- page -
http://www.cdu.edu.au/cdupress
Go Back >> List of Entries
Mercia (originally called Mercy) was still a baby when her mother was admitted to the leprosy hospital on
Channel Island. Norah was one of a group who left the island after the bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942.
She was in poor health and died somewhere near Dorisvale but her family was never able to find her grave.
Mercia later recalled happy times on the island when she was a small child; the watermelons that thrived near the
beach on the Darwin side of the island and the lovely flowers grown by Matron Elsie Jones.
It was a traumatic day early in 1940 when Dr Bruce Kirkland and Father Henschke arrived in the Catholic
mission boat and removed all the healthy children from the island. They were not told where they were going.
Later, at Bathurst Island Mission, Mercia was told that her family at Roper River Mission did not want her. She did
not see her mother again. When the new Mission at Garden Point was opened in 1941 Mercia was transferred there.
It was a mission for mixed race children but Mercia was a ‘full’ Aborigine. There was hardly time to settle before
the war emergency arose and on 18 February 1942 Brother Andrew Smith transported the Sisters and most of the
children to Darwin in the mission boat. The bigger boys remained at Garden Point with a priest.
The next morning, the 19th, was fine and the children were playing in the Smith Street schoolyard when they
saw aeroplanes ‘dropping eggs’. American soldiers hustled the children under the school and covered them with
mattresses; no one was injured. Later that day they were transported in American trucks to the end of the road at
Adelaide River. It did not rain during their few days at Adelaide River but Mercia recalled they were hungry and
for the first time they ate all their bread crusts. Next came the journey to Larrimah by train, then trucks again on
the dusty road to Alice Springs and train again to Adelaide. This group from Garden Point were housed on a farm
at Carrieton in South Australia. One child developed leprosy and was brought to Darwin by Army nursing staff
travelling north. The rest returned to Garden Point after the war, travelling by train and trucks.
As Mercia grew up she decided to be a Catholic nun, the only role model she knew. In 1956 she was sent
to Port Moresby to join an indigenous order, the ‘Handmaids of Our Lord’, and then she undertook a newly
developed three-year ‘Maternal and Child Health’ course at Badili, Port Moresby. The next few years were spent
at isolated mission centres in the mountains of Papua, delivering babies and teaching mothers how to better feed
their infants.
After 12 years in Papua New Guinea Mercia developed a great longing to meet again the family she had never
known and visited Darwin in 1968. Her father and brothers all came to Darwin to meet her and the reunion was
joyous. A few months later Mercia left the Order and worked for a time at Darwin Hospital; her one desire was
to train as a registered nurse but this was not possible. Further, her Maternal and Child Health Certificate was not
recognised in Australia.
Some time later Mercia visited her mother’s people at Roper River Mission where she met and married
Herbert Butler, a Telecom linesman based at Alice Springs. Herbert Butler’s family were from the Roper River
and it was a happy marriage. One son, Richard, was born at Alice Springs.
Mercia still wanted to be a nurse and undertook the Enrolled Nurse (Nurse Aide) course at Alice Springs
Hospital in 1976. She continued to work at the hospital for a time then transferred to the Community Health
Services to be more involved with the Aboriginal people.
Mercia became acutely ill and was sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide, accompanied by her
husband. She died there on 29 September 1990, survived by her husband and son.
E Kettle, Health Services in the Northern Territory, 1991, That They Might Live, 1979; personal information.
ELLEN KETTLE, Vol 3.
BUTLER, RICHARD (DICK) (1908–1987), sportsman, soldier and gardener, was born in Katherine in 1908 to a
Wugularri/Jawoyn Aborigine and a European father, George Butler. He had two brothers, Ta-Digin and Merengbet,
and like so many of his era Dick was brought to Darwin as a baby to be raised in Kahlin Compound. He was
fortunate enough to secure the position of ‘horse-boy’, grooming and watering the horses used by public servants.
He then became houseboy for the Government Secretary, Colonel Charles Barnett-Storey, and he subsequently
worked as a bucket-boy on the Katherine–Larrimah extension of the railway line. Like Charlie Talbot, Butler was
also a capable boxer and trainer, and an established lightweight champion in his own right, and was particularly
renowned for his performance in an illegal bare-fisted ‘grudge’ fight against Timmy Angeles in the Darwin Botanic
Gardens in 1929, although they remained good friends for the rest of their lives.
At Christ Church Cathedral on 1 July 1931, Dick married Louisa Fanny Spain, daughter of Anastasio Pedro Spain
and his wife Fanny, and a niece of Catalino Spain, who was later an employee of the Commonwealth Railways and
was one of 22 civilians killed on the wharf during the first Japanese bombing raid on Darwin on 19 February 1942
when a labourer with number 3 Gang working on MV Neptuna. Louisa Butler was killed during Cyclone Tracy,
and her name was commemorated on a memorial plaque outside the Darwin City Council offices, which was
unveiled by Her Majesty the Queen on 26 March 1977 during her Silver Jubilee tour.
Butler enlisted as a Gunner in the Darwin Mobile Force (DMF) in 1939, serving with a number of others
from the Territory of Aboriginal descent including Willy McClennen, Samuel (‘Smiler’) Fejo, Juma (‘Jim’) Fejo,
Stewart Kunoth, Bill Muir and Victor Williams. The Darwin Mobile Force was raised in Victoria and New South
Wales in November 1938 and arrived in Darwin on 28 March the following year, establishing itself in the disused
Vesteys Meatworks. They were artillerymen tasked with providing mobile protection for the Headquarters of
the Army in the Northern Territory, (known then as the Seventh Military District), armed with 18-pound guns,
three-inch mortars and medium machine-guns, while there was also a rifle group giving the unit a surveillance
capability. Under the command of Captain Francis, Dick Butler’s band of Aboriginal coast watchers—based at