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grazing licence to open up and develop a property that he later named Ti-Tree; this was 1913. After doing some
relieving work on the Overland Telegraph with his partner Jack Burns he got a grazing licence for a place he named
‘Alcootara’. With the outbreak of war he wanted to enlist and so he let the licence lapse. Before he left the Territory
he reapplied for Tea Tree, ‘stipulating I want that country when I come back from the war’.
In 1915 he enlisted in the Third Light Horse Regiment as a Trooper, together with Alf Turner in Adelaide.
The ship they were on anchored off Gallipoli, but they were not disembarked. He saw service in Palestine and
Syria. Bill suffered shell shock and malaria and was in hospital for several months. He was repatriated as an
invalid and reached Adelaide in June 1919 where he was discharged, having served three years 187 days abroad.
As Melbourne was the administrative centre in matters pertaining to the Northern Territory, he went there and
applied in person for the Ti Tree lease. ‘This time I got it’, he said. In Adelaide he was asked if he would drove a
mob of Henbury horses to Derby in Western Australia. Having put together a plant and crew he left Alice Springs
in November 1919 but had to wait near Newcastle Waters for the monsoon to break so they could attempt the
170 mile dry stretch to Top Springs—the Murranji track. Having set off in the rain they soon discovered that was
a mistake as the boggy conditions made everything impassable. Eventually they got through and easily managed
to sell their mob of horses. After collecting a herd of cattle, he brought the first mob back to Tea Tree on the
Overland Telegraph line, which he reached in June 1921. Thereupon he erected a more permanent dwelling which
he described as ‘what you might call a tin shanty’.
In 1924 Heffernan employed an Aborigine named Fishhook who came from the Burt Plain on the east of the
telegraph line. He was an experienced drover and according to Heffernan ‘has been my faithful standby ever since’.
The partnership lasted until his death. At that time his nearest white neighbour was about 35 miles away. The line
of the telegraph virtually ran through the middle of his lease so all travellers stopped including Afghan cameleers
who sometimes relined their packsaddles. Originally they were stuffed with a buffel grass which is a native of
Africa and Asia but it has now naturalised itself in many parts of the Territory. Heffernan stayed there until 1928
running a store, post office and telegraph station besides running some cattle. With his business activities the cattle
tended to suffer so that year he moved back from the highway onto the Hanson River, about 16 kilometres west,
and renamed the station ‘Ti-Tree’. The store was leased and later sold.
As Heffernan dug many wells and bores on his property he conveniently survived the drought periods.
He commented ‘it is interesting that the watertable east of the bitumen is more shallow than on the western side’.
He employed various well sinkers and contractors to build stockyards and fences, but his head stockman for
23 years was Billy Briscoe. By 1935 Edwin Fitzroy (alias Pfitzner) had completed a homestead for him. The walls
were constructed of stone and potch-opal with an iron roof and Heffernan recounted that it ‘still stands as solid as
a rock, without a crack in the whole structure’. As it is only about 14 miles from Central Mount Stuart it is situated
in the centre of Australia.
In 1938 Heffernan engaged Frieda Lehmann as housekeeper for himself and his offsider Fitz. As Heffernan
put it ‘we were reasonable cooks but could do with much more nourishing fare, especially after a hard day’s
work of mustering or branding. Besides washing, ironing, mending and keeping the home tidy, a woman offers
interesting and happy companionship’. They were married on 12 September 1939 by Reverend Harry Griffiths in
the sitting room of the Australian Inland Mission hostel in Alice Springs and ‘lived happily ever after’.
In 1945, by now 65, he decided to take life ‘more leisurely’ so he employed a station-hand, Jeffrey Alfred
Hamlyn, who was 18. When Jeffrey married Ruby Irene Hunt in 1958 Heffernan had a home built for them on
his property where they were regarded as members of the family, he and Frieda having no children of their own.
At their silver wedding anniversary in September 1964 Heffernan calculated that their 62 guests had travelled a
total of over 11 000 kilometres to attend. In their leisure time Heffernan and Ruby Hamlyn played crib together
and Frieda Heffernan read and wrote. His memoirs are a kaleidoscope of all the people who were in the centre from
the 1920s. He speaks, for instance, of the murders of Fred Brooks and Harry Henty and the retribution meted out
to Willaberta Jack and of the redoubtable Billy Crook.
Bill Heffernan died in November 1969, survived by his wife.
P A Scherer, Sunset of an Era, 1993.
P A SCHERER, Vol 3.
HEMMINGS, ERNESTINE: see HILL, ERNESTINE
HESKETH, ISABELLE VIOLET: see PRICE, ISABELLE VIOLET
HERBERT, (ALFRED FRANCIS) XAVIER (1901–1984), pharmacist, author, social critic, was born on
15 May 1901 in the isolated settlement of Walkaway near Geraldton, Western Australia, into an unconventional
household consisting of his father, Welsh-descended Francis Benjamin Herbert, a cleaner and fireman with the
railways, his mother, Amy Victoria, nee Scammell, her two children from a previous liaison, and his maternal
grandfather. The ex-nuptial birth was not registered and its controversial circumstances led to the young Xavier
feeling an intruder in his own family, where unresolved tensions between a working-class father and an assertive
Anglophile mother with middle-class aspirations, engendered deep anxieties about his identity and allegiances.
Herbert later attributed his worries about his masculinity to his difficult relationship with his father. His dominant
mother’s role was probably just as significant.