'Same bodies, different skin: Ruth Heathcock'

4. ‘Same bodies, different skin’ Ruth Heathcock Karen Hughes Ruth Heathcock (nee Rayney) was a South Australian nurse who worked with Aboriginal people suffering from leprosy in the Roper River and Gulf Country of the Northern Territory from 1930 to 1942. In treating their leprosy, she enabled her patients to continue living in their country and escape incarceration, which was usually for life, on the Channel Island lazaret off the coast of Darwin. Ruth demonstrated that she respected Aboriginal law above the recently imposed minority white laws that had resulted from colonisation, in spite of the fact that her husband was an official enforcer of those laws. A Northern Territory mounted constable, he was invested, as were all policemen in the Territory after 1920, with the power of Aboriginal ‘protector’.1 Ted Heathcock, however, was won over by Ruth and turned what she referred to as a ‘blind eye’ to the work she practised for over a decade while he was absent on patrols for up to six months at a time. Eventually Ruth and Ted campaigned for a repeal of the Northern Territory Administration’s Ordinance for the Suppression of Leprosy 1928, under which ‘leprosy suspects’ were detained. Ruth was well known as a skillful and courageous nurse and was awarded an MBE in 1951 for her bravery and initiative in the attempted rescue at Manangoora of wounded bushman Horace Foster. This involved travelling for more than 180 kilometres during the height of the monsoon season, through flooded rivers and the open sea, in a dugout canoe with four others.2 She used the occasion, however, to 83 Shared struggle make known the seminal role of Aboriginal people in the rescue ‘without whom,’ she maintained, ‘I couldn’t even have existed.’3 This essay focuses on Ruth Heathcock’s work with leprosy during her period in Arnhem Land, and the critical role of Aboriginal women domestic workers in shaping the philosophy behind her professional activism. Her work was profoundly influenced by her lived experiences, including her socialisation as a child in the first two decades of the 20th century in the lower Murray region of South Australia. In her personal writings and interactions with nonIndigenous people, Ruth advanced the idea of Aboriginal women’s autonomy, expert knowledges and ritual career status, which at the time were given little credence in either the popular imagination or the anthropological arena. Her participation in Aboriginal women’s complex religious and spiritual life during her time at Roper River encouraged Ruth’s later exploration of alternative areas of spirituality. Much in Ruth’s story has remained silent in all these years because of the clandestine nature of her work. Vic Hall’s 1968 biography, Sister Ruth, limited by romanticism and the novelistic genre, suggests the need for a fresh exploration of this narrative in the light of current debates surrounding gender and cross-cultural friendships, and black–white relations from the 1930s to the early 1940s.4 Rich source material exists within the oral traditions of presentday Roper River community historians based at Ngukurr. Ruth Heathcock’s presence continues to be memorialised there and her narrative is understood as an important historical signifier of crosscultural relations that were outstandingly different to the dominant. Research for this chapter has evolved from new material recorded with the descendants of the house workers and other Indigenous historians within the Ngukurr, Numbulwar and Borroloola communities; from government records and archival sources; and from extensive conversations I had with Ruth Heathcock in Adelaide during the 1980s.5 *** In 1927 Dr Cecil Cook, the Chief Medical Officer of the Northern Territory from 1927 to 1939, published a report into the epidemiology of leprosy.6 Cook concluded that leprosy had been introduced into the Northern Territory by Chinese indentured labourers in 1882, when the first known case was identified at the Pine Creek mines. Thereafter it spread progressively to Aboriginal communities as well as to a small number of the white population.7 As the European population in the Northern Territory at the time of Cook’s report was 84 Ruth Heathcock less than 1800, relatively few Europeans contracted leprosy in comparison to the much larger Indigenous population, in excess of 20 000.8 This galvanised European perception of the endemic as an ‘Aboriginal problem’ from which whites needed to be protected if the north were to be ‘won’. Cook was unable to obtain funding for specialised medical treatment.9 Instead, he advocated complete isolation, introducing a policy of segregation enforced through invasive surveillance, capture — via subterfuge if necessary — and compulsory detention at an offshore location, pathologising patients but rendering leprosy invisible. ‘NonEuropean alien leprosy suspects’ among Chinese, Malay and other indentured labourers were deported to their countries of origin under Cook’s ordinance of 1928. Police patrols performed surprise raids to round up these ‘suspects’, often wrongfully diagnosed for transportation.10 Channel Island in Darwin Harbour, previously an offshore quarantine station, was converted to a leprosarium in 1930. The small island was without a permanent water supply and inmates suffered harsh physical conditions, segregated in unlined corrugated iron huts.11 People of different clan, language and incompatible skin affiliations were forced together within the same locality, uprooted from their spiritual and cultural basis of country and community. At a time when ‘the rest of the world was modifying its compulsory isolation laws, in Australia they were strengthened’.12 Driving the policies of public health in northern Australia during the inter-war years was the idea of making the tropics safe for the white person and thereby protecting Australia’s northern border. As Warwick Anderson contends, ‘framing disease, framing “environment”, and framing “race” all were part of the same manoeuvre — with political and social consequences perhaps as profound as any military deployment’.13 Alison Bashford likewise argues that ‘there is no mistaking tropical medicine as part of the military and colonial enterprise’.14 Compulsory isolation of diseased people was another facet of the concurrent draconian policies of separating Indigenous children from their families and removing Indigenous people from land. It was underscored by the same concepts of white anxiety: ‘protection’ and ‘pollution’.15 The pathologising of bodies and the institutionalisation of disease was in conflict with an Indigenous approach to social medicine. People infected with ‘the big sickness’, as leprosy was known among northern Aboriginal people, were treated with love and inclusion.16 85 Shared struggle Integral to healing processes is the fundamental inter-connection between land and body, and their mutual enactment upon each other. ‘Unlike [among] the white community,’ Suzanne Saunders points out, Aboriginal people ‘had no longstanding tradition of fear associated with leprosy. It was to them a new disease which they accommodated within an already developed understanding of the causes of illness generally…[and] it did not provoke rejection.’17 Cook’s policy arguably had a reverse effect on ‘containment’, increasing leprosy’s spread in Aboriginal communities as people were forced into hiding, and infection went undiagnosed and untreated.18 Ruth Heathcock viewed the policy as a ‘death sentence’, and described her reaction to its implementation this way: Lepers they caught — caught — just like criminals. It was most inhuman and the beloved was on my side. Ted wrote to the administration, and the administration contacted Geneva, and spoke of the case of a leper travelling 150 miles from the coast down to me. So you can imagine why I wasn’t going to have any of them reported and sent away. I would rather have gone to live with them.19 Ruth’s initial activism remained in the private sphere. It was expressed through her personal actions and professional ethics, her relationships with Aboriginal people, and the education of other white people around her. She mediated between two laws and two ways of being in the world. Ruth first encountered leprosy in 1930 when she was 29. She had recently arrived from Adelaide for a 12-month posting to run the Australian Inland Mission (AIM) hostel in the former tin mining town of Maranboy, 48 kilometres east of Katherine, along with fellow South Australian nursing sister Babs Sheridan. Ruth was sharing a meal with two Aboriginal women domestic workers at the hostel. She noticed a man sitting alone outside by the woodheap and asked the women to invite him to join them. The man, however, refused to enter the hostel. The women explained that this was because he had leprosy, and took the food outside to him.20 Leprosy was something Ruth associated with biblical times and she was initially shocked to find it at Maranboy. Her response was to acquire as much knowledge as possible about the disease’s transmission and methods of treatment. She corresponded with her colleagues in Adelaide, principally Dr FS Hone, an Adelaide Hospital honorary 86 Ruth Heathcock physician and former Commonwealth quarantine officer under whom she had trained.21 Ruth was satisfied that leprosy was not highly contagious — infection required prolonged contact and the transfer of ‘live blood to live blood’ — and could effectively be treated to arrest its spread in individual patients.22 Isolation, a spatial response to contagion in highly populated European colonies such as India, was hardly necessary in sparsely populated northern Australia. Moreover, it was a shameful substitute for the provision of adequate health care.23 Ruth was horrified when one day she glimpsed the bleak windowless train carriage heading from Mataranka to Darwin, transporting people for transfer on to Channel Island.24 As the local women at the hostel began to trust Ruth, they made her aware of significant numbers of leprosy sufferers hiding in the country along the Roper River, going without treatment for fear of being removed from their families and dying outside their country. Ruth was angry and especially disdainful of Cecil Cook’s official neglect in disregarding the land-based cultural and spiritual dimensions of Aboriginal people’s lives. She described incarceration as leading to a ‘double death’, spiritual as well as physical, in leprosy’s so-called ‘treatment’, and she resolved to do something about it. Cook, ever the scientist, had no time for such views, which he regarded as rooted in superstition.25 Ruth had originally sought a career path rather than marriage as a framework for her life. At 16, she began instruction with the active unenclosed congregation Little Sisters of the Poor, which had opened in Adelaide five years earlier in 1912. Bound by perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and the additional vow of hospitality, the sisters welcomed elderly destitute people into their homes as ‘family members’ on a permanent basis.26 After two years Ruth felt constrained, as she had as a child, by what she regarded as inconsistencies and paradoxes within the dogma of institutionalised religion, and withdrew from the congregation prior to taking her final vows.27 She changed her vocation to nursing, undertaking study at the Adelaide Hospital in 1921, and joined AIM in 1930.28 She completed the equivalent of four years of medical training, graduating with triple certification in midwifery, medical and surgery electives. Her aim to travel and work with Aboriginal people would satisfy a desire for social activism as well as an independent and adventurous spirit. These objectives were threatened, however, after she contracted a tuberculosis-related illness at the Torrens Island quarantine hospital. 87 Shared struggle Ruth’s training was interrupted for a year, and she lost one of her lungs. Considered unsuitable for an inland posting because of her health, one of her first nursing appointments, in 1929, was close to her childhood home of Wellington, at the Point McLeay Mission on Lake Alexandrina south of Adelaide, working with Ngarrindjeri people (see Chapter 8). Ruth, however, kept up the pressure for an inland posting and AIM conceded, offering her a 12-month position at the Maranboy hostel, due for closure the following year.29 The AIM (not to be confused with the Aborigines Inland Mission) was established specifically by John Flynn to provide medical services to the white community in the colonising process of ‘remote’ Australia, and so can be seen as an imperial agent. Charles Duguid, on his first trip to Central Australia in 1934, was appalled at the racism that underscored this Australian icon, which he had assumed was: …caring for Aborigines as well as whites. Instead it was accentuating the division, and when I returned to Adelaide I called on the Director of the AIM to discuss it with him. He was utterly frank. ‘The AIM is only for white people’, he told me. ‘You are only wasting your time among so many damned dirty niggers’.30 But Ruth provided medical treatment to the Indigenous community on equal terms whenever it was needed as did several other AIM sisters.31 She was able to reach out to Aboriginal people requiring medical attention through her relationships with the Aboriginal women employed as domestic servants at the hostel, who put her in touch with their communities beyond the boundaries of the AIM compound. One of her patients at the Maranboy hostel was Edward (Ted) Heathcock, an English-born mounted constable who had been working in the Top End since the late 1910s. Ruth was interested in his extensive knowledge of and interest in Aboriginal peoples, and a friendship developed which led to their marriage at Mataranka in 1931. Unlike many who proceeded and followed him, who abused their considerable powers and, in particular, sexually exploited Aboriginal women, Ted Heathcock had a reputation in the Indigenous community for compassion, fairness and honesty.32 Connie Bush described him as ‘a very kind man but [he] would not let anyone break the law.’33 Likewise, Val McGinness recalled: ‘He was always very, very kind and gentle. I don’t remember him arresting anybody.’34 88 Ruth Heathcock After honeymooning at Elsey Station, the Heathcocks spent a brief time at Mataranka before moving to Roper Bar on the south-eastern border of Arnhem Land, considered (in non-Indigenous terms) the Territory’s most isolated police station. Marriage to ‘the beloved’, as she called Ted, ensured Ruth’s tenure in the Territory, allowing her to form a closer alliance with Aboriginal people. She was also able to continue her professional life as a medical nurse without the restrictions of working within an institutional structure. At Roper Bar she operated out of the police station as an independent nurse, with emergency back-up available from the Flying Doctor Service via peddle radio contact. She provided health care to the few local white cattle station owners, bushmen and travellers, and the much larger Aboriginal community.35 Ruth had Aboriginal people in her home assisting with the running of the police station, especially during the long periods Ted was away on patrol. These were often the wives of her husband’s police trackers, their work contributing to an economy of exchange in which Ruth reciprocated, responding to social obligations within the local Aboriginal community, particularly in terms of medical care. Norah Wonamgai; Cara Thompson Nganjigee; Minnie George; Gypsy (Kykuri); Edna Nyuluk and her sister, Mundullullu (Alice Holtze); Nancy Burunbridj (from Rose River); Bluebell and her daughter Mareli (also known as Ruth); Priscilla Herbert (Milly); Nellie Huddlestone; Marie Roper; Missie; Big Polly; Little Polly; and Old Judy are among the women who worked with Ruth during her eight years at Roper Bar. Destabilising the classic colonial relationship of white mistress and Indigenous domestic worker, they became her closest friends, confidantes, teachers, extended family and valued coworkers, from whom she learned language, culture and aspects of women’s law.36 Ruth came to understand that the knowledges, skills and resources of Aboriginal people underpinned not only her own existence but the existence of all white people in the Northern Territory. Ngukurr elder Rosalind Munur Baalwark, daughter of Cara Thompson Nganjigee and granddaughter of Norah Wonamgai, recalls that Ruth ate bush food and spoke words from Aboriginal languages, and that people considered her to be ‘really relaxed just like an Aboriginal person’.37 Norah Wonamgai and Old Judy adopted Ruth into their family and Norah named her ‘Pitjiri’, after the file snake (Acrochordus javanicus) which floats on the water in the wet 89 Shared struggle Ruth Heathcock and Edna Nyuluk, one of the women who worked with Ruth at Roper Bar in the 1930s, Ngukurr, 1984. Photography by Francois Perez from the documentary Pitjiri: the snake that will not sink. season, when she observed that Ruth’s body would not sink but ‘bobbed up and down like a bottle’ when they were diving for lily roots in a lagoon.38 Norah Wonamgai’s great-granddaughter, Audrey Bush Wulandja, interprets the unsinkable qualities implicit in Norah Wonamgai’s choice of name metaphorically: ‘If there was a sick person who needed her help it didn’t matter how far away they were or if there was a fire or a flood, she would go straight through any obstacles to get to them.’39 At Roper Bar, people who had been living in the bush without treatment, fearing the ramifications of disclosure, began to come to Ruth through the mediation of the women domestic workers — always at carefully chosen times when her husband was away. They were mostly Alawa, Mara, Ngandi, Ngalakan, Warndarrang and Yukul 90 Ruth Heathcock people from the Roper River area. As trust grew that Ruth would not report them nor inform her husband of their whereabouts, others came from a wider radius, including from north-east and central Arnhem Land.40 During Ted’s absences, the police station, isolated from the gaze of white society, became a different kind of gendered and cultured space, one governed largely by women’s inter-cultural authority and knowledge. Through a shared understanding, the women worked together closely to establish what was essentially a covert operation to administer medical treatment to Indigenous people suffering from leprosy who were hiding in the Roper River hinterlands from missionaries (at nearby Roper River mission) and police. This meant that ‘officially’ there was no leprosy at Roper River. Between the first recorded instance in 1921 and Ruth’s arrival in 1932 there had been a more or less steady increase in reported diagnoses in the Roper River district. After 1932 this tapered off almost completely, with only a single instance reported in 1933. It increased again in 1937, the year of Ruth’s departure, to three recorded cases, and from then reported instances once more increased. But this increase wouldn’t have been linked to Ruth’s departure because of the covert nature of her work.41 Rosalind Munur recalls the role of her parents, Cara Thompson Nganjigee and Pat Thompson Marranukum (also known as Paddy or Big Pat, who was employed as a police tracker) in guiding Ruth on foot or horseback to places where sick people were hiding. Cara made use of her expertise in eight Australian languages: There were sick people out in the bush and Ruth used to go with my mother and father for two or three days like that. They used to stay with old Sam’s mother and father [Long Tom and Old Judy].42 Some of the old men used to stay with Mr and Mrs Heathcock, they were really ill, no hands, no nothing.43 They used to go and get them before the sickness might spread. A big group got away from Old Mission; they dug a hole under the fence and ran away — Ngungubuyu mob, from Rose River. Some Aborigines used to be afraid and run away but my mother used to talk with language and tell them not to be afraid and give them an understanding. A lot of work they used to do. Sister Ruth said, ‘You don’t have to be frightened. We’re all the same, same body different skin.’ She really understood our Aboriginal way. She understood Kriol and our language. People still understand that Mr and Mrs Heathcock been a big help here.44 91 Shared struggle Emergency surgery was sometimes needed on these bush trips. On one occasion a patient’s bone was protruding from their arm, on which the flesh had been destroyed. Ruth was obliged to perform an amputation, improvising with horseshoe clippers.45 In such situations, when the needs of a patient exceeded what her expertise or available instruments could adequately perform, Ruth claimed that she received spiritual help, often in the form of a pair of golden hands assisting with an operation. Local women accepted Ruth’s experiences as congruent with Indigenous healing practices, embodying modes of interconnectedness and perception usually outside the experience of white women.46 As Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out: Indigenous women perceive the world as organic and populated by spirits which connect places and people… Unlike white constructions of Christian spirituality, Indigenous spirituality encompasses the intersubstantiation of ancestral beings, humans and physiography. The spiritual world is immediately experienced because it is synonymous with the physiography of the land.47 Such commensurability served to deepen the bond between them and locate spirituality as an important site of resistance.48 ‘If I talked about all this down south,’ Ruth would often say, in her characteristic down-to-earth manner, ‘people would just think that I’ve got white ants in my head.’49 When it was learned that Ruth could be trusted with secrecy, more knowledge and responsibility were given to her. She was invited to participate in women’s ceremonial life, the inner details of which she could not speak about. While many of the trackers’ wives were young women of around 16, Norah Wonamgai, who took responsibility in instructing Ruth, was a senior woman of 45 or more. She was regarded as a clever-woman, an elder of high degree, a law woman and a ceremonial leader. She was born on the Roper River, before the coming of white people to her country. Indeed, as Rosalind Munur recalls, her first impressions were of the sightings of the first missionaries arriving along the Roper in 1908, when her brother Pilot Bob gave them permission to stop there: ‘My granny was angry. “I don’t like mununa,” she said, “but I just have to carry on.”’50 Norah, remembered by Ruth as quietly spoken, independent, forthright and commandeering, was perhaps the single most influential person in Ruth Heathcock’s life. In Ruth’s later years there was rarely a conversation where she wasn’t mentioned, where some knowledge 92 Ruth Heathcock that Norah had taught her was not referred to and invoked. Norah used her position as erstwhile domestic worker and goatherd to influence and educate Ruth, her role evolving into that of cultural consultant, diplomat, mentor, educator and friend. Norah and Ruth established an alternative kind of cross-cultural exchange to that practised on the Roper River Mission, 35 kilometres away, where the primary goal of the Europeans was to convert. It was a relationship of mutual respect involving consultation, negotiation, reciprocity, and the acknowledgment of Aboriginal sovereignty and its spiritual basis in the land. Norah’s role as an Aboriginal doctor complemented Ruth’s as a white ‘doctor’ and midwife, furthering their interconnectedness. Norah assumed the senior position of classificatory grandmother in passing on knowledge.51 Phillip Roberts, in I the Aboriginal, alludes to such mentoring exchange and its integral role in Indigenous women’s cultural practice in the Roper Valley: ‘One woman gives her trust to another, who thus becomes her guide, mentor, a point of reference — the figure of symbolic relations between her and the world.’52 Ruth recalled how Norah would employ the metonymic relationship of her reflection in the mirror when attempting to impart the basis of telepathic communication, or ‘travelling langa head’: ‘She’d take me in front of the mirror and she’d be cross, too. “See you,” Norah would say, “well, you in that looking glass and you here. See, that spirit belanga you can travel anywhere.”’53 *** In 1935 Ruth received a visit from a delegation of nine male elders, requesting that she accompany them to Burunju, where a large number of people suffering from leprosy were living in hiding. Because of the length and ruggedness of the five-day horseback journey, Ruth informed her husband, who insisted on accompanying them. On reaching Burunju, she was taken into a cave by the elders, where recognition of her healing was formalised in what appears to have been a doctor-making ceremony. Following this, Cara Thompson and Nancy Burunbridj led Ruth to a rock shelter nearby where a significant number of people who had contracted leprosy were hidden. Together, the women treated them over several hours. The elders proposed a plan for a ‘dispensary’ camp to be established at a concealed location close to the police station, enabling patients to safely receive continuing medical treatment from Ruth in addition to a regular supply of rations. They emphasised that no one but Ruth, Nancy or Cara should visit the camp.54 93 Shared struggle Oral histories from Ngukurr elders indicate that Ruth Heathcock’s life narrative was understood within the context of the creation cycle of Kunapipi. This is a widespread and highly secret-sacred femalecentred Dreaming narrative and ceremonial cycle (though not confined exclusively to women) which begins at the mouth of the Roper River and travels through Burunju to other parts of Arnhem Land.55 Dennis Daniels, a former male ceremonial elder for Kunapipi (‘my mother ceremony’) outlined certain ‘outer’ or public aspects of this association when Ruth was on a visit to Ngukurr in 1984 (aged 83), during which the Kunapipi, suppressed throughout mission times, was performed as part of an initiation cycle:56 She went to Ruined City and went from Ruined City to Roper Bar on horseback. Tom Costello [Daniels’s grandfather], Ngalaikan and Ngandi tribe, knew that area well. She asked what totem had made Ruined City. He told her Catfish. She went into a cave at Ruined City and saw the sea turtle rock and canoe alongside and rope on the canoe and harpoon and paddle. She asked the old people, ‘How did the canoe get here and the sea turtle?’ They told her the canoe came with the old Catfish, Nguru. Nguru brought the canoe and the harpoon and the rocks and things from the sea. He started to come from Low Rock an island seven miles out. The name of that rock is called Magandoola. He went to Wiyakiba with canoe and sea turtle. When he got to Wiyakiba he said to the others, ‘I’m taking one canoe and harpoon, rope and one turtle and the rest of you I’ll leave you here at Wiyakiba.’ He took Dugong as well, he had a rope around his neck and took them to Wanmurri, and another kind of catfish, Warama. Took Nguru, Warama, turtle, canoe, Dugong, harpoon and a rope and paddle. At Wanmurri he left one Nguru there and took the others to Kurrukul. All Catfish, leave salt water behind. He kept going to Ruined City. When they got there they all stayed in one cave had a meeting, had a ceremony, the Kunapipi ceremony.57 It cannot be seen as merely coincidental that a large number of the women who worked with Ruth had associations with and responsibilities for Burunju. Burunju, or Ruined City, is a sacred site in central Arnhem Land where a number of significant Dreaming narratives intersect — including in the cave near where the sufferers of leprosy were hidden, which is an important part of the Kunapipi business.58 Cara Thompson, Mundullullu (Alice Holtze), Edna Nyuluk, Minnie George and Nellie Huddlestone all had primary ownership of or ceremonial responsibilities to Burunju, while Norah Wonamgai was a 94 Ruth Heathcock Ochre painting of hands covered in white spots, known as ‘the bite of the native cat’, the symptoms of leprosy, on the wall of the rock shelter where people suffering from leprosy hid from authorities during the 1930s and 1940s, near Burunju, Arnhem Land. Photography by Karen Hughes, 2003. senior traditional owner for Murlinbahwah (Roper River). Minnie George and Nellie Huddlestone were both wives of Old (David) Walker, a senior traditional owner — minininggi — for Burunju, whereas Old Judy’s husband, Long Tom, was djungaiyi.59 Ruth’s classificatory skin relationship to Norah as ‘granddaughter’ thus connected her to a web of relationships and responsibilities that enabled her to visit this sacred space.60 (Cara, Norah’s daughter, was also an important minininggi for Burunju, a position now held by her own daughter, Rosalind Munur. Cara’s totem was Nguru the Catfish, and after her passing, Rosalind Munur has explained, her mother was transformed into one of the three Catfish tors that guard Burunju’s entrance. The rock is known by Cara’s Aboriginal name, Nganjigee, and is her totemic dwelling place.)61 In working for Ruth, these women were utilising their specialised knowledges in a range of innovative and complex ways, exercising their cultural obligations to country and community within a frontier space. While assuming the cover of a seemingly docile role within the colonial project as ‘domestic workers’, one imitative of white values expressing gender and racialised hierarchies, the domestic workers at the Roper River police station were in fact expertly subverting their 95 Shared struggle positions so as to be active agents in cultural assertion. By inviting Ruth to participate at the interface of an Indigenous knowledge system, they coopted their ‘mistress’ into an astute strategy of tacit resistance to the imposed non-Indigenous values that attempted to separate people from country. The women’s efficacy within this situation was partially because (unlike most Indigenous Australian domestic workers, particularly those in the southern states, who were strategically removed from their families) they were still living in their country, sustained by continued participation in familial, community, educational and ceremonial life while simultaneously participating in a European economy.62 Their role as house workers was an extension of their role within the community rather than a disruption of it. Ruth as ‘white woman’ could remain largely invisible because of the passivity ascribed to her gender and race, and an apparent ‘legitimated’ status within the dominant regime as ‘nurse’ and ‘policeman’s wife’. As James Scott notes: ‘Resistance is often of a covert nature and therefore hidden from the presence of the elites and hence does not become apparent in their documents.’63 The freedom and independence enjoyed by these Indigenous women led Ruth to think of Roper River societies, such as Alawa and Warndarrang, as ‘matriarchal’: a description in stark contrast to prevailing views in both anthropology and popular opinion in which Aboriginal women were ‘typically portrayed as downtrodden slaves of the men’.64 The elders sanctioned Ruth’s work. Dawson Daniels, whose grandfather was Tom Costello, one of the elders who accompanied Ruth Heathcock to Burunju in 1935, locates her incorporation within an Indigenous knowledge system through the context of an earlier dream prophecy he was told of: Old people, my grandfather and his father had a dream, a good dream that someone would come out to them, to look after our sick people and take them to a better place. We believe that person was Sister Ruth and that dream apparently came true.65 In April 1937, Yee-eepinny (also known as Smiler), a cousin-brother of Pat Thompson who had worked for Ted ten years earlier, was brought to the police station (during Ted’s absence on patrol) suffering severe peripheral nerve damage, including paralysis in the legs and the loss of toes and fingers, as a result of leprosy.66 He had been carried on the shoulders of his aunt (Bukumurra) and uncle 96 Ruth Heathcock (Kankubina) for nine months as they made their way to Ruth from Caledon Bay, 386 kilometres to the north.67 On his return, Ted was visibly upset at Yee-eepinny’s condition and deeply moved by his family’s devotion. For Ted this marked a turning point. He felt he could no longer remain silent, and to Ruth’s great relief decided to take a stand, something Ruth wished he had done much earlier.68 In correspondence, Ted Heathcock appealed directly to the newly appointed Northern Territory Administrator, CLA Abbott, on humanitarian grounds. Abbott, however, consulted the Chief Protector of Aborigines, Cecil Cook, on the matter, resulting in Yee-eepinny’s immediate removal to Channel Island.69 Smiler’s incarceration was the last straw as far as Ted was concerned. With Abbott’s support he initiated a petition to the League of Nations, outlining the mental and spiritual as well as physical suffering that enforced removal entailed. In speaking out against incarceration policies, Ted was not only risking his career but also imprisonment. Kankubina and Bukumurra’s epic journey and their dedication to Smiler were reported in both the national and international press, drawing widespread attention to the inhumanity of Australia’s questionable isolation policy. The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society in Australia and London lobbied the Australian Government for the awarding of the Albert medal for bravery to Kankubina.70 In the interim, Ruth was given ‘special dispensation’ by the Territory administrator to treat leprosy patients in her area, although war interceded. Eventually, in the 1950s, mobile leprosy clinics were established in the Northern Territory.71 Cecil Cook’s period of power in the Territory was coming to a close. He and Abbott disagreed on almost everything. Two years later, ‘against his personal wishes’, Cook left for Sydney.72 Later in 1937 Ted was transferred to Borroloola, in Yanyuwa country, south along the Gulf of Carpentaria, and remained there until his secondment in 1942 to Alice Springs as a commander in the war effort, during which time Ruth was appointed a coast guard at Borroloola by the War Office.73 ‘My last home in the territory’, Ruth was to inscribe with deep regret on the back of a photograph of the Borroloola police station.74 Leaving their daughter Ivy in Norah’s care, and their newborn baby Rosalind with Old Judy and Long Tom at Roper River Mission, Cara and Pat Thompson accompanied the Heathcocks to Borroloola on the supply boat Leisha. Ruth was also assisted by a capable young Yanyuwa 97 Shared struggle woman, Bessie Marshall Kithibula. Like Cara, who later became the first Aboriginal nurse at Roper River Mission, Bessie rapidly acquired excellent nursing skills. She was one of those who travelled with Ruth in the dugout canoe on the hazardous journey in 1941 for which Ruth later received the MBE.75 It is not clear exactly how Ruth maintained contact with her Roper River patients during these years but it would seem that Cara and Pat Thompson were integral to that process. In February 1942, during the Second World War Japanese air raid on Darwin, the Channel Island leprosarium was bombed. Patients made their way to the mainland by whatever means they could, some dying in the process.76 Twice dispossessed, many found their way to Ruth at Borroloola.77 Ruth refused a request from the War Office to evacuate to Adelaide. Her strong nursing ethos would not allow her to leave her patients vulnerable. She had to be forcibly evacuated, under warrant, in late 1943. The War Office, however, conceded to her insistence that the leprosy patients she was treating travel with her to Adelaide, remaining under her professional care for the war’s duration. Dr FS Hone, by now a towering figure in the South Australian medical establishment and a long-time supporter of Ruth’s work, took charge of their placements in Adelaide hospitals.78 Prior to the war’s conclusion, Ruth recalled: ‘I had to take them back by plane to Camooweal in the Territory to take over the hospital there for a while. Then I came back to South Australia where I have been ever since.’79 Clearly this white woman did not wish, in the words of Lynn Riddett, to fade.80 ‘They [Ruth and Ted] were pushed out because they were too good,’ remembered Yanyuwa elder Tommy Peter Jayalarri, a young man at the time of the Heathcocks’ departure from Borroloola, ‘and army came.’81 Ruth never saw Ted again. He died in Alice Springs in 1944, the result of complications from injuries he’d sustained during the First World War, where he’d served with the 2nd Light Horse Regiment.82 No longer the wife of a police officer, Ruth was left without home or employment. It demonstrated the extraordinarily fragile nature of white women’s agency and independence, tied as it was to marital status — and, in Ruth’s case, supported by Ted’s unusually progressive pro-Aboriginal stance. Now, as a widow without independent means, her choices were more limited. Ruth assisted her younger sister, Marie Rayney, in caring for their elderly mother and resumed nursing at the Adelaide 98 Ruth Heathcock Rosalind Munur, daughter of Cara Thompson Nganjigee; and Sammy Bulabl, son of Nancy Burunbridj, Roper Valley Station, September 2003. Photograph by Karen Hughes. Hospital’s Magill wards, working until the age of 65. For a while she was employed as a housekeeper on a station at Mount Druitt in the Western Desert at the time of the British nuclear tests at Maralinga in 1956. In 1988 she was named Marion Council ‘citizen of the year’.83 She continued to pursue her spiritual interests outside of the conventions of orthodox religion, joining the Rosicrucian order and practising Transcendental Meditation. She kept an ‘open house’, as she had in Arnhem Land, where people and stray cats were always welcomed and fed, and such matters were discussed. It seemed that her dominant spiritual insights, however, were informed by her Aboriginal influences, particularly Norah Wonamgai’s specialised knowledges. In 1993 Yanyuwa elder Hilda Muir visited Ruth from Darwin with a blanket she had made for her. Forcibly abducted to Darwin’s brutal Kahlin Compound (another legacy of Cook’s eugenicist experiment) as a child of eight, Hilda Muir vividly recalled a time in 1932 when Ruth and Ted were appointed relief superintendents — and how starkly this contrasted to the cruelty and deprivation she experienced before and after they were there: ‘She was beautiful. I never remembered anyone so kind. [Ruth and her husband] were the only people that ever showed any compassion. We were the children of theirs.’84 She described how Ruth made cotton 99 Shared struggle frocks to replace the children’s jute rompers and, with Ted, took them on excursions to the beach.85 Despite the early warnings of delicate health, Ruth enjoyed a long, healthy and productive old age, passing away peacefully at the age of 94 in May 1995. Ruth never saw her lived experiences as extraordinary. She thought her responses an integral part of being human and, in that sense, her life as ordinary. In her later years, she felt she was just beginning to understand the things that had happened to her in the Territory.86 It is interesting to reflect on Ruth’s childhood to see what may have set her apart. Perhaps her attitude to the Indigenous people with whom she shared the country was shaped by her childhood peers and playmates at Wellington, South Australia, where she was born and grew up. Perhaps an understanding grew out of sustained social relations with women deeply embedded in her early childhood. Ruth Rayney was the daughter of Irish immigrants Emily and John. Her father, a gentle, softly spoken, educated man, worked as an engineer on the railway line that supplemented the Murray River trade; her mother Emily was compassionate and supportive of her daughters’ independence.87 The Rayneys had six children, three older boys, followed by Ruth and her sisters, Marie and Fay. John Rayney died when Ruth was six and her mother was reliant on the labour of her sons (until they were enlisted to fight in World War II) in raising her daughters. Tragically, all of Ruth’s brothers died in action. Ruth was a tomboy, running up and down the metal roads, able to outrun her brothers. Independent, confident, used to responsibility, she felt secure growing up in a female-headed household. She attended Wellington District Primary School with a group of local Ngarrindjeri children whose families had left the segregation of the Point McLeay Mission, across Lake Alexandrina at Raukkan, after winning a fight to ‘reclaim’ and farm portions of their clan estates.88 These childhood friendships and the rich interactions they opened with the broader Ngarrindjeri community around Wellington profoundly influenced her thinking, showing alternative ways of being in the world that laid the foundation for a cross-cultural understanding and pro-Aboriginal activism that was to shape her future work and life. In Ngarrindjeri country, women were perceived to hold equivalent power to men. Always sceptical of authority, the only figure of it Ruth recognised outside the family structure was Ngarrindjeri elder Louisa 100 Ruth Heathcock Karpeny, who made an indelible impression on Ruth’s consciousness when she was a child. Louisa Karpeny was close to 100 years of age. As a young woman she had hidden in the rushes, petrified, when the British explorer Sturt and his party entered her country. Louisa was bicultural and bridged two worlds. She used her power as an ambassador and formed an important liaison with the district’s most powerful European immigrant at that time, policeman and subprotector George Mason. She was a woman of status and knowledge in her community, a skilled weaver and important healer and sorcerer, a putari who kept the maraldi bones. ‘Everyone feared Great-Nanna [Louisa Karpeny] because she was one of the sorcerers with the maraldi bones,’ says Daisy Rankine.89 As a child, Ruth understood Louisa’s power and thought of her as ‘Queen of the Lakes’:90 My word she was severe when we used to go out there to fish as children on the Murray… Dear old thing, when I knew her she was elderly. She wore a blanket over her head. Her head was bald like an egg and there was one white curl. Did she ever have a voice! And she’d pick up a stick like this and we were scared stiff!91 Louisa Karpeny was to foreshadow the influence of other Aboriginal women in Ruth’s life, most notably that of the gifted clever-woman Norah Wonamgai in Arnhem Land. Karpeny’s presence around Wellington symbolised an overarching authority that spoke of women’s knowledge and of land. She remained a dominant figure in Ruth’s childhood and helped frame her understanding of the potentiality of Aboriginal women’s power and law and the gendered nature of country. Unlike other non-Indigenous women who professed cross-cultural friendships and an understanding of Indigenous knowledges — Katherine Langloh Parker and Jeannie Gunn for example — Ruth was neither a landholder’s daughter nor wife.92 She had no vested interest in processes of dispossession, and in fact remained essentially true to the initial vows of poverty and hospitality she had taken as a teenager with Little Sisters of the Poor. Ruth Heathcock’s lived experiences, dominated by relationships with powerful Aboriginal women, enabled her to express alternative notions of inter-subjectivity, deploying her white privilege to redress Indigenous disadvantage from a standpoint of friendship and equality. 101 Shared struggle Notes 1. 2. See Austin 1997. CLA Abbott to the Secretary, Department of the Interior, Canberra, 23 January 1946. For a detailed account see Ruth Heathcock, The rescue, unpublished manuscript, n.d., copy in possession of the author; Hall 1968; Hughes 1986; and Roberts 2003. See also Hill 1945; Jose 2002, pp. 139–42. 3. Hughes 1986; Heathcock, The rescue. 4. Hall 1968. 5. I am especially grateful to Rosalind Munur, elder of the Ngukurr community, for research advice and to the many other community members at Ngukurr, Roper Valley, Darwin and Borroloola who shared their knowledge and generously participated in the research process. I wish also to acknowledge the staff at the Northern Territory Archives Service for their helpfulness beyond the call of duty. This research was supported in part by the Northern Territory Government through the NT History Grants Program and through an AIATSIS grant as part of a larger research project on the lives of the domestic workers. 6. Cook was both Chief Medical Officer and Chief Protector of Aborigines. 7. Cook 1927; Hargrave 1980, pp. 25, 28. 8. Report on the administration of the Northern Territory for 1944–45 to the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Northern Territory Archives Service (NTAS), Darwin. Indigenous population figures are an estimate extrapolated from Hargrave 1980, pp. 3, 9. 9. Davidson 1978. 10. Saunders 1989. 11. Saunders 1989, pp. 33–36. 12. ‘Statement of heritage value’, Heritage Register, Northern Territory Government Gazette, no. S5; see also Saunders 1990, pp. 168–81. 13. Anderson 1996, p. 63. 14. Bashford, p. 252; see also Anderson 1996. 15. See for example Anderson 2002 and McGregor 1997. 16. It was known also as Aragundagunda in south-east Arnhem Land. Hargrave 1980, p. 202. 17. Saunders 1990, p. 171. 18. See Hargrave 1980, p. 29; Saunders 1989, pp. 15–16; Saunders 1990, p. 181, Thoneman 1949, pp. 168–70. 19. Hughes 1986. 20. Ruth Heathcock, personal communication, May 1984. 21. Woodruff 1951. 22. Ruth Heathcock, personal communication, May 1984. 23. Kettle, p. 136. 102 Ruth Heathcock 24. Ruth Heathcock, personal communication, May 1984. Leprosy suspects were usually transported in converted cattle carriages similar to the one illustrated in Saunders 1990. 25. Colin McCarthy, personal communication, 16 July 2003; see McGregor 1997; see also Hargrave 1980, p. 203 for discussion of Indigenous attitudes to leprosy. 26. Catholic online encyclopedia 2003, viewed 6 June 2004, <www. newadvent. org>. 27. Ruth Heathcock, personal communication, May 1984. 28. The hospital became known after 1962 as the Royal Adelaide Hospital. 29. Ruth Heathcock, personal communication, May 1984. 30. Duguid 1972, p. 100. It is ironic to note that the original AIM, the Aborigines Inland Mission, was founded by a white woman, Mrs Retta Long, who ‘told me that she called on John Flynn not to cause confusion by using the same initials when the Australian Inland Mission began work but he refused to change them’. 31. See Riddett 1991 & Riddett 1993, p. 80, re. AIM sisters’ resistance to contemporary eugenicist views. 32. See for example Hilda Muir, oral history interview by Francis Good, TS 793, NTAS, tape 1, 1993; Valentine Bynoe McGinness, oral history interview by Janet Dickson TS 532, TP 521, NTAS tape 3, 1984; Connie Bush, personal communication 1996. 33. Connie Bush, personal communication 1996. 34. Valentine Bynoe McGinness, Norther Territory Records Series (NTRS) 2266, oral history interviews TS 532, Northern Territory Archives Service, Darwin. 35. Hall 1968; Heathcock 1983 oral history interview, NTRS 226, oral history interview TS 240, NTAS, Darwin. The Aboriginal reserve of Arnhem Land was to the north of the police station at Roper Bar. To the south stretched large pastoral properties such as Urapunga, Roper Valley Station, Hodgson Downs, Elsey Station, St Vidgeons Station and Nutwood Downs. Many were formerly owned by the London-based Eastern and African Cold Storage Company during the violent period in the 1880s and 1890s known as ‘the killing times’. These properties now had passed into individual ownership during a period of relative harmony in which Aboriginal people were able to coexist. See Morphy 1984; Harris 1993. 36. See for example Haskins 1998b, generally; Moreton-Robinson, pp. 21–31; Riddett 1993, generally. 37. Rosalind Munur, personal communication, January 2003. 38. Ruth Heathcock, personal communication, May 1984. 39. Audrey Bush, personal communication, July 2000. 103 Shared struggle 40. Ruth Heathcock, personal communication, May 1984; Rosalind Munur, telephone interview, 1 August 2003. 41. See Hargrave 1980, pp. 287–92, for table of diagnoses recorded in the Northern Territory. It includes a map on p. 44 showing a complete retreat of contagion at Roper River from 1926–40, whereas leprosy either remained constant or spread rapidly in other parts of the Top End at this time. 42. By ‘old Sam’, Rosalind means Sam Thompson. Long Tom and Old Judy were also the parents of Pat Thompson. Another of their children, Matthew Thompson, was taken to Channel Island in the late 1940s. 43. Rosalind Munur is referring here to the home of Mr and Mrs Heathcock behind the Roper River police station. The sick people only stayed there while Ted Heathcock was away, otherwise he would have been forced to report them to Cecil Cook. 44. Rosalind Munur, personal communication, June 1984. Kriol is now the first language for most speakers in this region and is the language taught at school (see Harris 1993). 45. Ruth Heathcock, May 1984; Hughes 1986. 46. Hughes 1986; Hall 1968, generally; Moreton-Robinson, p. 18. 47. Moreton-Robinson, pp. 18–19. 48. See Paisley 2000, pp. 17–18, for comment on the connection between spiritual beliefs and personal politics in relation to the activist and theosophist Bessie Rischbieth. 49. Hughes 1986. 50. For information on the missionary service see Harris 1998; mununa is a generic south-east Arnhem Land term for white people; Rosalind Munur, personal communication, February 1997. 51. Colin McCarthy, personal communication, 16 July 2003. 52. Lockwood. 53. Hughes 1986. 54. Ruth Heathcock, personal communication, September 1984; Rosalind Munur, personal communication, June 1984; Hall 1968, pp. 47–48. 55. See for example Peggy Grove, ‘Myths, glyphs, and rituals of a living goddess tradition’ in ReVision, vol. 21 i3, p. 6 (1), 1999; R Berndt, Kunapipi: a study of an Australian Aboriginal religious cult, FW Cheshire, Melbourne, 1951. 56. Ruth Heathcock accompanied the author to Ngukurr, as well as Burunju, in September 1984 for the filming of the documentary Pitjiri: the snake that will not sink. She had also made a visit in the 1960s with Colin McCarthy and again in the late 1970s. 57. Dennis Daniels, personal communication, September 1984; see Capell 1960; Bush 1990. 58. Dennis Daniels, personal communication, September 1984; see also Capell 1960. 104 Ruth Heathcock 59. Minininggi translates as traditional owner, while djungaiyi translates to ceremonial guardian. 60. Rosalind Munur, personal communication, March 1997. 61. Rosalind Munur, personal communication, September 1984, March 1997; see also Hughes 1986. 62. See for example Haskins 1998; Haebich 2000; Read 1999; Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, Bringing them home. 63. Scott 1985, pp. 284–89. 64. Little serious attention (apart from Phyllis Kaberry’s Aboriginal woman: the sacred and profane and some of the unpublished fieldwork of Ursula McConnell) was given to Indigenous Australian women’s autonomy and religious life until Diane Bell’s 1970s fieldwork and the resultant publication Daughters of the Dreaming. See also Bell 1987; Cheater 1993; Evans et al. 2003; Austin 1990, p. 15. 65. Dawson Daniels, Ngukurr, September 1984, in Hughes 1986. See generally Sansom 2001 for a discussion on the powerfully interactive presence of Dreaming beings, forces and Law within the seemingly ‘everyday’. See also Hughes 2001. 66. Rosalind Munur, personal communication, August 2003. 67. National Archives of Australia (NAA): Ted Heathcock to Cecil Cook, 7 October 1937, F1 37/580 Darwin, and ‘Witchdoctor’s long trip’ in the Western Australian, 31 May 1937, F1 37/580; Gibson 1992, ‘KancubinaKiang-oo-panny’. 68. Colin McCarthy, personal communication, 16 July 2003. 69. NAA: ‘Witchdoctor’s long trip’, F1 37/580. 70. NAA: John Harris, secretary, Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society, to the Rt Hon. SM Bruce, high commissioner for the Commonwealth of Australia, Darwin. 71. Grant; Hughes 1986. 72. Saunders 1989, p. 36. Cook once said of Abbott: ‘I didn’t find him difficult at all. I simply didn’t know of his existence. He never consulted me, never told me anything.’ Cecil Cook, oral history interview, NTRS 226, TS 179, p. 13, NTAS, Darwin. 73. Colin McCarthy, personal communication, 16 July 2003. Records of Ted Heathcock’s involvement in the war effort are in commissioner of police F77 correspondence files, 1935–58, File 41/43, NTAS, Darwin. 74. Ruth Heathcock, personal photographs, private collection of Sandra Fishloch. 75. For Bessie Marshall Kithibula’s recollections of the 1941 rescue, see Bessie Marshall a-Kithibula 1992, ‘The death of Horace Foster at Manangoora’. 76. Saunders 1989, p. 32; Connie Bush, personal communication, June 1995. Connie Bush’s mother, Norah Roberts, was a patient on Channel Island. Left without care, she died in the days following the 1942 bombing. For more on this see also Phillip Roberts’s account in Lockwood. 105 Shared struggle 77. Ruth Heathcock, oral history interview by Dallas Cooper, May 1983, NTRS 226 TS 240, side B, tape 1, NTAS, Darwin. 78. See Woodruff. 79. Heathcock, oral history interview, 1983, NTRS 226 TS 240, side B, tape 1, NTAS, Darwin. 80. Riddett 1993. 81. Tommy Peter Jayalarri 1984, unpublished oral history transcript recorded by John Bradley, 4 June 1984. 82. Ted emigrated to Australia in 1912. He joined the Queensland 2nd Light Horse Regiment in 1914 and served at Gallipoli. Tom F Heathcock to the commander, Northern Territory Mounted Police, commissioner of police F77 correspondence files, 132/45, Northern Territory Archives Service, Darwin. 83. Grant 1992, p. 93 84. For eugenics and Aboriginal people see Austin 1990; Austin 1993; McGregor 1997, pp. 161–72. Hilda Muir’s recollections: Joel Magarey, ‘40 years on, Ruth’s kindness is remembered’, the Advertiser, 28 January 1993. 85. Magarey, ‘40 years on…’; Hilda Muir, oral history interview by Francis Good, NTAS, 1993; Hilda Muir, telephone conversation, 2 September 2003; Hilda Muir, ‘Very big journey’: my life as I remember it, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, forthcoming; Hall 1968, p. 159. 86. Hughes 1986. 87. The early journals of George Taplin show that Ruth’s father paid a visit to the Point McLeay Mission, though we do not know what for. See Taplin, journals, 28 October 1878. 88. Jenkin, pp. 229–31 89. Bell 1998, p. 337. 90. Hughes 1986; Hughes, ‘Pioneer for humanity’, the Advertiser, 3 June 1995, pp. 6–7. 91. Ruth Heathcock, personal communication, August 1987. 92. See Ellinghaus; Evans et al. 2003. 106