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Once the battle for representation had been won, Watts became the first Secretary of the Northern Territory
Political Organisation that selected Nelson as its parliamentary candidate. It was Watts’s support of Nelson which
went a long way towards the latter’s successful election to the House of Representatives though they later fell out
and Watts was Nelson’s opponent during the 1928 campaign, but the sitting member held his seat.
The Northern Territory Administration believed that a more tractable Council would be possible if the franchise
was changed to allow voting by all adults, not just property owners or occupiers. Relations between the Council
and the Administrator, R H Weddell, who was appointed in 1927, were not a lot better than they had been under
Gilruth and negotiations broke down. Watts, as Mayor, presided over the meeting in 1929 that objected strongly
to the changes but by then he was in very bad health. At the Council meeting on 12 February 1930, he applied, by
letter, for leave of absence until the end of June (the end of his current term) though he had then been absent for
four meetings. Leave was duly granted and Watts left Darwin for his brother’s home in Toowoomba, Queensland,
but again there was controversy as the mayoral allowance continued to be paid.
The matter was quickly resolved as Watts died in Toowoomba on 1 March 1930, the first Mayor of a Darwin
local government council to die in office. He left a very small estate and it seems clear that he could not have
taken on the role of Mayor without some reasonable remuneration. While commenting that Watts had his share
of human failings, the obituary in the Northern Standard praised his endeavour to ‘do good according to his own
light’. He was a devoted husband and father to the wife and five children who survived him.
F X Alcorta, Darwin Rebellion 1911–1919, 1982; P F Donovan, At the Other End of Australia, 1986; D Lockwood, The Front Door, 1969;
A Powell, Far Country, 1981; Commonwealth Parliamentary Paper, no 28 of 1920; Northern Standard, 30 June 1921, 14 February 1930,
18 February 1930, 28 February 1930, 4 March 1930; Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 13 August 1909, 7 July 1911, 14 July 1911,
20 February 1913, 10 July 1913, 26 February 1914, 10 June 1915, 1 June 1916, 29 June 1916, 30 October 1916, 19 July 1917, 5 April 1919,
14 June 1919, 28 June 1919, 4 March 1930; Northern Territory Archives Service, E96/212; Queensland Births, Deaths and Marriages
84/006926.
HELEN J WILSON, Vol 2.WAUDBY, WILLIAM JOHNSON (BILL) (1920– ), policeman and pastoralist, was born on 8 August 1920 at
West Adelaide, the only child of strict Methodists, Ernest William Waudby and his wife Agnes, nee Walker, who
came from Yorkshire, England, about 1911 to settle in South Australia. Ernest Waudby was a cabinet-maker and
funeral director and for a time young Bill acted as undertaker’s assistant.
Bill attended Belair Primary School followed by Blackwood Primary School when it opened in 1929 before
going on to Unley High School. This, apparently, was not a huge success, causing his father to finally remark:
‘You’re wasting my money, your teacher’s time and your own, get out and get a job’.
Bill was 15 when he left school and being the time of the Depression in the early 1930s, he found a job
as packer’s assistant and messenger boy with Charles Birks & Co, Rundle Street, Adelaide (now David Jones).
Eighteen months later, as part of a Depression scheme for youth in their mid-teens, Bill joined a training scheme
with the South Australian Police until, at the age of 19 years, he applied for and was accepted by the Northern
Territory Police.
He arrived in the Territory and Darwin in 1939 when there were only about 45 police in the whole of the
Territory. Settling into the Top End as a non-drinker, it was not long before he was called upon to challenge the
current champion milkshake drinker. He won the title and continued as a milk drinker until, playing football with
the Waratahs when they won the 1940–1941 premiership; he gave milk away for rum. An over indulgence though,
made him swear off rum and revert to his former beverage.
From Darwin, Bill was sent all over the Territory in his work as Mounted Constable and was stationed in
Tennant Creek when the Japanese bombed Darwin. Joining the Air Force he served in Australia and New Guinea
until, in 1946, he returned to the Territory and the Police Force.
On relieving duty to outlying stations such as Katherine, Tennant Creek, Pine Creek, Mataranka, Wauchope
and Alice Springs, it was while temporarily stationed at Katherine in 1947 that Bill became involved in the rescue
of a Royal Dutch Navy air crew whose aircraft, a Dakota, had crashed landed in inaccessible country in Arnhem
Land during the Wet.
While three of the crew managed to walk out, a rescue patrol led by Mounted Constable Waudby set off to
battle impenetrable tropical growth, ford raging torrents of the flooded Maud Creek and Katherine River and cross
a treacherous boggy terrain to reach the remaining air crew seven days later. They were amazed to find the men
in high spirits surrounded by tinned tucker, fresh fruit and bottles of good champagne—the cargo the aircraft had
been carrying to troops in the islands. Preparing for the return journey, the aircrew, never having been on horses
before, were given instruction and despite bad weather and impossible conditions were led back to safety in
Katherine four days later.
Shortly after, Bill Waudby left the Northern Territory Police Force. Obtaining a Grazing Licence for just over
400 square miles of vacant Crown land, Waudby named it Central Mount Wedge after the mountain on the property.
He first of all camped under a tarpaulin, then lived in a bough shed while developing the station, and seven years
later, he applied for and was granted a Pastoral Lease.
On 2 July 1949 Bill Waudby and Pat Rugless, whom he had first met in 1946 in Darwin when she worked for
the Allied Works Council were married. Their first son, James, was born on 16 March 1950. In May 1952, Pat was
pregnant for the second time when she and Bill were bringing cattle into Alice Springs and she was struck down,
on the road, by poliomyelitis. After five months in an iron lung in the Alice Springs Hospital, Pat was evacuated
to Adelaide with a portable iron lung in a TAA transport aircraft that had to fly below a thousand feet to enable her
to breathe. In Adelaide, on 7 November, she gave birth by Caesarean section to their second son Robert. Two and