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HARNEY, WILLIAM EDWARD (BILL) (1895–1962), bush and ‘odd jobs’ worker, soldier, pastoralist,
fisherman, trepanger, patrol officer, ranger and author, was born at Charters Towers, Queensland, in 1895, the son
of William Harney, miner, and his wife Beatrice Annie, nee Griffin, both English born.
Living on the bread line, Harney’s parents were almost forever on the move. By the age of 10, with only three
years’ formal education at the Charters Towers Boys’ School, the young Harney had worked at Longton, southwest
of Charters Towers ‘bringing up the horses’ on a mail run. Between 10 and 12, he worked as a printer’s devil on the
Charters Towers Morning Post while his mother worked as a cook at a boarding house and his father sought work
at the tin and copper fields out west. Another move brought the family together again at the Mount Molloy copper
mine and young Harney worked at a succession of odd jobs. In 1907, the Harneys moved back to Charters Towers,
where his father worked the gold mine mullock heaps, while for some months young Bill assisted him.
At the age of 12, Harney left home as a horse tailer for a drover taking cattle from Normanton to the Gulf
Country. His wages were 15 Shillings a week and keep. He stayed with cattle work for the next seven years, his
last droving trip being in 1912. During the next two years he moved among cattle stations seeking jobs and at one
stage worked on the 112-kilometre dry stage north of Kalidjewarra, a stretch of the rabbit proof fence designed to
keep rabbits out of Queensland. He spent six weeks working in the mines near Cloncurry, but, detesting the tunnel
work, went back to the lower wages but better life of the cattle stations.
He was on Wurung cattle station between Burketown and Cloncurry when the First World War broke out.
With his mate Andy Anderson he enlisted in the Ninth Infantry Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force. Between
1914 and 1918 he served overseas in Egypt and France as a signaller and was twice mentioned in despatches.
Forty years later he told of his experiences in that period and of his philosophy of war in an Australian Broadcasting
Commission interview with producer John Thompson. ‘Harney’s War’ became a radio classic.
He returned to Australia in June 1919 and travelled straight to Queensland and Charters Towers, then to
Carandotta. In September he arrived at Borroloola in the Northern Territory.
From 1919 until 1921 he worked with cattle once more. In 1921, with a partner, he took up a block of virgin
land east of Borroloola on Seven Emus Lagoon. The period that followed was one of struggle, buying a few cattle
from a cattleman and mustering herds of wild cattle, the offspring of others left behind by the overlanders. Early in
1923, he and his partner were accused of having cattle with ‘foreign’ brands on their run. Arrested and taken to
Borroloola to await their trial in Darwin, they were incarcerated in the cell at the Borroloola Police Station. It was
here, at the age of 28, he received an extensive education in the classics through reading books in the ‘Carnegie’
library, to which he had access. Later that year, with the trial in Darwin proving a fiasco, he cashed in the remainder
of his war gratuity and bought a 10-ton ketch, Iolanthe. He then made the perilous journey along the north coast of
Australia from Darwin to the Gulf of Carpentaria, the McArthur River and Borroloola. He abandoned Seven Emus
to his partner and for the next seven years lived on board Iolanthe, making a living fishing and trepanging in the
Gulf with his partner Horace Mole Foster.
Groote Eylandt was a frequent landfall and on 5 April 1927 he married Linda Beattie, an Aboriginal ‘mission
girl’ from the Church Missionary Society mission established there.
In 1928 their daughter was born aboard Iolanthe and the family continued ‘working’ the Gulf and the Roper
River for the Chinese trade. In 1931, Linda’s ill health forced them to sell Iolanthe to a mission station on the east
coast of Arnhem Land and journey to Darwin, where their son was born on 30 October.
The years of the Great Depression not only proved hard for Harney and his family, whose very existence
depended on outback station work, but also held tragedy. Between October 1930 and the last months of 1932,
the family travelled by truck more than 6 000 kilometres through the south, west and centre of the Northern Territory
seeking work. Linda’s health deteriorated and she died towards the end of 1932 from tuberculosis. In 1934 after
two years in straitened circumstances on the dole in Katherine, Harney’s daughter died with a ‘TB spine’. He put
his four-year old son in the care of Catholic priests in Darwin and set out to find work.
The next five years were spent in the Northern Territory on roadwork, fencing and contracting for government
departments.
In 1940 Harney was appointed a Protector of Aborigines with the Native Affairs Branch of the Northern Territory
Administration. He travelled far and wide throughout the Territory, seldom sleeping in one place for more than a
night, carrying out wartime and post war patrols for Aboriginal welfare. It was during this period in 1945 that his
15-year-old son, visiting him in Alice Springs during school holidays, was drowned. Harney was now alone.
In 1948 he retired from the Native Affairs Branch and settled on the western shore of Darwin Harbour to
continue his book writing started in 1943. Using his home, Darramunkamani, as a base, he was active in various
ventures and was sought after as an adviser by many. He was a speaker at several writers’ groups and festivals in
southern capital cities; he was an adviser on two National Geographic Society expeditions to Melville Island and
Arnhem Land; he contributed prose and verse to a diverse range of magazines; he did radio broadcasts for the
Australian Broadcasting Commission, and, during a visit to the United Kingdom to seek out his ancestral roots,
he did several broadcasts on British radio. He also appeared on television there. In 1953 he represented Australia
in the Commonwealth radio round up for the British Broadcasting Corporation Christmas broadcast. Throughout
this period he continued to write books.
In 1957 he was appointed the first Ranger for Ayers Rock and Mount Olga National Park and Keeper of Ayers
Rock. For five years he patrolled the area, attended to tourists’ needs and passed on Aboriginal myths concerning
the rock.
In June 1962 he retired and made his home in Mooloolaba, Queensland. He died there on 31 December of the
same year.