2011 - Theses - Flinders University

whose home this mission station has become. He’ll write about home to perhaps the one otherperson he thinks might understand, young Reg Williams, who knew the call of these people,and the grief of leaving.His letters written, Jim breaks bread alone at his table, dipping a piece in the thin gravybefore he takes and eats it. It is nearly finished.Alice Springs, September 2007I had just returned from a brief trip to the Flinders Ranges, to attend the funeral of GrannyGertie Johnson. Of course I would go, whatever the expense, and by train and hire carmanaged to arrive just as the service began in the brown mud brick church at Nepabunna. Ihad my five-year-old son Clancy with me, and we stood outside the church as many otherswere, hearing snatches of speeches from inside, but mostly paying our respects to the old ladyand her indomitable spirit. I had realised, driving the hire car at top speed up the Leigh Creekroad, that Clancy had not been in the country of his birth for more than two years. And so Ihad told him the story of his birth – an emergency RFDS trip to Adelaide, weeks of waitingin hospital there before we could bring him back to his home in the Flinders, where we buriedhis placenta in the yard at Druid Vale station, north of Hawker. ‘You belong toAdnyamathanha country,’ I said, and told him all the stories I could remember until wearrived at Nepabunna. Later, I heard him telling the kids at Iga Warta, ‘I’m fromAdnyamathanha country.’ They looked sceptical.As did my friend Tim, when I told him. ‘Nah. Is that right?’ Twenty years coming andgoing from Alice Springs, but born and raised on Anna Creek and Stuart Creek in SouthAustralia’s outback, and he still says ‘Oodnadatta, William Creek, Stuart Creek, that’s home-121