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sent to the leprosarium at Channel Island in Darwin Harbour. The result was that the victims of the disease would
be hidden from the authorities as they did not wish to be removed from their own totemic country and die in alien
territory.
It was while at Roper Bar, during the absence of her husband on patrol, that nine Aboriginal elders visited Ruth.
Although her Aboriginal housemaid was terrified at the sight of these men and hid, Ruth approached them without
fear. They examined her ears, eyes, hands and feet and declared that she belonged to their tribe, ‘in the dreamtime.’
She accepted this status and believed that the Aborigines saw an ‘aura’ around her. The Aboriginal women taught
her their language, that of the Alawar people, and gave her the name of Pitjiri, meaning the snake that will not sink.
She told them that she could not swim so she was taken to the river and pushed under the water and she bobbed
up like a cork.
Ruth was taken to visit an area in Arnhem Land called Burundju by the Aborigines and considered by them
to have been the location of an earlier settlement in the dreamtime. The place was known as the ‘Ruined City’ by
white people because of the strange geological formation, caused by erosion over the ages and resembling that
of an abandoned city. It was a special place for the Aborigines and they discouraged visitors. Ruth, however, was
taken there because it was there that some of the lepers were hidden.
Ted Heathcock became aware that it was during his absences on patrol, which might be for a month at a time,
that the Aborigines brought the lepers to Ruth. Had he been present he would have been required to arrange for
their transfer to Channel Island. Understanding the way his wife had with these people, he wrote to the League of
Nations in Geneva outlining the situation with the result that the Administration allowed the people suffering from
leprosy to be treated by Ruth in their own areas.
Ruth’s finest hour was in 1941. Her husband had been transferred to Borroloola on the McArthur River but
in March 1941 he was in Darwin with business in the Supreme Court. It was in the midst of the ‘wet’ when an
Aborigine arrived with a note for the policeman. The messenger had come across many kilometres of flooded
rivers and swamps to deliver the note, which was from Horace Foster, who had a camp on the Wearyan River.
The note was brutally stark in its message. It read, ‘Have shot myself accidentally. Think I am settled. Can you
come out? Shot the bone in two above the knee. May bleed to death.’ With her husband away Ruth immediately
sent a message by the police transceiver to the Flying Doctor Base at Cloncurry. The doctor flew out the next day
but the weather conditions and the boggy state of the airfield made it impossible to land near Foster’s camp so he
came on and landed at Borroloola to inform Ruth.
It was now several days since the accident but Ruth determined that she should go to provide what help she could.
She assembled a kit of what she thought she would need and set out with Roger Jose and his Aboriginal wife in a
fragile dug out canoe to travel to Foster’s camp. This journey meant travel in stormy weather some 96 kilometres
down the flooded McArthur River, across the dangerous bar to the open sea in the Gulf of Carpentaria. There were
then about 24 kilometres in the Gulf at a part described as ‘at that time of year one of the unhealthiest areas off
the Australian coast’, to the mouth of the Wearyan River and then to Foster’s camp. The journey was made in
extremely dangerous conditions with unimagined discomfort. The party, wet, hungry and cold at night, took three
days and nights to reach its destination.
Ruth could see that her patient was in a hopeless condition. However, she dressed the wound and here she
was confident that some supernatural power was hers to make the ‘golden hands’ help in her task. She sent an
Aboriginal messenger to the nearest station, McArthur River, which had a pedal radio, to arrange for the flying
doctor to come. The doctor came but Foster had died only an hour before his arrival.
In recognition of her work Ruth was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1951.
The award citation specially recognised her courage and initiative in the 1941 journey. The Administrator in 1941,
C L A Abbott, said the journey was ‘one of the bravest acts I have known in the Northern Territory’.
Until his death in Alice Springs in 1943, Ted Heathcock assisted the armed forces in various ways because of
his knowledge of the Aborigines and the country. Ruth also gave special war service by escorting Aborigines who
were suffering with leprosy to Adelaide for treatment and care. After the war she escorted them back to Darwin.
Following Ted’s death, Ruth and her sister provided care for Aboriginal children at an Anglican hostel in Alice
Springs. Their aged mother accompanied them.
Later Ruth returned to South Australia and took up residence in Marion, a suburb of Adelaide. For some
40 years she continued her nursing care of people and was recognised as a skilled midwife by the authorities in the
Marion area. The Marion Council named her ‘citizen of the year’ in 1988. It was at that time also that the Council
offered her a unit in newly constructed homes for the aged, where she had the company of her only surviving
sister.
V C Hall, Sister Ruth, c 1968; interview with R Heathcock, 1989.
ARCH W GRANT, Vol 2.
HEFFERNAN, FRIEDA CECILIA nee LEHMANN (1898–1976), nurse, domestic worker, housekeeper and
home maker, was born at Kanmantoo near Callington on 25 June 1898, the only daughter of four children born
to Fritz Lehmann, a farmer, and his wife Agnes, nee Kiekebusch. She was educated at the local school until she
was nearly 13 when, after the death of a grandfather, the family moved to her grandmother’s farm on the Bremer
River. Her first teacher had been a Catholic Irishman but now she came under the more traditional influence of
her forebears’ Lutheran faith. After leaving school she helped out on the farm and learned all the domestic skills,
as she put it, ‘that a girl ought to acquire’. She also did outside work, was fond of riding a horse and knew how to
stook and pitch hay.