Probing take on the history of Adelaide House

By ERWIN CHLANDA

A group of locals are taking a fresh look at Adelaide House in Todd Mall, the town’s first hospital and usually seen as a monument to the revered Reverend John Flynn, a product of his “hard work and advocacy,” according to Wikipedia.

Once completed in 1926 Adelaide House was the 9th in a network of 14 medical facilities, an important part of the “mantle of safety” Flynn of the Inland envisioned for the people of the outback.

So long as they were white.

Emily Hayes, minister of the Alice Springs Uniting Church, which owns Adelaide House, at the opening yesterday referred to Dr Charles Duguid, pivotal in the beginnings of the Ernabella mission in the top end of South Australia.

Working on the maps (from left) Kim Mahood, Kieran Finnane, Brenda Shields, Lisa Stefanoff and Sylvia Purrurle Neale.

Rev Hayes was addressing about 100 people in the church, before viewing the centrepieces of the display, two large and colourful hand-drawn maps, created over about a year in collaboration with senior Arrernte people, adding images of events or recollections.

Rev Hayes said: “In 1972 Duguid published a book in which he accused Flynn of telling him not to waste his time with 'damned, dirty niggers'. This has been vehemently refuted by many who knew Flynn but his own writing is mostly silent on the Aboriginal people of the Outback.

“When he does mention them, he is ambivalent. At times he is very sympathetic but at other times his words are paternalistic or belittling. He did not see them as people with a future.

“The University of Newcastle’s colonial massacres map shows 21 massacres occurred across Northern Australia during Flynn’s time.”

Flynn, she said, never spoke about any of them.

Brenda Shields, Sylvia Purrurle Neale, Elaine Peckham and her son Faron Peckham, addressing the gathering, made it clear that they were very much a part of the town, although with respect to its first hospital they were on the wrong side of the racial divide.

Fom left: Sylvia Purrurle Neale, Brenda Shields and Elaine Peckham.

The display states: “From 1934 Aboriginal patients had been treated in a medical hut, the so-called ‘Blacks’ Hospital’ on the eastern bank of the river.

“[Later] they were taken to the ‘Native Ward’, a corrugated iron and flywire construction fenced off from the rest of the [hospital] compound.”

Health care desegregation did not come until 1969. Patients moved to the new hospital at its current site, in December 1976.

The town’s housing conditions were similar: “Local families of mixed descent, including many former inmates of the Bungalow, crowded into makeshift housing by the river, not far from the hospital, in an area known as Rainbow Town.”

This was not to the liking of Lieutenant Colonel Noel Loutit who commanded up to 5000 troops encamped in Alice Springs during World War II, effectively taking over the town.

Children hiding in the hills from Welfare.

He opposed a plan by civilian Administrator Charles Abbott for 22 basic cottages for the town’s traditional owners on land just north of The Gap: “There are many cases of deserving white people who should receive consideration prior to squandering of £6,600 on Niggers.

“Their place is in the Mission Stations or in Native Reserves outside the town boundaries …”

But the display is far from a bitter account of a segregated town. Rather it is a tale of resourceful people – black, white and “half-castes” – while not living together, managing to live alongside each-other, often relying on humour and cheekiness to survive in a place far from the rest of the world.

The display mostly tells it through direct quotes from people who were there. They are not named in the display because, according to a member of the volunteer group, they consider their past had been shared equally by a great number of people.

“Being ‘a Gappy’ (living in the Gap Cottages) became an identity in itself, a matter of pride. Half this town lived in the Gap Cottages,” one said.

They were well-known families like the Perkinses, Brays, Ansells, Ah Chees, Tilmouths, Satours, Stuarts, Hayes, Millers, Laughtons, Neales, Coles, Presleys and more.

“We grew up as one big family. There is nothing like that today.”

“Jessie Neale in House 22 would bake pies, pasties and jam tarts every weekend. Everyone would come to buy her food.”

Rev Hayes (standing) during the Q&A. In the foregound Keith Castle, also a member of the group.

“There was a big space, a cleared sandy area where children played. I remember we’d look for money in the sand to buy lollies.”

“There was a shop, where the Gap Youth Centre is now. He had everything, like Wallis Fogarty in town.”

“There was a slaughter-house nearby where we’d go with hessian bags to pick offal up off the floor. And there were big fig trees, European figs, with delicious sweet fruit.”

“Everyone would flock around the Laughtons’ place, Herbie would bring out his guitar and they’d all have singalongs.”

The town got its first library in 1953. “I’d stand outside the old library, gazing in the window at the books. Joy Brucek, the librarian, was a wonderful woman who eventually came out and invited me in.”

Adelaide House. Tourism promotion photo.

As soon as young people left school, they’d get a job.

“In my generation we all got jobs, we didn’t have good education, but we were smart, enthusiastic-for-life people, we didn’t think about it.”

“Before when you went for a job, they wouldn’t ask you for a paper saying what you can do and can’t do. They’d give you a job.”

“Mona Minahan would employ Aboriginal people … at the Riverside (hotel). Mona came to me one day to tell me how to sweep. I was 15 or 16. I said, ‘You’ve got no right, my mother taught me that.’ Later I heard her saying in the bar, ‘You know that skinny little black bitch, she stood up to me like no-one else is game to.’ After that we became friends.”

[ED – Kieran Finnane, a member of the group, is a co-founder of the Alice Springs News.]