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son. Unable, for religious reasons, to marry the father of her child, Hemmings adopted the name of Mrs Ernestine
Hill. The events marked the beginning of her nomadic life style. Her travels, which were subsidised by Associated
Newspapers, apparently to keep her out of Sydney and as partial compensation for her plight, began in the 1930s.
Assured of publication in the Sun newspapers, she soon gained prominence for her writings from distant corners
of Australia.
Hill’s enthusiastic journalistic style created immense problems for Associated Newspapers. In 1931 she wrote
glowing accounts of a large gold discovery by a prospector at the Granites, to the north west of Alice Springs
in the harsh Tanami Desert. Despite earlier reports that the Granites field was unprofitable, Hill’s story led to a
stock market boom and hopeful prospectors flooded the area. The Managing Director of Associated Newspapers,
C R Packer, embarrassed at the sensation created by the Hill articles, financed a geological expedition to the
Granites. When the report was published, Granites shares fell dramatically in value. The personal suffering which
Hill’s stories helped cause was immense. It was in the middle of the Depression, and a great number of men had
travelled to the Granites with little but hope to sustain them. Many of these were left stranded, suffering from
dysentery, and without food and shelter. The situation reached the stage where the Commonwealth government
was compelled to take action, providing free transport to South Australia for those who were destitute or physically
ill. The fact that Hill was guaranteed publication was not lost on her fellow journalists. F E Baume, a journalist
with the Associated Newspapers geological expedition, prefaced his book on the Granites, Tragedy Track, with an
attack on Hill’s irresponsible and sensationalistic journalism. He wrote, somewhat dourly, of Hill that ‘the front
page is her own for the asking.’
Hill soon became embroiled in controversy again as a result of a front-page article on Arnhem Land Aborigines
that appeared in the Sunday Sun in August 1932. The heading read ‘Black Baby Saved From Being Eaten:
Cannibalism on East West—Grisly Feast Persists—Story of White Woman Who Intervened—Mother’s Awful
Loss’. The tone of the article, including Hill’s statement that it ‘seems only with the total disappearance of the
race will this ghastly horror die out’, evoked much criticism. While Hill claimed in the article that she had actually
witnessed the event, she later admitted that she had only heard the story. In an interview shortly before her death,
she spoke of her early work as that of a ‘wicked and ruthless journalist.’
Despite the racist tones of her 1932 article, Hill in later years did much, through her articles and photographs,
to provide a record of Aboriginal and outback life during the 1930s and 1940s. She also worked with Daisy Bates
on recording the latter’s life with the Aborigines in a series of articles entitled ‘My Natives and I’. The series
was syndicated throughout Australia. In 1938 Bates published her book The Passing of the Aborigines. Hill was
incensed that Bates made no acknowledgement of her contribution to the book, claiming that she had ghost written
the work for Bates on the basis of a series of interviews held in the office of the Adelaide Advertiser. In her own
book, Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir of Daisy Bates, published posthumously in 1973, Hill again asserted her
co-authorship of Bates’s book, and published a letter from Bates acknowledging her contribution.
During the 1930s Hill had several books published. The Great Australian Loneliness, an account of travel
through outback Australia from Adelaide to Darwin via the Birdsville Track, Central Australia and Arnhem Land,
was published in 1937. Water into Gold, a history of the Murray River irrigation area, was published in the
same year. Hill’s only novel, My Love Must Wait, based on the life of Matthew Flinders, appeared in 1941 and,
published in the United States and Europe, sold more than 10 000 copies in Australia. Hill also wrote for journals
such as Walkabout and provided a regular column for the ABC Weekly. She edited the women’s page of the latter
publication from 1940 to 1942, and was a Commissioner of the Australian Broadcasting Commission from 1942
until 1944.
In 1944 Hill was in the news once again, this time due to her efforts to have her son exempted from conscription.
Claiming to be a widow, she maintained that her son was her research assistant and that she needed him to enable
her to continue her work in telling Australians about their vast continent. In return for having her son remain with
her, she wrote, ‘I promise a lifelong and joyous typewriter toil for Australia... a book a year for eleven years.’
In 1947 her story of the foundation of the Australian Inland Mission, and the work of John Flynn and the Flying
Doctor Service, Flying Doctor Calling, was published. By the time her best known book, The Territory, was
published in 1951, Hill had travelled, in her own words, ‘twice around Australia by land, clockwise and three times
across it from south to north, many times east and west, and once on the diagonal.’
The Territory, a sweeping and colourful account of the people and places of the Northern Territory, of which
one writer commented that ‘it ought to be in the swag of every Australian’, was the last work published by Hill
during her lifetime. But she continued to plan for future works, carrying tin trunks full of notes and manuscripts,
cuttings and photographs, across the length and breadth of Australia. Described by a friend as ‘a restless vivacious
little person always eager to see new places and meet new people’, Hill never lost her zest for travel. She once
wrote to a friend that it ‘is a dreadful addiction... It is all a magnificent country, and every dusty monotony leads
to a joyous surprise... I love to take the trail, and nothing, I hope will be wasted... I’ll travel it over in notes and
maps and writing to the end of my years.’
The Ernestine Hill collection of photographs and manuscripts, including the drafts of two unpublished works,
‘Johnny Wisecap’ and ‘Blanket Over the Moon’, is housed in the Fryer Library, the University of Queensland.
Hill died in Brisbane on 22 August 1972, survived by her son Robert. Her wish was that she should be buried
‘just under a tree, surrounded by a few friends and family.’
W H Wilde, J Hooton & B Andrews, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 1988; Advertiser, 23 August 1972; Australian,
25 August 1972; Courier Mail, 23 August 1972; M Bonnin, ‘A Study of Australian Descriptive and Travel Writing, 1929–1945’, PhD Thesis,
University of Queensland, 1980.
EVE GIBSON, Vol 2.