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He and Steve Lewis were the first white men to travel around Lake Woods and he and Harry Bates blazed the
trail between Beetaloo Station and what is now called OT station. Over some years working there, he fathered a
number of children by a Jingili Aboriginal woman. He mourned the death of his half-caste son, William (George)
Miller, who fell from a horse at OT Downs in post-war years. A later child, born in 1905, was Alice Mary Miller,
‘Lulla’.
By about 1910, he was back droving for wages along the Murranji track between Newcastle Waters and Wave
Hill. He was a pioneer buffalo and crocodile shooter but his attempts at exporting hides met with little success.
He continued to drove over the next 20 years and helped more than one man in the pioneering months of a new
station. He also had a brief foray at pearling and then mining at Wandi.
Over the years, he built up a considerable knowledge of Aborigines and their customs and he was accepted as
a blood brother by several clans. The respect in which he was held by Aborigines, many of whose languages he
spoke, was recognised and he sometimes travelled as pilot and guide with exploring parties. He defended the rights
of the Aborigines fiercely and began to record what he saw. Around the campfire, he would read Shakespeare, Plato
and Karl Marx ‘and anything else he came across’, the weightier the better for it passed the time. In appropriate
circumstances, he read aloud and he recounts how while out at Bedford Downs the men never tired of hearing how
Horatius held the bridge. On night watch in a stock camp, particularly if Aborigines were expected to be troublesome,
he would walk up and down in front of the campfire ‘declaiming favourite passages’ of Shakespeare.
In 1933, he made a permanent camp at the Katherine but failing eyesight sent him to Sydney in 1938 after
54 years in the Territory. He spent the rest of his life in Sydney in a boarding house where he was known for his
‘fog-horn voice, fondness for a wide-brimmed, high-crowned Stetson hat and unrivalled capacity for blistering the
air with ripe Australian oaths’. He lived on an aged pension friends had obtained for him. He never married and
died in obscurity in 1958 and was buried in the Botany cemetery.
About 1941 he published under his own name The Magic Snake that dealt with Aboriginal legends. He became
a member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. In 1968, 100 years after he was born, with a Commonwealth
Literary Fund grant, Lynda Tapp published a number of his memoirs under the title Gather No Moss. People
interested in Aboriginal place names later recognised the value of his work and the trust placed in him by
Warumungu and Jingili people in particular. His daughter, Alice Miller, proudly held a copy of The Magic Snake
until her death in 1974. Before his death, Linklater had deposited his papers with the Mitchell Library. He kept
up a correspondence with such notable Territorians as Jeannie Gunn of We of the Never Never fame and he
was photographed in Adelaide in 1946 with T H Pearce (Mine Host) and Jack McLeod (‘The Quiet Stockman’).
In 1980, his nephew H T Linklater published Echoes of the Elsey Saga, which was based in part on material
supplied by Billy Miller.
H T Linklater, Echoes of the Elsey Saga, 1980; W Linklater, The Magic Snake, 1941, ‘The Ragged Thirteen’, 1941, ms, Mitchell Library,
Sydney; W Linklater & L Tapp, Gather No Moss, 1968; B Sharp, ‘Pioneer Adventurer’, Stockman’s Hall of Fame, June 1993.
V T O’BRIEN and HELEN J WILSON, Vol 3.
LITCHFIELD, (AUGUSTUS) BOYNE PHILLIPS (1912– ), general and bush worker, diesel engineer and
community worker, was born on 29 February 1912, at Clifton Hills, Victoria, where his mother was visiting family
for six weeks, the son of Valentine (Val) Litchfield and his wife Jessie, nee Phillips. His father worked for the
government diamond drills at West Arm and Anson Bay looking for coal and then moved to Union Reef and Pine
Creek. When Litchfield reached school age, he was sent to board at the Catholic school in Darwin until his father
gave mining away and moved to Darwin to work at the Vesteys meatworks at Bullocky Point. The family lived at
Parap behind the police station. Litchfield, aged 11, was awarded the Royal Humane Society Medal for jumping
down a nine-metre well to save his two-year-old brother from drowning in 1923.
Litchfield attended the Parap School and later the Darwin School, which was located near the present site of the
General Post Office. Some Melville Island Aborigines camped on Mindil Beach when Litchfield’s parents lived
at Myilly Point. One, Jumbo, who was about Litchfield’s age, began helping to look after the younger children.
He became a very important member of the family, remaining very close, especially to Litchfield’s mother until
her death in 1956. Litchfield remembered that two old Chinese men lived in a shack on the corner of Knuckey and
Cavenagh Streets. They had a buffalo and cart to deliver cordwood around Darwin. They kept several buffalo near
the One Mile Dam, and Litchfield with his brothers and sisters often played there and rode the buffalo full speed
into the water.
Litchfield’s first job was with the British Australia Telegraph Company with his brother Val and friend
Roy Edwards. Then he worked for Holt and McMillan, who had a butcher shop in Smith Street. One long weekend
Litchfield was accidentally locked in the freezer. In those days, there was only a lock on the outside of the door.
He kept himself alive by moving carcasses from one place to another. Another job was in Cowper’s Garage, which
had the contract to service aircraft as they came through Darwin.
In 1930, Litchfield joined Geoff Dangerfield on his lugger Enchantress. For three years they shot and skinned
crocodiles and buffalo, and gathered trochus shell, pearl shell, turtle shell and trepang. They also carted crocodile
and buffalo skins from the Adelaide River to Darwin for an old hunter. The writer Ernestine Hill accompanied
them on one of their hunting trips. She later described in an article ‘one of the most foolhardy things I have ever
seen’ when Litchfield, aged 19, dived into the Adelaide River to retrieve a crocodile he had just shot; he was so
confident he had killed it! At another time Litchfield and Dangerfield shot geese and kangaroos for the itinerant
camp near Gardens Hill. Many homeless men lived there during the depression years.