2011 - Theses - Flinders University

alright and not poison so we all had a go. We were all into it then. So every time they seethe white man coming on the packhorse they will stand and wait for him.’ 23In popular imagination, Mt Serle was that ‘great token of the Far North’, although it was allbut abandoned in the 1860s drought. 24 Yuras were left alone again, with bush tucker andwaterholes depleted: starving, emaciated, barely surviving.The rain returned and the white men with it. This time they brought rations as well, andevery week, the old, infirm, and women with children lined up with calico bags and emptyjam tins for flour-sugar-tea and a bit of tobacco. Whichever colonial decreed these should bestaple foods, and worth a man’s labour? As drought closed in again in the 1890s, yurasclustered around the ration depot, until it was also abandoned and left only for a camel depot.The unfortunate manager faced ‘bold and threatening’ yuras demanding one pound pay perweek with double rations as their terms of employment, and complained to the police atBeltana when he offered less. 25 And so Johnsons, Wiltons, Demells, and Coulthards wontheir contracts hauling carts with their donkey teams, along the rough hill passes to therailhead at Beltana. Other yura families cobbled goats together, eight at a time, and collectedfirewood for sale on stations or at the small rail towns. When an opportunity opened up,Adnyamathanha were there, shaking it for what it was worth.17