>> Go Back - page - >> List of Entriess
Plowman had previously arranged to meet Partridge, his successor, at Blood’s Creek to initiate him into the
handling of the camels. He had travelled part of the way from Bonney Well with Harry Brookes the mailman.
After returning south, he stayed with friends in South Australia for a time, during which he wrote to Flynn with an
account of his journey back from Bonney Well and assuring him of his restored health.
He was not only Flynn’s first Patrol Padre, but also set a standard and demonstrated a sensitivity to the task that
convinced Flynn that his concept of a ‘nomadic’ ministry was justified.
Plowman and Jane Lillian Sinclair, a member of the Malvern Presbyterian Church in Melbourne, were married
on 18 June 1918. They moved to Tasmania, where he took up appointment as Young Men’s Christian Association
(YMCA) Secretary at Queenstown. After moving to Bendigo in Victoria, he worked at a relative’s newsagency.
Some time later, he joined a real estate firm, a business that set the pattern for much of his later life.
While his children were still young, he had a complete physical collapse attributed to the long-term effect of
an abscessed molar and arthritis. His medical treatment included a long period in bed, which appeared to have had
an adverse effect, but, whatever the cause, he suffered a long and painful paralysis in his movements. During this
time, he began a disciplined daily use of his hands by writing. With his strong will and the wonderful support of
his wife he gradually recovered and returned to work.
It was during his recovery that he commenced writing the four published books relating to his experiences in
Central Australia: The Man from Oodnadatta, Camel Pads, The Boundary Rider and the novel Larapinta.
Professor Walter Murdoch of the University of Western Australia wrote, ‘inter alia’, in his 1933 foreword to
The Man from Oodnadatta: ‘For my part, I find that my imagination does not respond very readily to statistical
statements... but I have not ridden very long (on Kabool or Ameer) in the padre’s company before becoming
vividly aware of the brooding immensity of the scene. But the greater wonder is the little company of men and
women to whom he introduces us... who are, taking them as a whole, singularly free from the meaner vices, and
singularly rich in the root virtues of hardihood, courage, generosity and loyalty to one another... “The Man from
Oodnadatta” will then be an historic document of great value, because of its unswerving fidelity to contemporary
fact.’
Plowman was elected an Elder at Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Bendigo, and resumed his honorary
work as a lay preacher. He was President of the Bendigo Musical, Elocutionary and Literary Society from 1937 to
1938 and 1939 to 1940.
At the outbreak of war in 1939, he was appointed by the Premier of Victoria to work with the State Evacuation
Committee. This was followed by his appointment to the Victorian Housing Commission staff, where he was
responsible for country land acquisitions for Commission homes. Plowman died on 26 August 1966 in his 80th year
at Lumeah Private Hospital in Melbourne.
W S McPheat, John Flynn, 1963; R B Plowman, The Man from Oodnadatta, 1934; Plowman’s diary, Australian Inland Mission records,
National Library of Australia; family records held by Plowman’s daughter, J Whitla.
GRAEME BUCKNALL, Vol 2.POIGNANT, AXEL (1906–1986), bush worker, photographer and author, was born in Yorkshire, England,
in 1906. His father was Swedish and he grew up in Sweden. However, he was eligible, through his English mother,
to migrate to Australia under one of the last schemes to recruit British boys to work on the land. He arrived in
Sydney in 1926 and for the first four years, the young migrant’s energies were absorbed by the mechanics of
survival as he moved between the city and the backblocks of New South Wales. He soon learnt at first hand the
harsh realities of the bush worker’s life, but, gradually, he turned to photography as a way of making a living.
His formative years as a photographer were spent in Perth, Western Australia, where he tried to extend the range
of his work beyond commercial portraiture, and he became deeply absorbed in nature photography, an interest he
shared with close friends Norman Hall and Vincent Serventy. He quickly rejected the pictorialist aesthetic in
favour of the ‘new’ or ‘modern’ vision, which was technically enabled by the development of small, manoeuvrable
cameras such as the Leica. This was an approach he shared with Hal Missingham, and they exhibited together in
1941 in a show they called ‘New Directions in Photography’.
The following year, after the bombing of Darwin, it was decided to repair the wells along the Canning Stock
Route in case it was necessary to move the cattle south. Poignant joined the working party for a time and it was in
the photographs he took on that journey that his sensibilities and skills coalesced in a singular directness of vision.
The portraits of the Aborigines met along the way are witness not only to their positive social role as pastoral
workers but also to moments in personal lives. Yet it was to be five years before any of these photographs were
shown publicly. In 1947, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Newcastle, New South Wales, the portrait of
the ‘Aboriginal mother and newborn baby’ was awarded a gold medal for photography.
His first experience in the Northern Territory took place in 1945 when he was seconded from the Army to join
the camera crew of the Ealing Studios’ film, ‘The Overlanders’, directed by Harry Watt, which, coincidentally,
was a re-enactment of the shifting of cattle from the north, under the threat of a possible Japanese invasion.
The following year he returned to film ‘Namatjira, the Painter’ for the Commonwealth Film Unit. He and the
director, Lee Robinson, travelled by camel to Uluru (Ayers Rock) and Katatjuta (The Olgas) with the artist and his
family, including an elder called Nosepeg who had guided Spencer and Gillen at the turn of the century. It was a
silent and non-intrusive way of travelling and, from their elevated position, the landscape was ‘read’ by Nosepeg
and Namatjira. It was under this tutelage that Poignant came to understand the Aborigines’ special relationship
with their land. It was this knowledge which informed the way in which he photographed Aborigines thereafter,
whether as station hands, fringe dwellers or, later, in the bush. In 1947, at a time when his monumental portrait