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possessions had been destroyed along with the car during the raids. After two failed attempts to find a house the
family moved into a corrugated iron house just off Westralia Street in Stuart Park. That was home for nine years.
Litchfield began selling excess tomatoes from the Katherine farms in 1948. Her husband started a carrying
business and was asked by the Katherine farmers if he could dispose of their unsaleable crops. Litchfield put up a
sign on the highway to advertise and approached the armed forces with an offer to supply their needs. From this
humble beginning developed a green grocer business, which sold nuts, cold meat, home made cakes and sweets,
soft drinks, fruits and vegetables. Litchfield was the first person to get perishables from the south by airfreight.
Her shop was a welcome addition to that area of Darwin. She also supplied her home made sweets to local shops
in town and still found time to sew most of the clothes for her children as well as to attend to the normal household
duties. Litchfield joined the Country Women’s Association in 1950, later becoming a Branch President, Territorial
Vice President and Acting Territorial President.
Litchfield sold the business in 1954 before she moved with her husband and four children to Banyan Farm
near Batchelor. In 1957, the family moved into the town of Batchelor where her husband started work at the
nearby Rum Jungle Uranium Mine. Litchfield became involved in activities in the town, school and especially
the Bowling Club. When the mine closed down in 1971, the Litchfields elected to stay in Batchelor. Litchfield’s
favourite pastime was knitting baby clothes to enter in shows as well as for sale in a Darwin shop. She was well
known for having one of the best gardens in Batchelor.
Litchfield had tremendous strength of character. She never lost her feeling of pride in herself and tried to
instil it into her children. She was known as ‘the Duchess’ to most of the people of Batchelor. For someone of her
background to have lived through and survived the early hardships she experienced in the Top End often amazed
some of her acquaintances.
Northern Territory Women’s Register, 1988; family information.
JANET DICKINSON, Vol 2.
LITCHFIELD, JESSIE SINCLAIR nee PHILLIPS (1883–1956), Northern Territory pioneer, political lobbyist,
self-taught historian and writer, was born on 18 February 1883 at Ashfield, Sydney, second child of John Phillips,
surveyor and pastoral inspector, and Jean Sinclair, nee Ruid. She may have inherited her later passion for writing
and reporting from her maternal grandfather and uncle who established the John O’Groat Journal at Wick,
Caithness, Scotland in 1836.
Jessie spent her childhood travelling with the family to various New South Wales country towns until 1895
when they returned to Sydney where Jessie attended Neutral Bay Public School. One of her teachers was Mary
Cameron, later Dame Mary Gilmore, with whom she corresponded throughout her life.
In 1907, after spending her girlhood in Melbourne, she sailed to China to visit wealthy relatives in business
there. On the boat, she met a young engineer, Valentine Litchfield, who disembarked in Darwin. Six months later,
on her return from China, Jessie joined him and on 21 January 1908 they were married at the Methodist Church
in Knuckey Street, leaving the next morning for their home at West Arm, then one of the most important mining
fields in the Territory.
For the next several years they moved wherever the diamond drills were sent—first to West Arm, then Anson
Bay (where for almost a year she was the only white woman), Brock’s Creek, the Ironblow mine, the Union Reefs
and Pine Creek. Conditions were isolated and crude—her first home consisting of hessian walls, an iron roof and
a bough shed in front for shade and coolness. But Jessie, an avid reader and student of Territory history, became
passionately committed to Territory life and almost immediately began writing about it and lobbying for better
conditions. Her plea for mission stations, written to various individuals and the Victorian church publication,
the Messenger, is credited with having influenced the establishment of the Australian Inland Mission and later
the flying doctor service. When the diamond drills finished, Val Litchfield found work in Darwin with Vesteys
meatworks and Jessie settled down to town life at Parap, beginning in earnest a life of writing and reporting
Territory events for a variety of southern papers. In 1927, she made her first venture into politics by unsuccessfully
standing for a seat on the Darwin Town Council, claiming when she lost that a major reason seemed to be that she
was a woman. It was the first of several unsuccessful attempts she made for an elected office.
The strength of her commitment to the Territory and of her persistence in pursuing a goal can be seen from
her five years of lobbying for land. By 1923 when, with Vesteys closed, Val was out of work, Jessie began a
lobbying campaign for them to e granted a lease of 300 acres (120 hectares) of land at Anson Bay and 300 Pounds
of material, to be paid back to the government over ten years at five per cent interest. For five years, she pleaded
their case with every appropriate government official stressing ‘we can face difficulties boldly and do not need
spoon feeding’. Her pleas were consistently rejected and for many years the family was heavily reliant on her
income from writing, which included, in 1930, the publication of her book Far North Memories, based on life in
the diamond drill camps.
Val died in 1930 shortly after the enterprising and self reliant Jessie—by then mother of seven—had overcome
local objections to become first woman editor of the Northern Territory Times and Government Gazette. She edited
the paper until June 1932 when it was purchased by its rival, the Northern Standard, a union-owned paper with
which Litchfield—an avowed anti-communist and in most respects a strong conservative—had fought many an
ideological battle, although she had written for both papers in the late 1920s.
A self-trained photographer and historian as well as writer, Jessie was by now something of a local expert on
Territory affairs. She became Darwin press representative for several Australian and overseas papers, including six
years with Reuters, covering such events as the 1934 London to Melbourne centenary air race. She relinquished