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Two young men ran out of petrol on the way home to Western Australia. There was a bowser at Banka Banka
for station use. Mary gave the men petrol and they promised to pay when they reached home and got work.
Eighteen months later, the cheque arrived. This was one of Mary Ward’s greatest joys.
This quality of warmth and fellow feeling was transmitted to the Aboriginal employees on the station—
mostly of the Warrumungu tribe. Many of the stockmen and their families at the time of Mary’s leaving the station
in 1970 had been born and ‘grown up’ there.
Having no children of her own, Mary Ward mothered the Aboriginal babies, coping with both their health
and education problems. Before starting, with the help of the Welfare Department, the government school at
Banka Banka, Mary sent the Aboriginal children to the convent in Alice Springs or college in Darwin, as well
equipped as any European children. For her marked care of her native families and their children, she was made a
Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1968.
Of delicate appearance, short and with a ready smile, Mary Ward had an underlying strength of character and
morality that made her an astute businesswoman, who was relentless in dealing out justice to anyone practising
knavery. This strength flowed on to her control of the station personnel of any race, who were immediately
dismissed from the station if known to have intoxicating liquor on the place.
Her humanitarianism extended beyond humankind; having had her men load a large contingent of cattle onto a
truck before sun–up so they would not be travelling in the heat of the day on their trip to Queensland, she was later
surprised to see the truck parked at the Three Ways, seventy-five kilometres south of Banka Banka. She sought out
the driver and asked why he was still there at midday. He pointed out to her that the cattle were now his and he
could do as he liked. She replied, ‘I will never sell any more cattle to you because of this cruelty to animals.’
As a demonstration of Mary’s decided sense of humour, also her obsession that the grounds must at all times
look immaculate, she delighted in telling the story of one windy morning, trying to pick up a piece of paper which
kept blowing away as she approached, until the laughing Aboriginal girls pointed out to her that the ‘paper’ was a
pet white cockatoo, determined not to be caught.
In 1968–69 Mrs Ward built a red brick building in Tennant Creek at the cost of 58 000 Dollars to house
holidaying stockmen.
Another facet of her character was her desire to help the less educated, especially with English (her favourite
subject). She assisted men on the station to improve their English, even to write and spell.
Until her husband’s sudden death in 1959 on their station, Fermoy, her work had been entirely on the homestead.
She then took on the overseeing of all the stock work and other facets of station management. Astute in the
assessment of people, she chose competent assistant managers and chief stockmen. For health reasons she sold the
station in 1969 to American interests for 1 000 000 Dollars.
Before she left Tennant Creek, Mary bought several old type houses, had them renovated and moved into them
her old retainer families, many of whom continued to mourn her death, which took place in Adelaide in 1973.
Mary Ward was a charming, dignified, hard-working pioneer woman. Her name became synonymous with
Banka Banka and Tennant Creek and indeed that rare phenomenon ‘a legend in her own lifetime’.
Banka Banka Diaries, Fryer Library, University of Queensland; Personal information.
HILDA TUXWORTH, Vol 1.WARD, RICHARD CHARLES (DICK) (1916–1977), lawyer, politician, social and political reformer and judge,
was born in the Melbourne suburb of Kew on 28 July 1916, the son of Richard Dunstan Ward and Elsie May,
nee Coutanche. His father died nine days before he was born and Ward later acknowledged that his mother and
step-father had cheerfully made the necessary sacrifices which enabled him to undertake a career which otherwise
would have been impossible. He was a contemporary of Gough Whitlam, who was born in the same month and the
same suburb as Ward and with whom he became firm friends later in life.
Ward attended the Victoria Street School and then Melbourne High School. He excelled at school and in 1933,
in his first year in the Leaving Honours class, he won the Shakespeare Prize. The school paper said his success
‘was very popular among both his teachers and his fellow students, and not least because of the genuine modesty
with which he received it’. Modesty was an attribute that would stay with him the rest of his life.
Dick Ward became Legacy-ward to Captain Harold Peters, then managing director of one of Melbourne’s
largest bookstores and a prominent member of Melbourne Legacy. Peters assisted Ward in pursuing his legal career
with the help of a bursary from the Sir Samuel McCaughey Bequest. After graduating in Law from the University
of Melbourne, Ward was admitted as a practitioner of the Supreme Court of Victoria. Shortly after this, in about
1938, Captain Peters arranged for Ward to become a partner in the legal practice of Andrew Brough Newell in
Darwin.
In late 1941 or early 1942, he joined the Army. With the rank of Lance Corporal, he was working as a clerk in
the records section at Larrakeyah but was given leave on 19 February 1942 to defend a client in the Darwin court.
He had just requested time for his client to pay a fine, when the sirens blew as the Japanese began dropping bombs
on the wharf in the first and most devastating attack on Darwin. According to author Doug Lockwood, Ward and
several members of the court staff ran to a trench at the rear of the courthouse. One of the occupants was Florence
Wright, a stenographer with the Crown Law office.
Following the raid, Ward moved to Alice Springs where he established a legal practice and soon became active
in moves for political reform. In September 1943, he married Florence Wright, with whom he had sheltered during
that first Darwin raid 18 months earlier.