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her mission, partly because the Lutherans were already at Hermannsburg and the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association
supported an itinerant missionary, E E Kramer, in Alice Springs.
A drought had been devastating Central Australia since 1925 and racial tensions were high. On 8 August 1928
Fred Brooks, a 60 year old dingo scalper, was killed by Aborigines on Coniston Station near Harding Soak.
Constable Murray was sent to catch those responsible and arrested two men who were later found not guilty by
a Darwin court. His party also killed between 17 and 70 other Aborigines.
The drought also forced Lock to retreat to Harding Soak in September 1928. Reverend Athol McGregor of
the Methodist Inland Mission drove Lock north to Barrow Creek. Facing white hostility, she continued with
McGregor to his home in Katherine. Lock saw an opportunity to take two Aboriginal girls in her care to Darwin for
injections against yaws. At this time, the Northern Territory was divided for administrative purposes into Central
and North Australia. Lock unwittingly broke the law by taking the children across the border to Darwin. Constable
Murray was also in Darwin in early November for the trial of his suspects. When he tried to put the children on
the train back to Alice Springs without the missionary, Lock resisted, and headlines throughout Australia read
‘Grim Struggle for Abo. Girls—Sister v Police—“Take them from my arms”, she cries’. Although Lock won the
battle, both she and McGregor were later fined.
While in Katherine Lock spoke to J W Bleakley, investigating Aboriginal conditions in the Territory for the
federal government. As a result, Bleakley sent a coded telegram to the Minister for Home and Territories on
15 October 1928. He reported that Aborigines at Harding Soak had told Lock that Murray’s party had killed several
women and children. This was the first indication of the massacre.
Lock’s allegations, along with pressure from humanitarian groups, forced the federal government to establish
an official enquiry into the shootings in January 1929. Both McGregor and Lock gave evidence at Alice Springs.
The Board exonerated Murray and blamed the racial unrest partly upon a ‘woman Missionary living naked amongst
blacks thus lowering their respect for the whites.’
Lock’s fellow missionaries were among her severest critics. The evidence to the Board of Enquiry of
H A Heinrich, from Hermannsburg Mission, led to the sensationalist headline: ‘Mission Girl Who Would be Happy
To Marry a Black.’ The propriety of Lock and other women working alone with Aborigines was hotly debated,
although Lock later denied Heinrich’s charge in a letter: ‘What I said was that I do not know how any one could
marry a black. It is as much as I can stand to put up with the smell of them.’
A E Gerard, South Australian UAM President, publicly defended Lock. She had, he said, ‘spent 20 years of
her life helping our aborigines, and... has had a life full of chances to marry a black should she have desired to do
so.’ However, Lock was an embarrassment. Gerard suggested her name be removed from the list of missionaries
in October 1929, because she ‘would not allow the Council to direct her’. He said that her work was ‘excellent...
but from the Government standpoint her methods were unsatisfactory and brought discredit on the mission.’
The Council took no decisive action.
Central Australian settlers and officials believed that Lock attracted groups of ‘wild’ Aborigines, encouraged
the men not to work by providing food for nothing and taught them that they were equal to white men. However,
despite her provocative behaviour, Lock’s views about Aborigines differed only marginally from those of her
contemporaries. She refused food to men capable of working, preached a strong work ethic, and tried to keep
the peace between white and black. She accepted that white men’s interests were paramount as they were ‘trying
to get a living in the bush’, and blamed the government for neglecting the Aborigines, who were consequently
threatening whites: ‘If the Government rent the land, and it is stocked, and the stock eat of the native food...
the Government should make some provision for the natives, especially in drought time.’ She felt ‘very sorry for
these men of the bush’, by whom she meant the whites. Nevertheless, she did care for the people with whom she
worked, particularly the children. One Aboriginal woman remembers her as ‘a fat woman [with] masses of hair
which she pinned up; she achieved everything through kindness [and] often had two kids in her lap, one kid on
each leg.’
Lock remained in Central Australia for three years following the Enquiry. She camped at Ryan’s Well near
Harding Soak until March 1930. She then travelled north in a buggy accompanied by four children and an Aboriginal
couple, arriving at Bonney Well, south of Tennant Creek, on 27 March 1930. Her camp on Boxer Creek is known
locally as Annie Loch [sic] Waterhole. The UAM decided against establishing a permanent mission here and Lock
was not replaced when she left in late 1932. Lock worked at Ooldea in South Australia from 1933 until 1936.
She spent several months in Sydney writing her memoirs but these remained unpublished and have been lost.
On 15 September 1936, Lock astonished everyone by marrying. James Johansen, her new husband, was a
widower. A retired bank manager from the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, he was a self-appointed Brethren
missionary to white residents of the area. The couple lived in a converted Model T Ford and travelled from town
to town. Annie died from pneumonia on 10 February 1943 and is buried in Cleve Cemetery. She left everything to
her husband, who married twice more before his own death in 1970.
C E Bishop, ‘“a woman missionary living amongst naked blacks”’, MA Thesis, Australian National University, 1991 (contains full
bibliography).
C E BISHOP, Vol 2.LOCKWOOD, DOUGLAS WRIGHT (DOUG) (1918–1980), journalist, soldier and author, was born in
Natimuk, Victoria, on 9 July 1918, the son of Alfred Lockwood, newspaper proprietor, and his wife Ida Dorothea,
nee Klowss. After education at the Natimuk State School, he worked as a reporter on Victorian country newspapers