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William Wildey ‘sixty years of age, but she does not appear to be more than forty. Her hair is but just getting grey,
and she is as active as a girl of fifteen.’ This would be a strange description if sixty were only a guess, so this may
be based on some information that would make her 30 years old when the Lambricks employed Memorimbo.
On the other hand, John Lewis says Flash Poll in 1873 ‘looked about fifty years of age and was very active and
straight as a die’. She told Lewis that she had been ‘a servant of Captain Lambrick’. Alfred Searcy described her
as having been a young woman in Port Essington.
Flash Poll spoke English quite well, and liked to impress visitors by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, learned perhaps
from Father Confalonieri and following it with a string of expletives (learned, no doubt, from some less religious
members of the garrison). She was always described as a happy sort of person who liked to cause a laugh by
donning western clothes, riding a horse or generally ‘showing off. She was particularly friendly with Searcy, who
regularly sent her gifts and to whom she willed her skull (although it is not known whether he ever received it).
When Searcy knew Flash Poll in the 1880s she was a large, buxom woman and very agile. She had known the
officers at Port Essington very well and told Searcy many interesting and humorous stories about them and about
life at the garrison. It is indeed a pity that her memories were never recorded. Whoever she was in 1846, Flash Poll
lived to a ripe old age, dying at Port Essington about 1907.
J Allen & P Corris (eds), The Journal of John Sweatman, 1977; A Searcy, In Australian Tropics, 1909; W Wildey, Australasia and the Oceanic
Region, 1873; Crawford Pasco, correspondence SAA; John Lewis papers SAA; George Lambrick’s letterbooks, NSWAA.
JOHN HARRIS, Vol 1.
MIJANU (LONG TOMMY or TRACKER TOMMY) (c1900–1978), stockman and police tracker, was born
about the turn of the century, at Newcastle Waters.
Mijanu, known also as Long Tommy or Tracker Tommy, of the Jabijinnginja (or Jampijinpa) subsection,
grew up in the area of Newcastle Waters and Powell Creek, the next telegraph station to the south. He was six foot
four inches (193 centimetres) tall, with a fine strong physique, even in old age. He was quietly spoken, with a ready
smile, and remembered by the Europeans who knew him as ‘one of Nature’s gentlemen’.
As the anthropologist W E H Stanner recorded when he interviewed him (as ‘Long Tommy Mitjanu’) in 1934,
his traditional country was west of Banka Banka station, the country of his patrilineal Dreaming Japurla-japurla
or Karu ‘Laughing Boys’, and his matrilineal ngurlu was yalawan. His languages were Mudburra and Jingulu, and
he knew Warumungu and Warlmanpa as well as English.
When young, Mijanu worked for pastoralists Fred Kennedy and Bill Riley at Elkedra. Riley had been
linesman-stockman at Powell Creek. Mijanu, who later returned to stock work at Newcastle Waters, was a good
horseman, a skill essential also in police work, even after the Second World War. Soon after returning to Newcastle
Waters, he began regular worker as Police tracker when recruited by Constable Muldoon at Newcastle Waters in
the 1930s. However, Patrol Officer T G H Strehlow’s 1938 census does not record him at Newcastle Waters or
other places along the Overland Telegraph line.
Mijanu had been recruited by Mounted Constable Murray in April 1929 to assist the group that recovered the
bodies of Anderson and Hitchcock from the Kookaburra forced landing and so appears in the group photograph
taken in front of the Kookaburra by W N Berg. It originally appeared in The Daily Guardian of 28 June 1929 and
it was reproduced by Davis in 1980 and the author in 1982.
This was just one of many occasions when his bushmanship was used by officials. In April 1936, a Royal
Australian Air Force (RAAF) Dragon Rapide aircraft made a forced landing in dense scrub north of Number 11
Bore on the Murranji track. Once the site was located by another RAAF aircraft ‘black tracker Long Tommy of
Tennant’s Creek’ was involved in the subsequent recovery, on 23–24 April, of the three crew.
In the early 1940s, Mijanu worked for a time for Max Schober, the publican at Newcastle Waters. Mijanu and
his wife Ruby worked at Newcastle Waters Police Station most of the period between 1945 and 1948 under
Constables Syd Bowie and David Mofflin, and relieving Constable John Gordon. Mijanu was with relieving
Constable Gordon Stott when he moved the Police Station from Newcastle Waters to the new village of Elliott
after the war. Trackers were provided accommodation at the Police Station, but as was usual, Mijanu and his wife
chose to live at the Aboriginal camp. The work of a Tracker mostly was not that of tracking. As described by the
Administrator in 1951, ‘For the greater part of his time he assists in the maintenance of police horse plants, attends
to Police Station and yard upkeep and acts as liaison between the Aborigines in the district and the Police officer’.
This particularly occurred when accompanying police on patrol, often for weeks at a time. Mijanu however was
also a tracker in the classic sense. One time, probably in the mid 1940s, working with Constable Gordon Stott, and
after several days difficult tracking over stony ground and through long grass, he located the body of a white road
worker who perished out from Number Three bore near Larrimah.
Before the Second World War, Aboriginal employees were not paid money, but were usually credited with funds
in a trust account, which they could draw on with their employer’s assistance. Indeed this practice was common
until the late 1960s, especially away from towns. Mijanu would use his credit to get clothing and other goods from
the local store, or on trips to town (Katherine or Tennant Creek) with his ‘boss’. As was typical of Police Trackers,
Mijanu expressed his loyalty to individual police officers rather than to the police as a whole. Policemen he worked
for fondly recall Mijanu and his good nature, honesty and reliability. One recalls Mijanu being very sick for several
weeks in 1945, from being sung, and helping him recover by dosing him with a pannikin of castor oil. Ron brown
relates how ‘Long Tommy’ watched out for him during a fracas at Newcastle Waters.
At Elliott Mijanu had a son, Jamie, who was born on 10 June 1950 and who died on 20 August 1990. In 1960
at Elliott the linguist Kenneth Hale recorded Mijanu, and recalls him being ‘very clear and quick with language’.