Become a river boat captain

Head up north, pack your rods
and leave your troubles on the shore

Scott Hallet builds House Boats for hire in Borroloola. The venture started five years ago with an idea. "We thought; this will give us an excuse to go up and do a bit more fishing!" says Scott.
Instead, a hobby of fishing and living in House Boats has turned into a business and the Hallets now own four House Boats and six dinghies. Scott has no previous experience with boats and the manufacturing of them, but has since learned a great deal after five years of running the business. The boats are built out of aluminium, and are mostly built for just family to use and for others to hire out. As of yet, the business hasn't gone as far as selling the boats.
The prices range from $36 per person, per day to $50 per person, per day. The larger boats can hold a minimum of six people and on the smaller boats, a minimum of two people can be catered for. For people who are looking at hiring one of the boats, no previous experience is necessary, as Scott puts it, "Any Joe Blow can jump in and drive one! They're made very well". Scott says there are no set restrictions on where people can take the boats, "as long as it's kept in the river, they can go right to the mouth of the river. We don't let them go down Batton Creek though, because there are a lot of rocks".
The boats are used on King Ash Bay which is approximately 40 kilometres downstream from Borroloola. To get there you will have to take the bypass road to Bing Bong and turn off to King Ash Bay approximately 20 kilometres past Borroloola. King Ash Bay has a boat club and all the facilities you need when hiring the House Boats. King Ash Bay is said to be like a small township, consisting of a club and camping grounds. "They call it Borroloola North there now!"
The boats are set a week before Easter for the beginning of the season and are pulled out in the first week of December, so the boats are not available during the wet season.
The building of the boats is, according to Scott, "a family concern really, just me and my Dad basically. We were building them in Scott street, we haven't built one this year, but maybe next year".
The boats range in length from 27 to 40 feet and come with all the necessities in order to maintain comfort - linen, cutlery, pots, pans, cooker, airconditioner, bathroom, hot and cold running water, radio. Fuel is expected to be paid for as used by the customer. Generally the boats are designed to be able to go for seven days without needing fill up on fuel or water.
Anyone who's interested in hiring one of the boats can give Scott Hallet a ring on 8962 2030.

Heartbreak Hotel

Gerry McCarthy cries

The Heartbreak Hotel is on the corner of the Tablelands Highway and the Carpentaria Highway. It's a magic little spot because by the time you've driven from the Barkly Homestead to Heartbreak, you're out of fuel, thirsty and hungry!
It was established by one of the original shareholders in the Macarthur River meatworks which was an export abattoir, a small abattoir set up on Macarthur River station in the late seventies and operated through to the early eighties. It then went bust like most of the abattoirs of this region.
It's basically just a group of demountables and it's quite famous in terms of its name, Cape Crawford. A lot of tourists expect to arrive at the beach. They've travelled all this way through the Tablelands and they're waiting to get to the beach at Cape Crawford!
When they get there they realise they're 100 odd K's short of the coast and therefore they should go on to Borroloola. The guy that set it up got a lease off Balbirini Station, which was owned by Europeans then and is now owned by Aboriginal people. He started it and named it Heartbreak because of the amazing amount of red tape and frustrations and bureaucratic bungling that he had to go through to get the place up and licensed. It turned into quite a famous outback pub because the pastoral people all gather there, the mail plane lands there, it's got cold beer, it's always had a great atmosphere and some ferocious fights! I can recall numerous wonderful nights there with ringers and station people and parties till all hours of the morning. It has a Ball every year and we used to focus union meetings and in-services - professional development where we'd bring all the teachers in from around the Tablelands for a weekend and use Heartbreak as a focus.
It's changed very much now though and it's changed hands a couple of times. It's still demountable, it's a conglomeration of demountable buildings, but now it's worth over a million dollars.
A bit of a situation developed a few years ago because there were allegations that the staff of Heartbreak were telling tourists that Borroloola was a very unruly place and not a safe place to visit. Therefore, we were on the end of the road, so to speak, and desperate for coaches or tourists or anybody to come that extra 110 kilometres.
But because of the bad name we were getting, people were going straight round the corner and up to the Stuart Highway because that track from the Barkly Homestead through to Heartbreak and then on to Daly Waters has now become a major tourist track as opposed to the old tradition of going to Threeways and then up the Stuart Highway. So with our local Economic Development Association, we tackled that and went and established very good and positive relations.
People were then told that Borroloola isn't such an unsavoury place to visit and that your life isn't threatened by a visit to Borroloola!

The visitors who came to trade

The Macassans came across to
the Top End to share technology
and trade with the Yanula people
Gerry McCarthy learned this
lesson at school

The Maccasan history in the Borroloola area goes back, some suggest, to the 17th Century and it is basically the Trepang fishing people from Sulawesi, (part of Indonesia), who visited the Top End of Australia and had a major camp on Vanderlin Island, one of the Sir Edward Pellew group and have very strong ties with the Yanula people.
There are Yanula people living today in Borroloola who can tell you stories about relatives that went from the Sir Edward Pellew Islands, their homelands, back to Sulawesi as the Macassans visited on the end of the Wet, coming down with the last of the monsoonal winds and returning on the last of the Dry - the last of the south-easterly winds. It was very cyclical in nature and they came and fished Trepang.
This story unfolded in a school project. Quite a number of Aboriginal people came into the school to participate in this project because they were so interested in telling us about this part of their history. When we got into the nitty, gritty stuff we started to find out that the Macassans traded knives and axes and a lot of artifacts that the Aboriginal people didn't have access to here.
The Yanula people were very much geared up with technology, very early in the piece. The best technology that was adapted was used for sailing and dug-out canoes. From the Macassan influence there are today, still living, quite a number of old people who are excellent canoe makers.
The Yanula people from Borroloola have a canoes that feature in two museums. One in the Sydney Museum and one major canoe that they built for the Maritime museum, in Launceston, Tasmania. It's an amazing history because it went on for so long and was only terminated around the time of the First World War when the government stepped in because it was worried about the alien issue in Australia. Then they turned it into an immigration issue and so the Macassans, over time, just stopped visiting.
But there were Yanula people who had married into their society, who were still living in Sulawesi. There was an obvious Macassan influence within the Yanula people at Borroloola and around the coast.
We won first prize in the Borroloola Show with this project. It was just brilliant; it was really a wonderful, educational experience because it just brought so many people in. My Aboriginal Assistant teachers took charge of the project and we learnt dances that were obviously related to the Macassan culture.
The Yanula have incorporated Macassan words into their language and we did some great linguistic stuff. Especially for the non-aboriginal kids who were really drawn into it and the Aboriginal kids were just so proud. It just went really well and was very educational.
Here's a funny little story from the last Borroloola Rodeo which as usual was a big gig:
It was a big celebration and we had a big parade of the old people and there was a cultural display and so forth. So I encouraged a lot of my family to come up and my father who's now in his seventies has very grey hair and was sporting a very long grey beard at the time. He was at the Rodeo and I had my usual little friends, kids from the school who were hanging out with my kid.
One of the local kids is very funny and he was one of my major artists in documenting this historical study. He came to me in confidence and he said to me, "You know that Bob, your father?" and I said, "Yes, junior", and he said "He's very old isn't he, very old man". I said "Oh, well he's in his seventies, he's sort of not really that old" and junior says, "Oh he's old, one of the oldest blokes I've ever seen. Do reckon he'd know any of the Macassan fellas?".
So there was a grade student giving back to me that he had really understood lots of what we had done in a project - by a simple anecdote of asking about my father.
(My father wasn't impressed at first and then he saw the humourous side of it about five minutes later. We still share that joke amongst family members!)

Caring for the old people

Elayne Kerr, Director of Care at the Malandari Centre
in Borroloola explains its history and function

The Centre is on a program funded by the government for three years, run by Aboriginal people for the aged within the community. What we're wanting is for the old people in the community to stay within the community, to grow old here, to keep their customs, so that they're still with their families.
A few years ago, some local women got together and decided they wanted to look after their old people and as a result the Rrumburriya Malandari Aboriginal Council had a shed built for them. The women came together and they would cook meals for the old people in the kitchen they had down there.
One day a week they would bring the old people in. They went around in the bus to collect them all, to bring them in and do their washing, to give them a good meal and a shower.
From that the idea developed that a more permanent arrangement would be good, so this centre was formed. It took a couple of years to come to fruition.
We've been open for a bit over a year now, mainly for respite care but we do have a few clients who stay until they are unable to remain at the centre for medical reasons.
We have eight clients who live here at the moment. We like them to do as much as they possibly can themselves so that they can maintain their own identity.
We take the old people out to gather bush tucker when it's available. They go out to get bush medicine and we encourage that. Families are encouraged to come to visit as much as possible.
The kitchen here provides all the meals for the Centre. As well, we have 'meals on wheels' and two staff who will go out in the bus and deliver those meals - it could be as far away as Devils Springs which is thirty five kilometres away. Washing can be brought back on that same vehicle if needed, washed here and taken back out the next day.
We service the outstations as well. If anyone is living on their own, we'll go and clean their house once a week. All the staff here are trained in those areas and whoever is available at the time can do whatever is required.
Of course there are always more beds wanted. We are currently getting an extension for another eight self-contained rooms. They will be for the more agile clients so that they can look after themselves totally out there. Then in the other rooms we can have those clients who need just the extra care that we can give them.
It will be good when it's built because some of the old people who are out in the communities using Meals on Wheels will probably come in and access those rooms, whereas they're living in conditions which aren't really appropriate for their age or the medical conditions that some of them have.
The old people don't want to leave their communities but if it becomes necessary in oder to provide them with specialist care then centres like Malandari are the way to go.

Helping the bush with training and jobs

Adam Randall from
Julalikari Job Place reports

Like many of the Northern Territory's remote communities, Robinson River is experiencing high unemployment in a community where there is no major industry group. There is, however, a fledgling industry is being developed through a brick works and poultry farm.
Julalikari Job Place went to Robinson River and met with the local council to discuss employment development strategy to create real long-term employment options for the community. The first project that was looked at was a plumbing and irrigation project to be linked to a new sewerage system currently being built.
Job Place is also be looking at other strategies in which the poultry farm and the brick works can be further developed to the benefit of the community.
For information about Job Place and what it offers, phone 8962 2128.