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travel long distances on horseback or in a buckboard (the mail coach). The hospital was built on the top of a hill,
it was enclosed by gauze and looked like a meat safe, but when the Battery was working they had electric light and
water pumped from a spring. During their two years at Maranboy there was not a doctor who visited at any time
so all serious accidents were attended to and illnesses such as malaria treated. The hospital was the social centre
of the area and had a gramophone and a well-stocked library. Among the young men who visited the hospital was
Harold Giles, a shy policeman stationed in the area.
Early in 1924, Doris Dunlop went to Melbourne for some midwifery training. She then travelled to Darwin to
marry Harold Giles on 25 March 1924 at the Anglican Christ Church. The Giles commenced married life at the
Kahlin Compound for Aborigines in Darwin, where Harold Giles was the supervisor. Their first two children were
born during this period—Peter (26 February 1925 to 11 May 1986) and Margaret Dorothy (24 October 1926).
A third child, Alan Bruce, was born on 12 March 1929.
Whilst on furlough in Adelaide in 1928, Harold Giles resigned from the Police Force and took up the managership
of the Elsey Station near Mataranka. ‘The Elsey’ was called after the Elsey River, named by A C Gregory for
Dr Elsey, the surgeon in his expedition to explore the area. Doris and the two children followed Harold Giles later,
and travelled by ship to Darwin, by train to Katherine and then by car to ‘The Elsey’. They travelled the same route
taken by Aeneas and Jeannie Gunn in 1902. The area was famous because of Mrs Gunn’s book We of the Never
Never; Doris Giles corresponded with Mrs Gunn and stayed with her in Melbourne in 1933. Mrs Gunn’s last letter
of eight pages was in 1945 saying many of the soldiers stationed in the Northern Territory wrote to her giving news
of ‘The Elsey’ and its characters in her books. Jeannie Gunn arrived in 1902 to find her homestead destroyed by
a cyclone and reconstruction in progress. Doris Giles lived in the second homestead built in 1906 at McMinn’s
Bar; this had slab walls and a floor paved with water-polished stones from the riverbed. This homestead was white
ant eaten and not safe to live in so a new homestead was constructed with a cement floor and fibro for the walls
and ceiling. In 1940 Doris Giles relates that the paint was hardly dry, her husband had gone to muster cattle and
left one stockman and the cook at the homestead, when the biggest flood of 508 millimetres of rain in five days
occurred. Part of the homestead was washed away; Doris escaped on a raft built by the stockman and the natives.
Four days later they returned to the homestead to find great destruction of furniture and house. Doris relates that it
took months to clean and repair the homestead.
After the Japanese commenced bombing the Northern Territory in 1942, Doris and her two younger children
were evacuated to Brisbane. Some months later Doris returned to ‘The Elsey’ to look after the numerous visitors
who called at the homestead. She recalls the happy years when the nursing sisters from the nearby military hospitals
stayed with her. The soldiers came in truckloads each day and at times she had two sittings for meals. A weekend
camp was formed at the Elsey Falls, five miles from the homestead and soldiers came from their camps to fish
and swim. The beauty of the homestead was appreciated by Lady Gowrie (wife of the Governor General) with
the Roper River flowing past below the high banks, the garden with its rockery and huge trees and the lawns
maintained with fresh water from the Roper.
In 1941 the Giles bought a house on the Brisbane River at Indooroopilly. Doris lived there part of each year
so that the children at boarding school in Brisbane could live at home. They sold this house in 1955 and moved to
Sandgate where Harold Giles died in 1960. Doris often travelled to Melbourne to visit her son Peter, to Kingaroy
to see her daughter and meet many friends from the Territory. She died on 26 July 1979.
Family information; D Giles, memoirs, Northern Territory Archives.
VALERIE ASCHE, Vol 3.
GILLEN, FRANCIS JAMES (1855–1912), post and telegraph station master and ethnologist, was born on
28 October 1855 at Little Para, South Australia, eldest son of Thomas Gillen, agricultural labourer, and his wife
Bridget, nee McCan. His Irish parents migrated to Australia from Cavan in the year of his birth. They later settled
at Clare, where the family became shopkeepers. Gillen’s brother Thomas became mayor of Clare, and another
brother, Peter Paul Gillen (1858–1896), was elected to the South Australian Legislative Assembly in 1889,
becoming Commissioner of Crown Lands.
Gillen joined the public service in 1867 as a postal messenger at Clare, having survived a near-drowning
accident. He was transferred to Adelaide in 1871, combining duties as a telegraph operator with evening study at the
South Australian School of Mines and Industries. He was on duty in 1874 when news of the fatal Aboriginal attack
upon the Barrow Creek Telegraph Station was tapped down the line. Gillen received the dying stationmaster’s last
message and transmitted one from that man’s wife. Despite this adverse introduction to frontier life, Gillen was
interested in Aboriginal society from the time of his appointment to the overland telegraph in 1875 until his transfer
south in 1899. He served continuously between Charlotte Waters and Tennant Creek. With his appointment in 1892
as Post and Telegraph Stationmaster at Alice Springs, a magistrate and Sub-Protector of Aborigines, Gillen became
the senior official in Central Australia.
On 5 August 1891 he had married Amelia Maude Besley at Mount Gambier, they had six children. Besley
family connections under Gillen’s supervision were extensive. Amelia Gillen’s brother, Jack Besley, served on
Gillen’s staff and supported the family when Gillen was on ethnological fieldwork. Her stepbrother, Patrick Byrne,
lived at the Charlotte Waters station and her cousin, J F Field (1864–1926), was in charge at Tennant Creek.
Gillen’s relatives shared his interest in gathering ethnographic and biological specimens, particularly following
1894 when stimulated by visiting Horn Scientific Expedition member (Sir) Baldwin Spencer. Some of their
collections later enriched the National Museum of Victoria, which Spencer directed and assisted him in defining
the fauna of that region.