled watercourses had somehow carved a way.
We passed above Tempe Downs Station, and did not land. Calder informed me that the landing field was out of order and difficult to maintain. The Palmer River twisted down from the Krichauff ridges like a snake, then struck off dead straight to the south-east. The Tempe buildings were so close beside the deep-green trees lining the bank that, from the air, they seemed part of the dry, sandy river bed.
We continued on with the Krichauff hills dropping away to northward, and desert sandhills in waves beneath us as far as the next line of hills straggling about Angas Downs. There we landed, and met W. H. (‘Old Bill’) Liddle, sheep pioneer of the desert’s edge, and his two half-caste sons. Liddle took up desert and plain country between the Basedow and Wollara Ranges, and brought his sheep across country from Oodnadatta. Dingoes raided them day and night; native shepherds lost some; and many died from eating poison bushes. Wool had to be camel-packed nearly three hundred miles to the Oodnadatta railhead. Liddle gave the sheep up, and soon saw other sheep pioneers east of him give up the impossible fight. He handed the management of the property over to his half-caste sons, and changed to cattle. Up to 1947 Liddle had put down nineteen bore-holes without striking good water. He hopes to continue until he gets it. Angas Downs is a mail centre for a few far-out people who come a long way in. The de Conlays of Mount Conner Station, sixty miles south, send a native boy up with packhorses once a fortnight. It is a journey from the Aneri Soak, round the shoulder of Mount Conner, up beside salt-pans and dry salt lakes, across fenceless, lonely country watered by one doubtful well at Wilbia (Wilbeah) Wells. ‘Andrews’s place’ is south-west from Angas Downs, away in the desert, the farthest out of them all. Andrews’s has pioneered a desert track over sandhills and valleys like the high sandy wastes around hundreds of miles of Australia’s coastline, for nearly a hundred miles from his home at Curtain Springs, past Wilbia Wells, to the Palmer River.
A cheerful greeting at Angas Downs, and on again into the air, minus a few mail-bags, and plus a list of shopping to be done, and sundry messages in the name of goodwill and friendship. The Connellan aerial mail delivery is not a service merely of cold invoices and payment for all services rendered. It is a friendly, helpful, and almost philanthropic assistance and salute to pioneers.
Sam Calder pointed out Mount Conner, the ‘best aerial landmark in the Centre’; flat-topped above its crumbling cliff-sides rising well over one thousand feet above the surrounding desert; red; gleaming in the morning light. Far away beyond it, like the top of a man’s bald head, deep blue and hazy, Ayers Rock stood up above the light-red sand; and away to the south were the faint blue peaks of the Musgraves.
At Mount Cavanagh a man said: ‘I wouldn’t go up in one o’ them things for fifty quid.’ I replied: ‘It’s worth fifty pounds of anyone’s money,’ and was the subject of a long lingering look of pity until we left. We turned back at the aerial mail terminus at Mount Irwin Station, South Australia. There it was windy and cold, blustering up from the south over hundreds of miles of unpopulated gibber desert. At Kulgera Station, back in the Northern Territory, we taxied up to the stone homestead, and swallowed cakes, scones, and tea in a modern kitchen. The little old plane went up again, and I reflected on someone’s comment at Alice Springs; ‘Ten miles or a blinkin’ thousand – it’s all the same to Connellan’s grasshoppers.’ I had got to such a stage of faith in this man and his pilots and machines, that I would have set off readily round the world in our little Hawk.
Long tendrils of cirrus cloud had spread from north to south, and moving rays of fanning light crossed the desert. Down again, and up again. This time it was Erldunda Station, the property of Mr and Mrs S. Staines; then over a hilly wilderness of rocky colour flanking the Finke. Far beneath us a sandy track battled towards Alice Springs – the main overland route from Adelaide. We circled above Henbury Station, set down between its flanking sandhills above a permanent, gleaming water-hole in the Finke. Two native stockmen on lively horses gave and received mail; then, off again across the landing ground, a swirl of wind and up over the rich-green river gums of the river, over the mulgas and desert oaks of the sandhills, and northward over rocky pinnacles, small plateaux, canyons; red, brown, light blue and grey, all spectacular; and each feature with individuality and character. Here was a colourful miniature of all the larger hills and valleys I had seen.
Late afternoon was tipping the Macdonnells with red and mauve, and the emerald green of the spinifex on the southern slopes of Mount Gillen stood out clearly. A few minutes later the flight was over.
I received word that necessitated a quick return to Brisbane. Some of my questions would have to continue unanswered. At least a great work was being done by a faithful band of missionaries, and by a wise Native Affairs Administration, which had combined to arrest the death-rate of aborigines in some areas; and there now was some hope of continued survival and even increase, and hope of the successful transition of the world’s most primitive people out of their past of dreaming and ceremony and witchcraft, towards an ultimate state of civilized living acceptable to the white man’s Government and creeds. But it seemed as if some of the greatest problems had been faced one, two, and three generations ago; and the early work of the pioneer missionaries who had translated the difficult dialects of the different tribes, thus providing a working foundation for the later missionaries, anthropologists, and medical men, had at last achieved some definite result.
I would be back again, somehow, to find answers to many more questions that had presented themselves; and possibly to locate the man who had crossed the desert in 1923.