Central Land Council

The Land is Always Alive

Lake Nash

In February 1949, the Alyawarr people at Lake Nash became one of the first groups of Aboriginal pastoral workers in the Northern Territory to strike for wages. The three-month strike ended when management agreed to pay stockmen two pounds a month, plus keep, but living conditions at Lake Nash were still poor.

In the early 1960s the Lake Nash pastoral lease came under the control of the Texas-based King Ranch Incorporated, and by the 1970s the new management was pursuing a deliberate policy of driving traditional landowners off the station by cutting Aboriginal employment and closing the station store to all but station employees. The Alyawarr had for many years camped near Ilperrlhelame waterhole, an important sacred site which forms part of the Antyipere (Flying Fox), Nyemale (Grass Rat) and Kwerrenye (Green Snake) Dreamings. The camp was just a kilometre from the Lake Nash homestead.

The company was determined to see it moved but the Alyawarr were just as determined to remain and look after this important spiritual centre. The management sent in the bulldozers which tore down a sacred tree, and destroyed the school building, a water tap and the remnants of humpies and then built a fence which cut off about a third of the camp, but the people refused to budge. The management's harsh policies sparked a national scandal when the Department of Aboriginal Affairs was forced to air drop food and supplies into the community in 1974 after flooding cut the roads and the station refused to sell food to people on the brink of starvation.

Occasional media reports described the degrading conditions and drew graphic pictures of a desolate camp on a bare, dusty flat where Aborigines huddled in derelict cars or in shabby humpies constructed of scrap iron, dry boughs or tattered canvas. There were no working toilets and the water supply consisted of three cold-water taps for a community of about 180. When novelist Xavier Herbert visited Lake Nash in October 1981 he described conditions on the Aboriginal community as 'an insult to the Lord God'. In 1983 the CLC and other organisations made a concerted effort to force government action on Lake Nash by staging a convoy from Alice Springs to erect shelters at the camp.

As political pressure increased the parties resumed negotiations. Offer and counter-offer were made, until eventually the Alyawarr broke the impasse by agreeing to move to an area about eight kilometres from their present camp if they were assured of unrestricted rights of access to Ilperrlhelame, the store and the airstrip and the relocation of essential services including the school and clinic. It was not until June 1988 that the Alyawarr finally received freehold title to the excision.

Harry Campbell was one of those who stayed throughout the long struggle: We fought on our own for this country here. We really won this country. They gave it to us, this place here, because we beat them. They [whitefellas] came and fought for the country in the wrong way, as if it was theirs, and tried to make us go back to Sandover country. but we stayed here.