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Excerpt from  An Intruder’s Guide To East Arnhem Land

© Andrew McMillan

 

At the behest of Headquarters RAAF Command, who wanted to establish a joint land and sea operational base in the region as a matter of ‘extreme urgency’, RAAF surveyor Kevin Grahame was commissioned to survey locations for the proposed bases in the uncharted wilds of east Arnhem Land in early 1943. His brief was to find a site that would provide an all weather runway for medium bombers, a dispersal area for a general reconnaissance/bomber squadron and a squadron of interceptor/fighters, a camp for five hundred men and an alighting area for Catalina flying boats with provision for a dozen moorings. The Royal Australian Navy vessel Southern Cross was placed at Grahame’s disposal and from it he investigated Melville Bay, finding it to be sheltered enough and big enough for the development of a flying boat base. Wishing to explore the area around the Methodist Mission at Yirrkala, he called in and enlisted the services of Wandjuk (Marika) as interpreter and guide. The best site within the vicinity of Yirrkala was at Baypay on Rirratjingu land. Wandjuk consulted his father Mawalan who agreed that he should show their country to the surveyor. In August, the War Cabinet allocated funding of £100,000 to build the base, and work started a week later.

 

By January 28, 1944 the new aerodrome was officially referred to as OBU 56, an operational base unit for a detachment of Boomerang fighters of 83 Squadron. The Australian-built Boomerangs had been assigned to convoy escort duties across the Gulf of Carpentaria. Within seven months they'd be joined by 13 Squadron’s long-range Venturas. The airstrip and subsequently the peninsula were named after Pilot Officer William Julius Henderson Gove, a 22-year-old 2 Squadron navigator who was one of eight men killed in the mid-air collision between two RAAF Hudson bombers over Yabooma Island near Milingimbi on April 20, 1943. With the aerodrome completed and fighter planes in place, the construction crews started work on the flying boat base at Drimmie Head. A causeway was laid in joining the island to the mainland, creating a land bridge through mangroves Matthew Flinders had hauled his rowing boat through in 1803. When the construction crews arrived, Nikunu (Yunipingu)'s family was rounded up and trucked off Butjumurru and into Yirrkala, taking with them stories of ships in the harbours, of how a causeway was being built to bridge their island to the mainland, stories of the scrub being cleared and buildings erected, of this Balanda mob trampling over places all Yolngu held to be sacred.

 

In their Laynhapuy homelands, the Yolngu were wondering what'd hit them. Just nine years ago there were no Balanda intruders on their land, no gammon whitefellas, no roads or buildings or trucks or noisy aeroplanes carving up the sky. No, the land was just as they'd always known it, just as they'd always maintained it. But then the Reverend Chaseling and his God-botherers came and set up camp next to that creek the Yolngu knew as Yirrkala. And now country like Baypuy and Butjumurru was being overrun by Balanda with deafening machines and aeroplanes and guns, thousands of men occupying the traditional homelands and hunting grounds of the Rirratjingu and the Gumatj and a tapestry of other clans who had negotiated access to that country.

 

Out on Melville Bay, by August 1944 there were a dozen black Catalinas bucking on the swell. Up on Drimmie Hill, hundreds of men were digging in. 42 Squadron had arrived. Their first mission, a search for Japanese shipping in the straits around Timor on August 27, failed to find anything so they loosed their bombs on Japanese operations in Dili. There were six hundred men based at Drimmie Head. By the time the squadron had settled in, Nikunu and his family had got jack of the Yirrkala mission and its new superintendent, the Fijian Kolinio Saukuru, a ‘hard man who made people work for their “baccy”’. They took it upon themselves to go home to Butjumurru, erecting shelters of stringybark and paperbark, camping beneath the tamarinds on the beach at Gunyangara, a kilometre north of the flying boat base. For thousands of years, Butjumurru has been owned by the Gumatj clan, or should I say the land has owned them. But now the Air Force had moved in, taking over country of deep spiritual importance. Leaving their wives and children hidden in the scrub, Gumatj men revisited old ground to monitor the changes wrought by the intruders. It's dry dusty country at that time of year. The long slender leaves of the stringybarks and the woolly butts hang limp. The leathery fronds of freshly sprung cycads throw fountains of emerald green. The heat and the dust hang like a blanket.

 

Down to the south-east (or Djalathang-Dhimurru as the Yolngu may have referred to it) at Gowupu the scrub had been cleared, leaving a lone casuarina above the beach. The men squatted in the scrub on the hillside, watching as a Catalina gently bobbed in the water just off the beach. Anchor ropes slunk out from the tail hatch and the bow. Men in a dinghy fitted wheels to the aeroplane and then it was towed up a concrete ramp by a tractor. Another pair of big black Cats crouched on the tarmac. Around them, sun-burnt Balanda in greasy shorts and dusty boots and khaki socks swarmed over step-ladders and scaffolding. Dog tags swung from their necks. Slouch hats, their brims turned down against sun, sheltered regulation short back & sides. The wing-tip floats of the black Cats hung high above the ground, dwarfing the low huts and sheds, workshops, tents and stacks of fuel drums that lined the deck. Up to the north (Lunngurrma), between the new fuel tanks and the wharf, there's low hill of granite and a crevice that fills with water in the Wet. It's an important women's dreaming site. The Air Force had planted machine-guns on it. The Yolngu men wandered out to Guymalamurru where the scrub drops down the hill to a wide sandy beach. Officers' tents were scattered through the scrub. A portion of the shore was enclosed by a net that ran up the beach, well clear of the sharks and the stingers and maybe even the crocs. Half a dozen men lay on the steep sandy beach. Others splashed in the netted waters, climbed the observation tower, prepared to jump. From the beach you could see the Catalinas and the crash boats at their moorings. Further along the beach there was another string of four-man tents, large tarps slung over a central beam and stretched toward trees on either side. They were equipped with folding chairs and camp beds and water urns on folding tables. The Yolngu scouts wandered back to Gunyangara, beckoned wives and kids from the scrub, told stories of these crazy Balanda things. Women giggled. Kids turned cartwheels in the sand.

 

While the Yolngu encampment was tolerated at Gunyangara, further incursions onto the RAAF base were met with volleys of Tommy gun fire sprayed over the heads of the Yolngu, courtesy of orders issued by the adjutant, the portly Flight Lieutenant McMullin. Ten years earlier such an act of aggression would have resulted in the fatal spearing of the offenders, but much had changed in that decade through the efforts of four parties with differing agenda: Fred Gray, the Anglicans, the Methodists and Donald Thomson. The Gumatj retreated to their camp but rather than retaliating when whitefellas approached, Nikunu welcomed them. Some of the air force personnel took the time to visit his camp, taking mirrors from the canteen and tins of bully beef to trade for turtle shell and other exotic things. They’d sit beneath the thick dark limbs and tiny leaves of the tamarinds talking about air force life, mission life, things they’d seen and done. Soon commercial reality would overtake this trade, the demand for tobacco replacing that for beef and mirrors.

 

© Andrew McMillan

 

An Intruder’s Guide To East Arnhem Land

Niblock Publishing www.niblockpublishing.com.au

 

 

Andrew has also written a book called Catalina Dreaming which has a more detailed chapter on the base at Melville Bay as well as tales from the Cats' other ‘nesting sites’ at Cairns, Karumba, Groote, Doctors Gully & East Arm. It was published by Duffy & Snellgrove in 2002 and released as a talking book by Louis Braille Audio in 2003 (still in print/on disk).