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Arrarbi’s career is obscure after this time. It is likely that he engaged in more cattle killing that, together with
drought, forced abandonment of Tempe Downs Station from 1902 to 1906.
He had two wives, one named Tapia, and several children. Eventually the responsibilities of marriage, a family
and increasing age, caused him to settle down. There is a possibility that he rejoined the police force as the name
Police Bob was one by which he was widely known in his old age: a tracker of this name was based at Arltunga in
the mid-1920s. His reputation ensured that other Aborigines regarded him with a mixture of respect and fear for
the remainder of his life. He is believed to have died in 1945.
In Mounted Constable Cowle’s view Arrarbi and his companions were ‘scoundrels’, but Baldwin Spencer was
able to sympathise with their resistance and ‘look on them as heroes’. Each view is probably correct: Arrarbi was a
scoundrel, but he was also undoubtedly heroic in his leadership of Aboriginal resistance and was, at times, an able
contact between Aborigines and European settlers.
W Geisler, Dutch Australiens Wildnis, 1928; D J Mulvaney & J H Calaby, So Much That Is New, 1985; T G H Strehlow, Songs of Central
Australia, 1971; R Vanderwal (ed), The Aboriginal Photographs of Baldwin Spencer, 1982; C Winnecke, Journal of the Horn Scientific
Exploring Expedition To Central Australia, 1894, 1896; Centralian Advocate, 10 August 1984; C E Cowle, Letters to Baldwin Spencer, AIAS;
A Hamilton, ‘Lake Amadeus Land-Claim Genealogies for the Central Land Council’, 1985; R G Kimber, Journal Record, 3 March 1983,
(unpublished copy lodged with NTDB 1985).
R G KIMBER, Vol 1.ASCHE, BERYL VICTORIA nee ZICHY-WOINARSKI (1896–1970), was born in Victoria on 19 May 1896,
the granddaughter of Count George Gustavus Zichy-Woinarski (1825–1891). A Polish lawyer and a graduate
of Lvov University, Zichy-Woinarski was an officer in Kossuth’s rebel army during the Hungarian Revolution
and in 1851 was sentenced to death in absentia by the Austrian government, but by this time he was living in
England. The following year he migrated to Australia. Beryl’s father, Dr Victor Zichy-Woinarski (1865–1921),
served in 1915–1916 as a Medical Officer (with the rank of Captain) in the Australian Army in Egypt during the
First World War; her mother was Gertrude Zichy-Woinarski (nee Brind). For service to the community she was
made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).
On 24 February 1925, in the Chapel of Melbourne Church of England Grammar School, Beryl married
Eric Thomas Asche, a Legal Assistant in the Secretary’s Office of the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s
Department. Beryl had obtained one of the first driving licences granted to a woman in Victoria and for some
years had acted as a chauffeur for her father. She enjoyed driving, and Eric Asche’s engagement present to her
had been a Baby Austin. Their first child, born in Melbourne in November 1925, was named Keith John Austin—
after John Austin, the first Professor of Jurisprudence in England, but Beryl always claimed that he was named
after her car. They had a further four children, Erica, Carol, Ingrid and Victor.
From August 1926, the family spent a year in Rabaul, where Eric was Legal Assistant in the Territory of
New Guinea Crown Law Office. They then moved to Darwin, arriving on the SS Marella on 18 February 1928.
Their home was ‘the Mud Hut’ built by J G Knight, but it burnt down on the night of 31 December 1933, while the
family was on holiday in Melbourne. On their return to Darwin they moved to the newer government housing on
Myilly Point; when the 1937 cyclone devastated much of Darwin their house was one of the worst hit. Beryl wrote,
‘First fire and now a cyclone! I think we must have been intended to board!... there are advantages in only paying
rent after all, as I’d hate to pay the bill for our house damage’.
For recreation from time to time the family would take the Sandfly train and stay at the pub at Pine Creek,
from where they went out to Mataranka as guests of Beryl’s great friend Doris Giles, who lived at ‘The Elsey’.
Due to his ill health, Eric Asche and his family returned to Melbourne in 1938 and he died in 1940, leaving his
wife virtually penniless and with five children to raise. Beryl Asche was not one to be defeated and, drawing on
the strength of character that had seen her through some tough times in the Territory, she supported the family by
working as Assistant Secretary and then Secretary of the Melbourne Ladies’ Benevolent Society. Although she was
never able to return to the Territory, she never forgot it and often would say, ‘You can leave the Territory but the
Territory never leaves you’. To help satisfy her longing for its seductive lifestyle she would hold regular ‘Territory’
parties in Melbourne, inviting any ex-Territorians she could find.
Beryl Asche died on 2 May 1970, regrettably unable to see one of her children become Chief Justice and then
Administrator of the Northern Territory.Family information.
PAUL ROSENZWEIG and VALERIE ASCHE, Vol 3.ASCHE, ERIC THOMAS (1894–1940), soldier and lawyer, was born in Armadale, Victoria on 20 March 1894,
the son of John Frederick Asche and Lucy Rebecca, nee Wilson. He was the grandson of Thomas Asche (1826–
1898), a lawyer from Norway who graduated from the University of King Frederick in Christiana (now Oslo) in
1851, and arrived in Victoria on 27 August 1854 during the gold rush days. John’s younger half-brother, Oscar,
was one of the best known Shakespearian actors of his generation, who wrote, produced and directed the famous
musical Chu Chin Chow. After education at Melbourne Church of England Grammar School, Eric commenced a
law degree at the University of Melbourne, in the same classes as Robert Menzies.
After the First World War broke out he served with the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), as a Red
Triangle worker, in New South Wales camps from December 1915 to March 1916. He then embarked as a YMCA