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trainees. He also represented the Board on a Standards Association Committee to draw up National Standards
for testing in Typewriting and Shorthand. He was also on a Committee to advise the Minister for Education on
subsidies to business colleges.
He retired in 1987 and shortly afterwards wrote a set of procedures for the accreditation of private business
colleges. He was then required to implement them as Accreditation Commissioner. The role was expanded some
years later when the Australian Council for Private Education and Training took over accreditation of a wide range
of private colleges, ranging from business, religious and fashion design to aviation and dramatic arts. He was
elected a Fellow of the Commercial Education Society of Australia in 1989. He retired completely in 1993.
His interest in the Northern Territory never left him and he published two books: a mining history Pegging the
Northern Territory was published by the Northern Territory Department of Mines and Energy in 1987 and this
was followed by The Chinese in the Northern Territory published by Northern Territory University Press in 1990;
a second edition is in the pipeline. In addition, he wrote articles for the Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography
and in 1995 was planning ‘Reminiscences of a Public Service Inspector in the Northern Territory’.
He lived in Canberra with his wife. He was a life member of the Australian Capital Territory Racing Club, and
committee member of the Canberra Wine and Food Club. He was also a committee member of the Australia–China
Friendship Society, another major interest being the history and politics of China.
Correspondence with the author, 1983 to present.
HELEN J WILSON, Vol 3.
JOSE, ROGER (c1893–1963), labourer and ‘hermit’, was born in about 1893, probably in New South Wales.
Accurate details of his parentage are unknown but he claimed, almost certainly incorrectly, to be the son of an
Anglican Dean of Adelaide. He arrived in Borroloola in 1916 after walking from Cunnamulla in Queensland.
Initially Jose was employed at cattle stations near Borroloola, working on fences and building yards. At one
stage, he also maintained the track between Borroloola and Anthony’s Lagoon. He lived in Darwin briefly during
the 1920s; being married there to Maggie, a full-blood Aboriginal woman from Adelaide River. She died in the
early 1950s and Jose then lived with her sister Biddy.
Jose became well known as Borroloola’s most celebrated ‘hermit’, one of a small group of white men in the
isolated town who lived at a subsistence level in close contact with the local Aborigines. He read most of the town’s
library before it disappeared and could sprinkle his discourses on a wide range of subjects with quotations from
the Bible, the plays of Shakespeare and the great classics. David Attenborough, who once made a film featuring
Jose, described him as ‘a noble-looking man with a long grey beard of patriarchal proportions, curling silver hair
and deeply scorched wrinkled skin’. He often wore wallaby-hide slippers, a tea cosy for a hat and a heavy coat ‘to
keep out the hot air’. His diet consisted of snakes, yams, lily roots, birds, rum and methylated spirits. Jose’s house,
which stood until 1984, was built in the 1920s and was a corrugated iron tank with a roof and holes for windows
and a door. From the 1930s onward, he very rarely left Borroloola and he died there in 1963. Although a militant
atheist, his grave is marked with a simple cross and is located near Borroloola airstrip.
Jose was not a major historical figure but by the end of his life was one of the Northern Territory’s best
known and most loved ‘colourful characters’. Prominent writers sought him out to sample his simple yet unusual
philosophy of life. Douglas Lockwood once claimed: Jose taught me more about simplicity and humility than any
other man... A day with him was an enchanting experience.’
D Attenborough, Quest Under Capricorn, 1963; D Carment, ‘Borroloola: Some Aspects of Its Heritage’, Trust News vol 1, no 1, March 1984;
D Lockwood, Up the Track, 1964; J A Whitaker, Borroloola, 1985; K Willey, Ghosts of the Big Country, 1975.
DAVID CARMENT, Vol 1.
JOYNT, REGINALD DESMOND (1885–1946), Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary to the Aborigines,
was born in Melbourne on 21 May 1885. His father was Edward Kelly and his mother Alice Woolcott. He grew up
at The Avenue, Windsor, not far from the home of Hubert Warren. After attending school, he became a teacher
before entering the CMS training home in February 1906. Following almost two years’ training he was accepted by
the Victorian Church Missionary Association (later the CMS) for service at the proposed Roper River Mission.
Joynt was one of the three founding missionaries of the Roper River Mission which was started on
27 August 1908, the other two being the Reverend J F G Huthnance from Bendigo and Charles Sharp, a farmer
from Daylesford in Victoria. The founding party left Melbourne on 10 July 1908. On their way to Thursday Island,
they called at the Yarrabah Mission where the mission Aborigines, James Noble and his family, and Horace Reid,
agreed to accompany them to the Roper and help them in the new work. From Thursday Island, they sailed to the
chosen site on the Roper arriving there on 27 August 1908.
The new missionaries made considerable progress at the mission during the first two years. A garden was
cleared and planted and buildings were erected for the missionaries, a store and a school. Joynt was in charge of
the schoolwork for which the Bishop congratulated him on his first visit.
Joynt was the only missionary to remain at the mission in 1910. Huthnance and Sharp resigned during the
year, as did James Noble and Horace Reid. The acute staffing difficulties, however, were relieved with the
arrival of four new missionaries, Mr and Mrs O C Thomas, Miss C M Hill and Miss J Tinney on 16 May 1911.
The Reverend R and Mrs Birch arrived later in the year.
Joynt quietly carried on his work during the difficult times of 1912 and 1913, which resulted in the Reverend
and Mrs Birch and Mr and Mrs Thomas resigning. The work went ahead much better on the arrival of the