Of the two Erikson landings I know – Leif Erikson’s landing in America in 1,000 A.D. and Hans Erikson’s landing in South Australia in the 1920s – it is the latter that is far more significant. This is an entirely subjective assessment, of course, and it has to be conceded that Hans Erikson was in no way a pioneer. Swedish sailors had actually been ‘jumping ship’ in South Australia since the 1840s although not too many of them stuck around for very long. In the 1870s, Theodor Fischer, who found work inland at Outaalpa sheep station, even published a book in Sweden entitled Vagabond Life in Australia [Vagabondliv i Australien] describing his adventures in the Great South Land. Erikson probably never read it and even if he had, it would have been of little use. Change had swept across the landscape with the population creeping upwards and outwards. Politically, the Australian colonies had federated in 1901 and there was a new capital, Canberra. The frontier was still lawless but it had moved north: just where Erikson was heading step by step.
In the meantime, he took work wherever he could get it. It
was mainly farm work that he got by lying about his work experience back in
Sweden. Hence, the comic tales flowed from his pen such as when he worked a
horse-drawn combine but forgot to sow the seed. Next he had a stint in the
Commonwealth Railways as a porter and chef, fibbing that he “came from a long
line of Swedish chefs.” This was, of course, long before the Muppets
immortalised the Swedish chef and his specialties like Chocolate Moose.
Erikson’s cooking must have been similarly bizarre because, after only one trip
across the Nullarbor Plain, he was demoted to the role of porter at Oodnadatta.
While performing this role, he managed to lose an entire construction train for
over ten hours while sleeping off a hangover. The episode, he says, “has since
become a legend” in Oodnadatta and resulted in his summary dismissal.
Oodnadatta at that time was the end of the line. If you
wanted to go further north, it was by camel. Erikson was staying at the town’s
only boarding house, “Alice’s Joint”, and the grand matriarch Alice was his
only supporter. It was she who came up with the idea - and the starting capital
- for Erikson to mount a dingo-scalping expedition all the way across the
Petermann Ranges and the vast Nullarbor Plain to Kalgoorlie in Western
Australia. From her armchair, she taught him everything he would need to know about
survival in the desert, looking after camels and how to enlist “a good
black-boy” to accompany him. “It all sounded so simple,” Erikson wrote. As usual,
he does not supply the date but we can narrow it down to late in the 1920s.
The dingo or “warrigal” is the native dog of Australia
thought to have been brought there by Aborigines some five to ten thousand
years ago. With the extinction of the frightening marsupial mega-carnivores, it
assumed the apex predator role in most parts of the continent. A cunning hunter,
it does not bark but howls like a wolf. As tragic modern experience has shown,
it is fully capable of killing human infants and children and savaging adults.
When the Europeans arrived in Australia with their flocks of grazing animals,
the dingo’s predatory habits took a heavy toll. In 1912, the South Australian
government passed the Wild Dogs Act offering
bounty payments for dingo scalps delivered to police officers and other
government officials. Western Australia and the Northern Territory followed
suit. But it was the Western Australians who paid the most generous bounty:
just shy of two pounds per scalp. And that was at the heart of old Alice’s
rort: Erikson would take the scalps he got in South Australia and the Northern
Territory and cash them in at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Who would know
where they came from? According to Erikson, there had been a time when the
police would accept dingo ears rather than a full scalp. But some enterprising
rogue had duped them by presenting fake ears he made using other parts of the
dog’s hide. He got away with it until one of his confidantes dobbed him in. Erikson’s comment on this scam was: “I
only wished I had thought of the ear’s idea first.” Sometimes little comments
say an awful lot and this one shows Erikson’s admiration for an ingenious fraud,
especially where the trickster gets away with it. I feel sure he would have
read Uncle Willy’s story about Nicholls Eastbourne: the man who made a fortune
by duping South Sea islanders with his gold-coloured chips. Would Erikson have
approved of that cunning deception of innocent people or was it only okay when
the duped party was a government or big corporation? Like the big newspaper
duped by Uncle Willy sitting in his little grey cottage in Sweden tapping out
“eyewitness accounts” of the Messina earthquake and getting paid for it?
There was one little trick that Erikson did use, however, in
common with nearly all the other ‘doggers’ operating at the time. He used
Aboriginal know-how. Nobody understood dingos and their habits better than the
Aborigines and nobody could track and hunt them more efficiently. Alice told
Erikson he would need to recruit a “black-boy” for the journey, preferably one
who had never seen a white man before and certainly not one who came from a
mission station. Erikson’s black companion was Jacky, an athletic young man he
came across on the edge of the Nullarbor and who had never met a white man
before. I find this last assertion hard to believe, particularly as Jacky later
on showed that he was expert in handling misbehaving camels, something he must
have learned from prior experience with the animals, most likely on camel
trains.
There were other doggers in central Australia at this time
including Reg (R.M.) Williams who would later become famous as “The Outback
Outfitter” selling rustic frontier fashion to Australia’s majority city-slickers,
the types who, if they ever did visit the Outback, would probably refuse to
leave the air-conditioned cabin of the Pajero. Williams traded with the
Aborigines for dingo scalps in much the same way as Europeans traded with
Canadian Indians for beaver skins. Other doggers such as Stan Ferguson, Harold
Brown, Allan Brumby and Paddy de Conlay had Aboriginal wives and half-caste
children.[1] This
“inconvenient truth” was not unknown to the authorities. In 1935, the
Presbyterian missionary, Dr Charles Duguid, visited north-west South Australia
and was shocked by the extent of interracial breeding he encountered. That same
year in Adelaide, the Chief Protector of Aborigines reported to the government
his concern about doggers fathering half-caste children. But bureaucracies knowing
about something and openly acknowledging it are two quite different things as
Erikson would later learn in his famous nom
de plume dogfight with the government over this very issue.
The Advertiser in
Adelaide reported on 28 March 1935:
With the blacks and like the blacks, [white doggers] travel from soak to spring and from spring to waterhole, euro for their meat and flour and tea their only rations. In the camel-boxes or the pack-bags, they carry a stock of mirrors, red handkerchiefs and pocket-knives, to barter with the tribes for the dead warrigal. Two or three times a year, the spoils are sent in … to be counted over at the police-station or the store, a credit balance against flour and tobacco … The pursuit of the wild dog to his lair, further into the desert and the ranges, is certainly colonising the country and opening our eyes to the geography of the unknown, but there is no doubt that in the process of this weird new industry, dependent upon a Government policy on behalf of the pastoralists a thousand miles further in, the two good Australians, the black-fellow and the dingo, are coming in for a great deal of unnecessary exploitation.
Erikson gives a detailed account of his dingo hunting technique. The dogs were poisoned with strychnine using carefully handled baits sweetened with treacle. One of the great advantages of strychnine was that it did not kill the animals immediately but made them very thirsty so that they set off towards the nearest water hole. This was a reliable aid to locating water; all one had to do was track the dying dog and continue on in the direction it was taking and one would find the local water source. Over thirteen months, Erikson claims to have collected 1,200 scalps. The big picture is mind-boggling. By 1934, over half a million scalps had been handed in by doggers throughout this region of Australia. And yet the dingo survives to this day! Why hasn’t it been wiped out after so systematic a persecution? Why didn’t it follow the thylacine of Tasmania into extinction? Some have suggested that the Aborigines were careful to leave enough bitches alive so that the species (and the revenue source) would continue. The dingo bounty debate has raged in Australia for many years, complicated in recent times by the interbreeding of feral dogs and dingos. Some say these bounties just don’t work. Some say they do work and the dingo is only decades away from extinction. There seems to be a good scientific case to show that a stable dingo population helps Australia’s many small marsupials whose numbers are generally in sharp decline due to predation by smaller feral predators like foxes and cats. Economically, are dingo bounties essential for the grazing industry’s viability or are they merely a form of rural social welfare, a crumb brushed off the dinner table of highly-paid city bureaucrats by conservative Bible-belt politicians? I wonder what Hans Erikson would think? Whatever side he took, we can be sure he would argue it passionately and with embellishment.
Historically, the doggers’ use of strychnine apparently had
a dark side, too. Paddy de Conlay was accused of poisoning Pitjantjatjara
people in the Petermann Ranges in 1936 by leaving them a bag of flour laced
with the poison. This accusation – which came from the Aborigines themselves - was
relayed to the government in Adelaide by Charles Mountford. No action was taken
in this instance (Australian justice bureaucrats generally had no stomach for
going to court on the back of evidence from illiterate Aborigines) but the
authorities did have “gin men” like de Conlay in their sights. In 1939, the law
was changed making it illegal for white men to “habitually consort” with
Aboriginal women. De Conlay responded by abandoning South Australia and crossing
the Northern Territory border. R.M. Williams gives his version of the story:
Paddy solved the problem by marrying a
white bar girl he picked up (I was his best man). Meanwhile, he kept the harem
close by and a serious attempt was organised by the Aboriginal husbands of the
borrowed wives to liquidate the offender. But Paddy got in first and managed to
liquidate the conspirators. Duly charged with a capital crime, Paddy claimed
self-defence, which the judge accepted.[2]
Rough frontier justice! Alice had been careful to advise the young Erikson about consorting with Aboriginal women and not to do it without permission from the male elders. One cannot read The Rhythm of the Shoe without getting the impression that Erikson had a robust sex drive. Did he “go combo” during his Outback adventure? He clearly had ample opportunity but, of course, there is no hint in the book that he took that opportunity up. There was an “embarrassing” incident in Alice Springs when a “gin” named her “piccaninny” “Hans Erikson” but this was not an uncommon practice and nobody suspected that he was father to the inky black infant. The closest brush he had with this lifestyle is touched upon in chapter 7 “Charlie and the Tchonk-Tchonk.” Charlie was a “combo” boundary rider who Erikson worked with for a time. His harem was always camped some distance away. The boss knew about them and provided extra supplies for them. One cold winter desert night, Erikson and Charlie were sleeping in a galvanised iron hut. For some inexplicable reason, Erikson’s sleep was disturbed and he awoke to pitch darkness. He struck a match and to his horror saw a huge black snake coiled up on Charlie’s chest as he snored away. Erikson then came up with the ridiculous plan of trying to kill the snake with a broom. Thankfully, the plan transformed into a general panic that included the poor snake and nobody got bitten. Erikson and Charlie were outside the hut in their underpants. They didn’t have the courage to go back inside and so stumbled their way to where Charlie’s wives were camped. The sight of the two men – almost blue with cold – caused much hilarity amongst the Aborigines. There the story ends. Or did it? Did Erikson sleep alone that night?
When I read “Charlie and the Tchonk-Tchonk,” I am convinced
that Erikson did experience the real Outback and gain a first-hand knowledge of
white-black affairs at that time. The dialogue reeks of openness and
authenticity – the kind that only comes when two men see themselves as equals
and do not fear being judged by the other. Erikson says he became “great mates”
with the 72-year-old Charlie and this is evident in their discussions. When I
read the turbulent 1935 debate in which Erikson told Minister Paterson that he had traveled in central Australia by camel and
vehicle in the guise of a prospector and dingo scalp hunter and had met
hundreds of people who took him as one of their own, I immediately thought of
Charlie. Erikson went on to challenge the Minister to travel to central Australia,
quietly and unannounced, and find out for himself what was going on there.
That, of course, is the last thing Paterson wanted to do: he was hoping to bury
the whole thing in paperwork denials so that the British race could save face
and hold the high moral ground against the emerging Nazis. Paterson’s ignorant
hypocrisy must have been galling to people like Erikson and Xavier Herbert – as
it is to us today who have the luxury of hindsight. The argument that, by and
large, white men were not consorting
with Aboriginal women in central Australia in 1935 is akin to the argument in
2003 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction: it was a false premise
upon which was constructed an agenda for action.
Much has
changed since the 1930s and we are in danger of not fully comprehending why
“inter-racial breeding” was such a delicate topic then. Why was it a big deal?
The following letter appeared in the Brisbane Telegraph on 2 April 1935:
Sir – One of the best biographies of
Herr Hitler that has yet been published in the English language is “Germany’s
Hitler” by H. A. Heinz. Hitler’s whole life is dealt with. We learn how he
experienced a grinding poverty which never soured him; we see him proved a
selfless man who won the nation to him because of his own essential truth. We
learn of his black hour, during which he himself lost faith after the failure
of the 1923 putsch. Ludendorff precipitated this failure himself because he
took the word of honour of captured democratic officials and let them go and they
broke their parole and prepared for the reception of the patriots by machine
guns. Hitler’s biographer offers us no hint of any romance in the career of
this leader. Many will be surprised to hear that the Fuhrer is a vegetarian and
a non smoker. Hitler arrived because he would not compromise with truth nor
would he practise any half measures to placate anyone. He will not swing to the
right or swing to the left but he will always go straight on. That is why he is
now Germany’s Hitler and why he will some day be “The White Man’s Hitler.” Herr
Hitler has the solid support of the German nation and all the propaganda
emanating from biased and tainted sources has failed to disprove that Herr
Hitler is anything but the nation’s chosen and popular dictator. – Yours,
&c J. H. Beecham.
“The White Man’s Hitler” told the German Reichstag on 30 January 1937 that “it is the grandest and most sacred task of man to preserve his race.”[3] To question a sacred task is to display disobedient ignorance towards the divine. The extreme Right at this time blandly accepted “race” as a fundamental biological keynote fact and simply asserted that racial purity meant “strength” and racial impurity “degeneration” without providing any compelling proof or rationale. It was the kind of self-evident quasi-sacred truth that has led to eras of persecution all down the ages. And it wasn’t simply a case of asserting that the white race was superior to other races. Extreme Right wing writers – like Willy Grebst – were very admiring of “pure” non-white races and disapproved of their being “missionised.” They were perfectly adapted to their environment and should be left alone to live as their ancestors had. When non-white races were missionised or interbred with the white race, degeneration set in. Hence, Erikson back in the 1930s, for example, viewed missionary blacks as unfit and untrustworthy. The problem he saw with “half-castes” was that they became outcasts who belonged nowhere, couldn’t get a job and thus became financial burdens upon the State. Better to sterilise them, he argued with some timidity. Thirty years later and after the horrors of World War 2, he would write of “full-blood” Aborigines:
Whatever may happen to them [the
Aborigines] in the future, I am thankful that I have had the opportunity of
meeting some of them before they had become contaminated by association with
whites. I thought they were wonderful. The superiority of the blacks lies more
in the moral sense than in their ability to survive in the bush. Admittedly
they are experts at bush-craft. But so can a white man become an expert given
the same amount of training.[4]
Here was a white man so disgusted with his own murderous Aryan “race” that he is willing to concede moral superiority to the Aborigines and to treat as tainted any Aborigines who had the misfortune of “associating” with whites. In the early 1900s, Willy Grebst would have approved of the above passage, perhaps omitting or toning down the suggestion of Aboriginal moral superiority. Yes, he recognised that the white colonial race had blood on its hands but I do not believe that vain, patriotic Willy would go as far as placing Aborigines above educated upper class Swedes in the moral spectrum. That would be out of the question. He, however, had not witnessed the end point of Barthold Lundén’s beloved Nazism. Judging by Erikson’s view, the “White Man’s Hitler” clearly left a legacy of guilt extending beyond the borders of Germany.
For a great many people, however, I think the real fear
underlying all the concerns about racial interbreeding was in fact the very
opposite to the Nazi façade of racial superiority. It was a fear that “bastard
races” would combine the best elements of each race and produce a race superior to the pure original versions
from which they sprung. In Australia, this meant that the half-castes would
inherit both the white man’s intelligence and the Aborigines’ endurance, a
combination that would make them supremely adapted to life in the Outback such
that they would eventually supplant the “pure” but weak Europeans and the
“primitive” blacks. We have seen that Erikson sought to debunk the notion of
the Aborigines having special powers of survival; Europeans can become equally
skilled given the same training. Equally, Aborigines are no less intelligent
than their European counterparts and, given the chance, can achieve in academic
pursuits just as well. But while people were attaching religious devotion to the
blurry notion of “race,” they naturally wanted to see their own race occupy a
place of privilege and were anxious about any threat to that privilege.
Not everyone, however, was consumed by notions of race. Some
people of goodwill simply looked at the facts of what was happening in the
Outback – the kidnapping of Aboriginal women, the brutality of their treatment
at times, the reprisals, the debilitating effect upon traditional marriage
systems – and argued out of compassion for some sort of segregation between the
races that would allow traditional Aboriginal society to preserve itself. The
missionaries, of course, did not ultimately wish to see a preservation of
Aboriginal culture but a transformation of it into Biblical likeness: a Garden
of Eden where they got to choose which plants were weeds and which not. As
Willy Grebst loved to point out, the missionaries did much to prepare their
converts to be more easily worked over by the less holy members of the
Christian community. Those who survived the diseases that spread about in the
mission stations, that is, became easy pickings for the likes of Nicholls
Eastbourne.
Hans Erikson and Jacky successfully made their way through
some of the harshest environments on earth to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.
There, Erikson cashed in his 1,200 dingo scalps and sold his two camels and all
his equipment. With 2,500 pounds in hand, he took Jacky to Adelaide and then
eventually back to Alice at Oodnadatta where they parted ways. Erikson “was not
sorry to part company with” Jacky at this point, perhaps understandable after
13 months together. Reading between the lines, I would not be surprised if the
young Aborigine had realised his own vital contribution to the success of the
expedition and felt under-compensated for it. Fortunately, it is now becoming
better known how many of the famous white Australian explorers owed a huge debt
of gratitude to the Aborigines who accompanied them, finding food and water and
liaising with the local inhabitants.
So it was that Hans Erikson, whose life had been saved by an
old Saami woman near the Arctic Circle, who admired the intricacy of African
native languages and the survival skills of Aborigines in the desert, could yet
despise the mission blacks and propose the sterilisation of the half-caste
offspring of “gin men” like his friend, Charlie. He was a man of many
contradictions, a man of confused times.
[3] International University Society’s Reading Course,
Text Matter and Biographical Studies, Volume 8 (Nottingham) p. 277
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