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and a continuous encounter with injustice. His ability to sing the songs, visit the places, and perform the rituals,
and thus to sustain the relationships to country into which he had been born, grew as he matured, but remained
confined and circumscribed by the requirements of the cattle stations where he worked.
For much of his life Hobbles lived both: his country-based life and his cattle-station life. He experienced
both: his growth and fulfilment in his Aboriginal sphere and the restraints and confinement of his status as a ward.
During the 1960s he was among the pastoral workers who went on strike demanding land and justice. Following
the strike he went with his wife to her country, and was one of the founders of the community of Yarralin.
A slim man with a sensitive and thoughtful demeanour, Hobbles devoted his later years to the analysis of
historical and political issues. He was a deep thinker, a storyteller, a man who could pull together isolated facts in
order to locate the pattens, and then weave the stories that would give form and moral substance to the patterns.
A number of his historical narratives have been published (see below).
While his analysis and his passions went primarily into stories, some of which were equally political exhortation,
parable, history, myth, and legend, he occasionally erupted into action. One of his particular arenas of contention
was with the Pentecostal missionaries. Hobbles was one of the community leaders who kept requesting them to
stay away, and he was the one who became most angered by their persistent returns. On one notable occasion he
strode out into the middle of camp with a Bible in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. Shouting ‘Strike me
dead, God, if this is your book, strike me dead,’ he chopped up the Bible. He then turned to the community people
who had witnessed his actions and exhorted them to follow their own Law.
Hobbles had no time for regrets, for nostalgia, or for recriminations. Rather, he had a passionate desire to
see his people achieve a better future, and he believed that it could only come about through understanding the
processes of European power and control, within which he also located the missionaries. What Karl Marx calls
the secret of capitalism—that workers contribute to their own exploitation through their own labour—was no
secret to Aboriginal people in the Victoria River District. Hobbles’ contribution was to expand people’s fields of
understanding to include not just local events, but also broader processes. The result, he hoped, would be a greater
unity among Aboriginal people, leading to a greater power to achieve the lives of their choice.
Hobbles Danayarri died in 1988. His family of adult children included some community leaders; all of them
were knowledgeable in the Law, as were many of his grandchildren, and all were active in achieving land under the
Land Rights Act (NT) 1976. He was never forthcoming about his antecedents. Fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers
were all dead from a variety of causes related to the colonisation of the north. His spiritual genealogy indicated the
quality of his human genealogy: in the early days a group of Aboriginal people had been fishing somewhere in the
Wave Hill area and were shot by whitefellows. One of the men died in the water. His spirit became a barramundi;
the barramundi became Hobbles.
No one can yet say what his spirit will next become. Hobbles expected that his life would go the way of the
lives of his ancestors: that he would become a shooting star, a set of bones, a spirit that becomes new life, and
another spirit that goes home to stay forever in its own country.
Hobbles’ vision of Australia’s future was both compassionate and demanding. He urged all Australians to a
sense of their shared lives and their shared potential in this country. Especially he urged settler Australians to make
peace with Aboriginal people: ‘This time now, you got to have a feeling for Aboriginal people. Because [early
days] people from your mob [are] dead now, and you should stop that thing [making things hard]. We been doing
that job for you, and we been making that money for you, and nothing here for Aboriginal people. We’re not trying
to push you back to London and big England, but what’s your feeling? You the one been making lot of mistake,
but we can be join in, white, and black, and yellow. This a big country, and we been mix em up [people]. We’re on
this land now. We can be friendly, join in, be friends, mates, together.’
Two works present Hobbles Danayarri’s historical and political analyses in some detail. D Rose, ‘The Saga
of Captain Cook Morality in Aboriginal and European Law’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2, 24–39, 1984;
D Rose, Hidden Histories. Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River, and Wave Hill stations, North
Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991. A brief story is presented by H Middleton, But Now We Want the Land
Back, New Age Publishers Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1977. Hobbles’ published words have entered into dialogue with
scholars in a variety ways, see for example: T Rowse, After Mabo: Interpreting Indigenous Traditions, Melbourne
University Press, 1993.
Sources used are mentioned in the text above.
DEBORAH BIRD ROSE, Vol 3.DARCY, ELIZABETH, nee WALDEN, formerly HOPKINS, (1895–1944), pioneer of the Gulf Country,
was born on 19 February 1895 at Wandi, a small gold-mining township on the Wandi Creek, about 40 kilometres
east of Pine Creek, Northern Territory, the second child of Elizabeth and James Walden. Her mother was born
in Pine Creek and died in Katherine in 1951. Her father, born at the Crystal Palace, London about 1860, arrived
in Australia in 1881 and died in Pine Creek in 1908. They were married in December 1893 at James’s house in
Pine Creek, with an engineer and a blacksmith as witnesses, when the bride was 17.
James, or Jim as he was known, was a teamster and his horse-drawn wagons worked out of Pine Creek for
many years. There is a place at a large lagoon still called Walden’s Camp, where he spelled his horses every wet
season. The family spent time at Wandi and Eureka mines; there is a tin mine called Walden’s Mine, named after
the younger Jim, who was born in 1894. He was also a teamster and miner until his early death in Darwin in
1931.