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Bill Harney biography - Tuesday 9 December 2014

In Bill Harney's first year at Uluru in 1957, about sixty tourists visited the rock. Five years later, the number had swelled to four thousand. Many of them would share Bill's fire by night, and listen to his yarns—often hilarious, sometimes sad, always enthralling— telling of a life in the bush:

Tis dusk and the great dome of Uluru
Stands stark where the soft twilight glows,
And the badins around me are piping
Shrill notes where the spinifex grows,
And the kururu oak trees are sighing
Soft notes as the desert wind blows.

In 1904, aged nine, Bill Harney left his home in Charters Towers, in central Queensland, to be a billy-boy, stockman, drover, rabbit fencer and, during the Great War, a soldier. He returned home disillusioned and broke, and it was in this context that he 'crossed the line', and would live the rest of his life among Aboriginal people. They and many others called him simply Bilarni.

On my swag by a break-wind, I'm watching
Black tea-trees that wave as the seas,
And o'er a faint trail comes, piercing the wail
Of a dingo, that scents on the breeze
The smoke that drifts out from my camp-fire
To weave as a wraith through the trees.

In 1921, after Harney won six hundred and sixty pounds in the Melbourne Cup, he leased Seven Emus station in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and with the Garrwa people he turned it into a cattle station—of sorts. When he was caught with two thousand cattle stolen from Cresswell station, he spent six months in the Borroloola jail. This isolated outpost—amazingly—was stocked with a complete Edwardian library. During his time inside, on the library's offerings of Shakespeare and Plutarch, Harney says he taught himself to read.

After his stint in gaol, Harney became a trepanger—fishing for sea cucumber—working with Yanyuwa people who, for three hundred years, traded trepan with the Macassans. At the Groote Eylandt Mission, during the Great Depression, Bill Harney met and married Linda Beattie, a Warramungu inmate, and they had two children. Harney was ostracised by white society for 'marrying into the colour'. Later, when Linda developed tuberculosis and died, her family blamed Bill for her sickness, for 'taking her out of her country'. He coined a term for his own experience: 'the race trap'.

The loss of his wife was compounded for Harney when, within years of each other, his two children also died—daughter Linda to the same disease which took her mother, and small son Billy to a drowning.

In 1948 Harney retired to a beach shack across the harbour from Darwin, where he lived off the land and the sea, and wrote books. Not long after his first publications the name Bill Harney gained a reputation as 'the expert' on Aborigines, and was duly sought out by anthropologists for advice. The prominent anthropologist AP Elkin regarded Harney as his 'man on the ground' in the Northern Territory.

Then the ABC discovered Bill Harney and so too, ultimately, did the rest of Australia. By 1957, when he was invited to be 'Keeper of the Rock', Harney was the Territory's most famous citizen—perhaps, apart from the artist Albert Namatjira, who was a friend.

Soon Harney was the star attraction on a Trans Australian Airlines (TAA) whistle-stop tour of Australia promoting 'the rock', and the trickle of tourists to Central Australia turned to a river. During his five years at Uluru, he wrote the book To Ayers Rock and Beyond. People who visited the rock during Harney's tenure, between 1957 and 1962, never forgot the resident Ranger, sitting with him around his fire, as he spun yarns from his life.

Harney's time at Uluru was marked by a seven-year drought and so, worn out, he retired to his home state—Queensland.

On New Year's Eve, in 1962, Bill Harney died of a heart attack. His last page of writing sat in his typewriter, and concluded with 'I must have rest'.

Now dark stands the great dome above me,
And bright as a dewdrop of light
That evening star shines on the mountain
And beckons to me from its height;
Then it flickers and fades as around me
Come the strange eerie sounds of the night. (From 'Night Over Ayers Rock' by WE (Bill) Harney)

The enduring legend of yarn-spinner Bilarni.

On New Year's Eve in 1962, after more than a typical lifetime's tragedy and perseverance, Bill Harney died from a heart attack in Queensland.

In his typewriter sat a page of text ending with the words: "I must have rest."

It was the final known work by a prolific raconteur, known better as Bilarni to the many who heard his stories about life, culture and loss in the Northern Territory.

"At different times, he was regarded as Australia's greatest ever yarn-spinner," Dr Matthew Stephen, oral historian with the NT Archives, told 105.7 ABC Darwin.

It was quite a feat, particularly from such humble roots.

"For somebody who obviously had no formal education, he obviously enjoyed literature, reading and became a writer in his own right," Mr Stephen said.

"I don't know how someone who doesn't have a formal education gets in their mind that they want to be a writer.

"It's quite amazing how his career unfolded, beginning as a young boy in Queensland."

Born in 1895 to a poor family in central Queensland's Charters Towers, by the age of 12 Harney had already left home to work on cattle stations and boundary ride rabbit-proof fences.

In 1915, facing unemployment, he enlisted to fight in World War I.

He came back in 1919 from the Great War broke, shattered and disillusioned about all facets of the slaughter — to the extent that, for some time afterwards, he hid his veteran status.

"I'd never crack on that I'd been to the war. I was somehow or another ashamed of the war," he said in oral performances recorded many years later.

"I rode 800 miles to Borroloola on a horse to forget about it."

Legend forms in the Northern Territory
Once in the Northern Territory's Gulf of Carpentaria region, Bilarni made a meagre living on cattle stations and by mustering, until he was caught with 2,000 stolen cattle and sent to jail for six months.

"This had a silver lining," Mr Stephen said.

According to legend, Bilarni taught himself to read while locked up in the remote jail, which was somehow privy to an Edwardian library.

After prison, he went back to droving, fencing and sea cucumber fishing in the Gulf region, and in 1927 married and eventually had several children with an Aboriginal woman, Linda Beattie.

However, the next period was filled with trying times, including ostracisation by white society due to his inter-racial marriage, hardship during the Depression, and then finally the deaths of both his wife and daughter from tuberculosis.

He then joined the government's Native Affairs Branch as a patrol officer in the Gove region in 1940, and it is here that Mr Stephen noticed a difference in Bilarni's patrol reports compared to those of others.

"They were not only informative but entertaining in the sense that he was a very good writer," Mr Stephen said.

The experience also broadened Bilarni's understanding of remote life in the Territory and, after he retired to a beach shack in Darwin to contemplate, write books, and fish, he started to become sought out by anthropologists.

"He developed this reputation as quite the expert with Aboriginal people," Mr Stephen said.

"He had this great fascination and rapport with Aboriginal people that was quite important.

"He developed this love of poetry and I think there was a connection of the stories coming from Aboriginal people and his writing and love of poetry.

"It came quite easy to him. Collaborations [on books with anthropologists] might have made the writing easier."

By the mid-50s, Bilarni had transformed into the prolific storyteller that he probably had always been at heart, and was being aired to wide audiences by the ABC in Australia and broadcasters during his late life travels to Britain.

He was finally invited to be "Keeper of the Rock" at Uluru in 1957 for the ranger position that saw him, at the time, become one of the Territory's most famous living legends — rivalled only by his artist mate, Albert Namatjira.

But after extensive drought at Uluru, Bilarni retired to Queensland in 1962 with a typewriter and died less than a year later.

"It is sad in my mind that he was taken a little young before he could enjoy his second retirement," Mr Stephen said.

Hear extracts from Bill Harney's stories in this 105.7 ABC Darwin conversation with Dr Stephen and Rebecca McLaren.

Hindsight Presented by Lorena Allam ABC

The ending legend of yarn-spinner Bilarni by Emiulia Terzon ABC 19 January 2016 - SOURCE (ABC) (www.abc.net.au)