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Subiaco, Western Australia, in 1903, the son of William Beaton, born in Glasgow, Scotland, and his wife Sarah,
nee McLean, formerly of Euroa, Victoria. Rene’s family, the Denmans, were from Queenstown, South Australia,
where she was born in 1908.
At the age of 13 Frank was told to leave home because his parents could no longer afford to support him.
He fossicked for gold and shot kangaroos in the Meekathara district of Western Australia but his dream was to find
land and start a farm.
Frank arrived in Darwin aboard MV Koolinda in 1939 to work on the construction of Manton Dam. Life in
a tent beside the crocodile infested river was too much for the young Western Australian. He obtained a job in
Darwin helping to build Larrakeyah Army Barracks. Once settled in, he wrote a letter of proposal to his pen friend
in Perth, Rene Denman, which she accepted.
On her arrival in Darwin, also on Koolinda, Rene went directly to a job at Jack Buscall’s Curio Cottage in
Cavenagh Street, where she fed native birds, animals, snakes, crocodiles and goannas. A Justice of the Peace at
the picturesque sandstone registry office overlooking the wharf in Darwin married Frank and Rene. They looked
forward to a long and happy life on their proposed farm.
With the threat of war in late 1941, Rene was evacuated, once again on Koolinda, whilst Frank stayed in
Darwin. He was there when the first bombs fell in February 1942. He later enlisted in the Royal Australian Air
Force in Adelaide and served at Morotai constructing airfields.
Frank and Rene returned to Darwin with four young children in 1946. Their fifth child was born there.
Frank bought ‘Hidden Valley’ at Berrimah for 10 Shillings an acre. He paid 50 Pounds for the Sidney Williams
hut and established a thriving banana plantation. He also grew cucurbits, limes, gladioli and a single Bowen
mango tree. Frank’s produce was exported to markets in Perth and Adelaide where record prices became the
norm. Even the single mango tree was to attract prominence when the Administrator, Frank Wise, arranged for
a carton of the huge fruit to be air freighted to London for Princess Alexandra, who, during her visit to Darwin,
had expressed her love of mangoes. There were no other ripe fruit available in Australia at that time. The resultant
publicity brought requests from several countries for seeds from Frank’s ‘plantation’.
In 1951 Frank and Rene instigated the 1951 Jubilee Year Exhibition. Frank’s idea was to encourage ‘returnees’
and newcomers to rise up from the ruins and show what Territorians could produce from the land. The following
year the North Australian Show Society was born with Frank and Rene holding the Secretary and President
positions for many years.
After Frank’s death in January 1974, Rene stayed on in their Rapid Creek house until Cyclone Tracy wrecked
it. On resettling in New South Wales she was often asked if she would return to the Territory. Her reply was
that she had been bombed out and blown out and she would never return. After nearly four decades in Darwin,
Rene frequently stated that life in the south suited her much better with so many excellent facilities for the aged,
and the invigorating changes during the four seasons there. Her autobiography, Feet First, was published in Darwin
in 1985 and later reprinted. Rene died peacefully at Orange, New South Wales, in January 1988.
I L Beaton, Feet First, 1985; family information.
CHRISTINE COX, Vol 2.BEETALOO BILL, JANGARI also WIRINYKARI or WEINGARI (c1915–1983), Aboriginal elder, was
born probably around 1915, the son of Roderick Jampin (Mirijilkari) and a Napurrula women. His English name
comes from the name of the Batherns’ (Bulwaddy Bates’) station where he was born, on the east of the Overland
Telegraph Line near Newcastle Waters. His parents were, in normal circumstances, a proscribed combination and
they had come together in an unusual way. As Jangari told it, the woman who was to be his mother was a Gurindji
woman who had been the companion of a white hawker, Billy ‘Cabby’, who had picked her up from the Camfield
area and taken her to Tennant Creek. Being wary of European law which prohibited ‘cohabitation’, the white men
there engaged an Aboriginal man to give the appearance of the two Aborigines being a couple, which indeed they
later became, and Beetaloo Bill was their first child. They all travelled around in the white man’s horse and cart.
He had a younger brother, Charlie Bill, and several younger sisters, one of whom, Hilda Kingston, survived him.
Beetaloo Bill’s father also had an unusual ancestry, and was the subject of an ethnographic puzzle for the
anthropologist W E H Stanner, who interviewed him at Newcastle Waters in 1934, for he was in the opposite
patrimoiety from his father, Jangari’s grandfather.
Beetaloo Bill was made a man in 1929: as he said, ‘the year Phar Lap won the Melbourne Cup.’ His father’s
Dreaming was the Laughing Boys story from west of Banka Banka, but Beetaloo Bill’s main Dreaming, at least
in his later life, was the Snake and Star story, which circles the Barkly Tableland and culminates along Hayward
Creek. As a child he spoke his father’s language Warumungu, according to which his skin name (subsection) was
Jappangarti; in adult life his main language was Mudburra, according to which his skin name was Jangari; he also
knew the Warlmanpa and Jingulu languages, and understood Gurindji.
Like a number of his contemporaries, he worked for the Army during the Second World War at camps along
the Stuart Highway, including the newly established Elliott Staging Camp. After the war he was employed with
the Department of Works, at first on lower wages and later on full award wages. In this work he was part of a gang
that maintained government bores on stock routes, and in the course of this work he and his European workmates
travelled the stock routes that radiated for hundreds of kilometres from Newcastle Waters. Beetaloo Bill became
a well-known figure at cattle stations and droving camps. He was one of the few Aborigines in the Northern
Territory who were paid equally with Europeans in the years before this was mandatory, and was a member