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He died at St Luke’s Hospital, Darling Point, on 30 April 1975, just five days before his 89th birthday. His wife,
Hilda, and daughters, Hilda and Dorothy, survived him. He was the last survivor of the Bruce–Page Government.
A state funeral was conducted at St Mark’s Anglican Church, Darling Point. He is best remembered for his book
Australia’s Frontier Province (1950), a critical history of the Northern Territory in which he argued that, although
Britain had been unsuccessful in settling the north and that South Australia and the Commonwealth had each
achieved only a little, the Northern Territory was worth developing and would eventually repay the costs of such
development. Abbott Crescent in Darwin is named for him.
C L A Abbott, Australia’s Frontier Province, 1950; D Lockwood, Australia’s Pearl Harbour, 1966; Commission of Inquiry concerning the
circumstances connected with the attack made by Japanese aircraft at Darwin on 19 February, 1942 (Lowe Report); L Nicklin, ‘My Friend
Mr Abbott’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 May 1975; Canberra Times, 2 May 1975; C L A Abbott, taped interview, 22 April 1971, NLA.
MURRAY MAYNARD, Vol 1.ABBOTT, HILDA GERTRUDE nee HARNETT (1890–1984), secretary, author, voluntary worker, designer,
traveller and film maker was born on 9 September 1890 at Eucumbene Station, near Adaminaby, New South
Wales, the daughter of John Joseph Harnett, grazier. Educated at Loreto Convent at Kirribilli in Sydney, she trained
as a secretary. She travelled extensively, visiting Europe in 1895–1898, South and Southeast Asia in 1911 and
New Zealand in 1912. Before 1916 she worked in Parkes, New South Wales, for a law practice.
In 1916 she was in the office of the Australian Red Cross Society in Cairo before being sent to London when the
Australian Red Cross commissioners transferred their activities to the British capital. There she married Lieutenant
Charles Lydiard Aubrey Abbott of the Australian Imperial Force on 24 October 1916 in Westminster Cathedral
with Catholic rites.
After the war she settled with her husband at Echo Hills, a property near Kootingal, New South Wales,
and assisted him with his career in federal politics and the Producers’ Advisory Council. They also had two
daughters. With Gladys Owen she wrote Life on the Land, published in Sydney in 1932. She enthusiastically
continued her travels with journeys to Africa in 1925 (going from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo) and 1929,
around Australia in 1932 and 1933 and Europe in 1934 and 1936.
Hilda was with her husband for much of the time he was Administrator of the Northern Territory between
1937 and 1946. She was an energetic ‘first lady’, who quickly adopted a vice regal style which not all Territorians
appreciated. She particularly enjoyed entertaining important visitors who passed through the Territory but was
less enthusiastic about those she regarded as her social inferiors. An enthusiastic anglophile, she attempted to
establish personal links with the various British aristocrats who served as Governors of some Australian states
and as Australian Governors General. She did, though, revive the Darwin Branch of the Red Cross in September
1937 in spite of initial opposition from local medical practitioners such as Dr C E Cook and was subsequently
an active Branch President. In 1946 the Red Cross recognised her work when one of its buildings in Darwin was
named ‘Hilda Abbott Cottage’. She also supported several other organisations. A skilled furniture designer and
interior decorator, she designed, among other things, a desk for Darwin’s Government House. She continued her
travelling, making a film in Central Australia in 1937 and surveying high country tracks for the Australian Light
Horse in New South Wales during 1940.
The Territory provided new inspiration for her writing. As well as recording her memoirs in an unpublished
manuscript ‘Good Night, All About’, she wrote scores of articles for numerous newspapers and magazines, notably
the much read Walkabout, under the pen name ‘Haliden Hartt’. The Darwin Northern Standard, probably not
knowing who she was, once reprinted one of her articles, in which she described life in Darwin from a rather elitist
point of view. It is a romantic picture of a balmy tropical town late in 1941, seemingly oblivious to the war clouds
threatening all around.
In Darwin during the first Japanese bombing raid on 19 February 1942, she and her husband were lucky not to
be killed when a bomb damaged a building at Government House very close to their shelter. They dragged Elsey,
an Aboriginal maid, from the rubble and Aubrey Abbott rescued Leo, also an Aboriginal employee, but they were
unable to save another. Hilda and Elsey clung together and lay flat until the raid was over. She then went to her
room to collect some necessities when a gigantic explosion rocked her and the others when Neptuna blew up in the
harbour nearby. As she prepared to go to the Red Cross headquarters to collect any surviving records and take them
to Alice Springs, she was told of the loss of life when the post office was bombed and reflected sadly that none of
the Red Cross aides she had helped train were able to get to their posts.
Hilda drove a group of evacuees in the Administrator’s official Vauxhall Tourer from Darwin to Adelaide River,
where they spent the evening sheltering during air raid alarms in a hole in the riverbank. At last they were able to
load the vehicle and themselves onto a train and illegally travel southward to Larrimah and then, by road again,
to the safety of Alice Springs. Despite the lack of a travel permit, she bluffed her way through various military
obstacles and even obtained Army fuel for the journey and other assistance along the route. Her rationale for this
extraordinary trip was that she had to warn the civil authorities in Alice Springs about the flood of evacuees the
town would need to accommodate. She spent anxious days there waiting for news of her husband, who eventually
joined her.
The Abbotts lived, although not always together, in the Residency, Alice Springs, until Government House in
Darwin was reoccupied in July 1945. Hilda, however, spent several months following the Darwin air raid resting
near Jindabyne, New South Wales, where she wrote an account of her traumatic experiences that was eventually
published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1972. She shared some of her husband’s frustrations at the limited role
the military authorities allowed the civil administration in Alice Springs and was unhappy about restrictions on her