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In February 1942 Darwin suffered the first of many Japanese air raids. Burnett, along with the rest of the
civilian population and the Administrator, C L A Abbott, was evacuated to Alice Springs. His subsequent designs
for the Northern Territory inland, with its extremes of temperatures, are quite different from the tropical designs
for coastal Darwin. His Alice Springs houses incorporated a central core, including a fireplace for the colder
months, with wide verandahs enclosed with canvas blinds and fly wire for use as comfortable living or sleeping
areas during the warmer weather. In Alice Springs examples of his work can be seen in the Hartley Street precinct,
later partly preserved as a heritage area, and the Riverside Hotel.
Burnett often took on the roles of Magistrate and Coroner in Alice Springs and his somewhat unconventional
approach to the law led to amusing situations. On one occasion he was faced with two youths who had been
arrested for fighting. When it became clear that neither knew which one had started the fight, or who had won,
due to the fact that the police had intervened, Burnett ordered that the fight recommence under the supervision of
a policeman who taught boxing at a local youth club, and adjourned the case until the following day. The youths
were then fined five Shillings each, Burnett remarking that they would find it cheaper in the future to confine their
fighting to the youth club.
Burnett was an excellent artist and was unusual in that as an architect he drafted all his own work. He was
prolific in other art forms such as watercolours and sketches. Many of his fine pen and ink works were used to
accompany Hilda Abbott’s articles on the Northern Territory in Walkabout during the 1940s. His cartoons, some
with fairly acid comments, were widely enjoyed. It is said that Lord Gowrie, the Governor General of Australia
until 1944, had all Burnett’s cartoons forwarded to him.
During the latter part of his life, Burnett spent a great deal of his time in public bars in Alice Springs, where
he enjoyed good conversation and sketching the clientele. Despite crippling arthritis, his drawing skills remained
excellent. Many remember him as being somewhat eccentric. He always wore knee high woollen socks with tartan
tabs, specially sent from Scotland, and on special occasions wore his Gordon Highlander kilt. Although known for
his sense of humour, Burnett could be quite rude in response to remarks about his socks, in particular from tourists.
There is no record that he ever went to Scotland during his Territory years but he did meet up with his son John
who, as a Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force, flew heavy bombers during the Second World War and landed
in Alice Springs on one occasion.
In 1925 Burnett was elected Licentiate of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and in 1951 was elected
a Fellow of that organisation. He died of a stroke in Alice Springs Hospital on 8 March 1955 and was buried in
Alice Springs cemetery after a special service of tribute.
Royal Institute of British Architects Journal, August 1955; B C G Burnett Scrapbook, 1127/P1 Accession 90/9, Northern Territory Archives
Service; File on Burnett, including research by C Hardwick, National Trust of Australia (Northern Territory).
EVE GIBSON, Vol 2.
BURRUMARRA, DAVID (c1917–1994), Aboriginal politician, artist and spokesperson, was born about 1917 at
Waganggayu on Elcho Island before there were any mission stations in north-east Arnhem Land. He was a member
of the Warramiri clan whose country centres on the English Company Islands. His father, Ganimbirrngu, worked
for and traded with Indonesian seafarers from Macassar. His mother, Wanambiwuy, was one of the last members
of the Brarrngu clan of the Wessel Islands, a group devastated by smallpox introduced by these peoples.
Burrumarra educated himself but his interest in the wider world and his desire to learn singled him out from an
early age. He was the one chosen by his family to learn about non-Aboriginal ways, and to be a mediator for his
people. The Warramiri clan, with all of their Dreamings centred on the sea, have a long tradition of mediating the
presence of outsiders on Aboriginal land, and Burrumarra was to carry on that tradition in his lifetime.
A united Australia in which Aborigines and non-Aborigines shared equally in the wealth of the land was
the focus of Burrumarra’s work. He wanted Aborigines to be a part of the new world but on their own terms.
In 1957, along with Badanga and Walalipa, he instigated what has become known throughout the academic world
as the ‘Adjustment Movement in Arnhem Land’, which was an attempt to combine traditional Aboriginal law and
Christian values. As part of this action, sacred objects were openly displayed as a public statement of Aboriginal
ownership of the traditions and the lands represented by them. All northeast Arnhem Land Aborigines were
involved in this revolutionary step.
In 1988, following Prime Minister Hawke’s pledge for a Compact or Treaty, Burrumarra put forward a unique
plan, which he saw as the culmination of his work towards reconciliation. Aborigines, Australia-wide, would
create their own flags depending on what the land and sea meant to them. In the corner of each would be the Union
Jack, the symbol not only of the coloniser, but also of the coming of Christianity to Australia. So wherever one
travelled, one would know and respect both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal laws of that place.
In his youth, before the Second World War, Burrumarra worked as a deckhand on several Japanese pearling
boats, including Tubumaro, and was familiar with the Japanese who were later killed at Caledon Bay in what has
been described as the Black Wars of Arnhem Land. In 1934 he travelled with the missionaries from Milingimbi to
locate the site of the new station at Yirrkala, near what is now the large bauxite-mining town of Nhulunbuy. There
he worked as a ‘houseboy’ and later on was employed as a trepang diver for the English beachcomber Fred Gray
at Groote Eylandt. His first wife was Clara, described in some early accounts as ‘the lost white woman of Arnhem
Land’.
During the war, like his peers, he was involved in postal delivery and coastal surveillance between the mission
stations, travelling the hundred or so kilometres between Yirrkala and Milingimbi in a dugout canoe in under a
week. He also supervised the Aboriginal workers building Gove airstrip. In 1946, following the war, and at the