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fair wage of ‘twenty five quid a week’. It is perhaps an indication of how little Lingiari had ever been paid in cash
that he was unsure if ‘quids’ were Pounds or Dollars, brought in with decimalisation in 1966. The Manager refused.
In that case, said Lingiari, he and his people would withdraw their labour and walk off all the Vestey stations until
their claims were met. On 23 August 1966, the Aborigines left Wave Hill Station and ultimately squatted in Wattie
Creek. Other Aboriginal workers and their families from other stations joined the group. While mainly Gurindji
people, there were Aborigines from many other groups who joined in the walk off.
Lingiari’s concern that his people would suffer due to lack of food and support was unfounded. Support came
from Daniels in Darwin and locals, many of them whites, who sympathised with the Aboriginal workers and
provided initial food supplies until the Wattie Creek community became organised and initiated traditional hunting
and gathering procedures. When the Wave Hill Manager and other station managers arrived at Wattie Creek with a
killed beast and offered the opportunity to return to work on the stations, both offers were refused. The Aboriginal
walk off created great problems for the station managers. They desperately needed workers. Many Aborigines,
mainly the younger men, did return to work on the stations. However, this time the treatment was quite different.
Lingiari and other Aboriginal elders made it clear that they would only provide workers to stations that supplied
proper wages and food and treated their Aboriginal workers with respect. The element of respect, which confused
many of the white station managers and owners, was central to the aims of Lingiari and the other Aboriginal
leaders at Wattie Creek. In many cases stations which had relatively good housing for their Aboriginal workers
were refused requests for workers due to the way the Aborigines were treated. Conversely, other stations that had
poor housing, but had a reputation for treating their Aboriginal workers fairly, had little difficulty in finding willing
workers.
Having achieved some control over their own destinies, the thoughts of Lingiari and his people turned to a
dream that had gained momentum during the 1960s—land of their own. Lingiari’s vision was for Gurindji people
to live on their own land, eat their own beef and conduct their own ceremonies without interference. He wanted
justice and a land in which Aborigines and whites could live together with dignity and mutual respect. Lingiari’s
belief that both blacks and whites could live in harmony extended to the alien animals that the white settlers had
brought to the north of Australia. When asked when he was going to pull out the Aboriginal water pump workers
off the stations, he replied, ‘Never’. Lingiari knew that the sound of suffering and dying animals would not affect
the big Vestey bosses but that he and his people would hear, and be affected by, that suffering.
As Wattie Creek grew into a community with housing and organisation, Lingiari made many visits to southern
capitals to plead the case for a homeland for the Gurindji people. He found a sympathetic listener in Gough
Whitlam, who came to power in 1972 as Prime Minister. The process was set in motion to transfer a section of
land, including Wattie Creek, to the Gurindji people. On 16 August 1975 Whitlam, known to the Gurindji as
‘Jungarni’, ‘that big man’, at a special ceremony at Wattie Creek poured a handful of soil into Lingiari’s hands,
symbolising the return of the land to Lingiari and his people. The land grant of 3 200 square kilometres is the area
later known as Dagaragu. Lingiari was later awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for his service to the
Aboriginal people.
On 21 January 1988, Lingiari passed away at Dagaragu. A burial service was held at Kalkaringi, where his
family and a large group of mourners, black and white, gathered outside the Baptist church to sing hymns and pay
tribute to a great Northern Territory Aboriginal leader.
F Hardy, The Unlucky Australians, 1968; Vincent Lingiari File, State Library of the Northern Territory.
EVE GIBSON, Vol 2.LINKLATER, MARY ALICE: see MILLER, MARY ALICELINKLATER, WILLIAM (BILLY MILLER) (1868–1958), bushman, drover, prospector, horse trader, buffalo
hunter, cattle rustler and writer, was born in Adelaide on 29 July 1868, son of William Robertson Linklater, a
baker, and his wife Eleanor Wemys Linklater, nee Fea. His parents were Scottish Presbyterians of the ‘spare the
rod, spoil the child’ variety. As a youth, Linklater found Sundays ‘purgatory’ and eventually, after a thrashing by
his father who had discovered that he planned to run away to sea, he turned in the other direction and went bush.
He never saw his father again. The legacy from his youth that he valued was something of a classical education
and he continued to read widely during his lifetime in the bush.
He got any work he could get and by the age of 16 was a fully-fledged drover and had reached his full height of
167 centimetres of the ‘agile whipcord he remained all his life’. He took the name ‘Billy Miller’. His adopted name
was given by the Aboriginal group ‘Yanta Wonta’ who said he ‘bin die and jump up white fella’. Their version of
his name was ‘Billamilla’, which meant waterhole and that place was his spiritual home.
During the 1880s, he travelled extensively in Western Australia and Queensland, at one time following in
the footsteps of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition. Before the turn of the century Miller worked with
Tom Nugent on his newly formed Banka Banka Station and had first hand information from him about the latter’s
role as captain of the ‘Ragged Thirteen’. They stole as they rode to the Hall’s Creek goldfield where Miller was
also prospecting. When that failed, he returned to the Northern Territory ‘duffing’ en route a good mob of cattle that
‘more than compensated for his failure to make a worthwhile gold strike’. With no law to speak of in the remoter
areas of the Territory, Miller worked part time as a stockman on some stations and part time as a ‘poddy dodger’.
He made raiding forays into South Australia and Queensland taking cattle back to the Territory. It is said that on
one occasion he turned up at the Katherine with a fine mob of horses all bearing the brand of the South Australian
Commissioner of Police.