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he formed the 1st Field Survey Company. Several of his colleagues received a commission and he was much
aggrieved not to have been among their number. He served in a number of places in Queensland and in late 1942
was transferred to the 3rd Field Survey Company. After pre-embarkation training, his company left for Papua New
Guinea on St Patrick’s Day 1943. He returned to Queensland in mid-1944 having suffered from scrub typhus ‘and
other minor ailments’.
In 1946 having completed an Engineering Instructor’s Course, he was posted to Anglesea Barracks, Hobart,
where he was foreman of works. By 1948, he was Education officer, Tasmania. Living conditions were difficult
so he jumped at the chance of a posting to Darwin. A condition was that adequate accommodation would be
available for his wife, Mary, and his children. Between September 1948 and August 1949, he served as Education
Officer with 7th Military District at Larrakeyah Barracks. He retired from the Army on 9 August 1949 with the
rank of Warrant Officer Class 1 and with medals for long service and good conduct. An Army colleague was later
to recall that he was ‘quite knowledgeable in Army type surveying; very adept at mathematics and was a clear
and purposeful lecturer’. One of his own complaints about Army service was that, having been unable to obtain a
commission, he was never comfortable lecturing to officers, especially in subjects like higher mathematics.
After he left the Army he and his family moved to a small holding at Berrimah opposite what is now Kormilda
College. The family lived there for 14 years. For the next two years, he worked as an accounts clerk and then
survey draughtsman with the Department of Works in Darwin. From August 1951 to August 1952, he grew beans
and other vegetables at Berrimah. He sold his beans in Adelaide having taken the trouble of finding a market and
arranging the freight before he even planted a seed. He was also one of the first milkmen in Darwin, delivering
milk produced by Rupert Kentish at his Berrimah dairy farm. It was a seven-day a week job.
In 1950, he formed the New Life Co-operative Society and was its managing director until it folded in 1961.
Its premises, of corrugated iron and arc mesh, were in Cavenagh Street on a concrete slab, which had supported
one of Chinatown’s businesses prior to the bombing of Darwin. Steele’s only concern was to try to provide
cheaper fruit and vegetables for the Darwin people, locally during the dry season and imported during the wet
season. The eventual failure of the enterprise after much hard work by him and his wife, Mary, was caused by a
combination of circumstances not the least of which was, as he himself acknowledged, his lack of experience of
legal niceties.
He and Mary were among the moving forces in the establishment of the Maranga and Rural Districts Progress
Association which on 1 September 1951 held the first agricultural show—called the Darwin Exhibition—to be
held in Darwin for nearly 50 years. It had over 80 members and as Steele was later to write ‘was exceptionally
active in pressing the government for the solution of a wide range of economic and civic problems’. Members were
unimpressed that neither the Administrator, F J S Wise, nor the Government Secretary, R S Leydin, could attend
the official opening, though their excuses sounded legitimate enough. The Committee had received little assistance
from the business community but the show was a resounding success, the ‘magnificent range of agricultural exhibits
surprised everyone’. The Association received the Dawn Victory statuette and each member of the committee
received a medallion for organising the best civic effort in the Northern Territory for events commemorating the
first 50 years of the Commonwealth of Australia. After two successful Exhibitions Progress Association members
formed the still vital North Australian Show Society and Steele was on the first committee. During the Progress
Association’s lifetime, he was its Honorary Secretary.
Between August 1961 and August 1974, his interest turned to surveying. He worked for Gutteridge, Haskins &
Davey in the contour survey of Casuarina and adjoining areas and the beef roads programme, principally with the
road from the jump-up east of Top Springs to the West Australian border via Victoria River Downs, Jasper Gorge
and the Baines River. For a time he worked with Miller & Sandover and was then employed for 12 months as
a surveyor with Broken Hill Proprietary when its manganese project at Groote Eylandt was being established.
He laid down the grids on all deposits, did extensive levelling and centre line roadwork and assisted in the coastal
survey and the boundaries of the Anglican Mission area. His assistant was Nanjiwarra. He also worked with
Thiess Brothers at Mt Isa, Queensland, with the Bureau of Mineral Resources in Darwin, with Western Nuclear
(Australia) in Arnhem Land, Cloncurry, Daly River, Tennant Creek and the Kimberleys. For six months in 1970,
he worked with Mid-East Minerals at Kalgoorlie and Busselton in Western Australia.
He returned to the Territory and between December 1972 and August 1974 investigated the possibility of
growing oil-seed crops in the area west of Tennant Creek where sunflowers will grow well. He had tried to obtain
land so that proper trials could be established but the bureaucracy of the day was convinced that only cattle could
be successful in the north and according to Steele they put every obstacle in the way of people trying to get
agricultural type activities established. As he put it ‘they raised the rental on that land from ten cents a square mile
to a cattleman, to one dollar an acre to me. They made it three thousand dollars a year rent, so that they’d put me
out of business for a start’. For a time he planted on land west of Tennant Creek owned by Con Perry, however
the accidental death of his daughter, Gay, in 1972 had destroyed his motivation. He left the Territory in 1974 ‘and
went home’ to Melbourne, the decision helped by his disillusionment with the Administration. He maintained his
interest in sunflowers and became an enthusiastic member of the Sunflower Association, and in March 1982 was
an Australian delegate at an international convention in Surfers Paradise.
Bob Steele was always his own man. He described himself as ‘a most respectable conservative’ in the pre-war
years but the discriminatory attitudes he encountered in the Army soured him somewhat. He became a member
of the Communist Party but tired of the doctrinaire attitude that would not accommodate another point of view.
He later became an Australian Labor Party (ALP) stalwart. At various times he was a member of the North
Australian Workers’ Union and in 1973 and 1974 was Secretary of the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union in Tennant