The northern territory police magazine $4 c tat

Revolution for the N. T. Mounties

By DOUGLAS LOCKWOOD

AT the small N.T. settlement of Daly River the other day I sat beside Senior Constable Gordon Stott as he switched on his radio transceiver and dictated a short message to headquarters in Darwin, about 15o miles away.

From the time he gave his call until he signed off not more than two minutes had elapsed.

Then he turned to me and said, " When I first joined the Force as a Mounted Constable it would have taken six weeks, sometimes longer, to get that message through ".

Gordon Stott is now approaching retiring age after 40 years in the N.T. Police Force. He is its oldest serving member. His father, Robert Stott, served it for 46 years before him.

Stott is a tall, heavy man, with a shock of grey hair and the quiet Manner typical of men who live in the bush.

He might now have been an Inspector except that to become one it would have been necessary to live in a comparatively big town like Darwin or Alice Springs.

" I preferred the outback to prornotiqn and I never persevered with exams. I'll probably stay in the bush until I retire ", he said.

The wireless set with which his Station — like all remote Police Posts — is now equipped has brought a revolution to his life. But it is only one of them.

When he joined in 1924 there was one car in Darwin and none elsewhere in the Northern Territory. The Police Force used buggies. In the outback they had only camels and horses.

Now there is a modern fleet of radio-equipped vehicles.

When Stott went to his first country station at Rankine River, on the Barkly Tableland, in 1925, he arrived on horseback. He left it in the_. same way three years later.

A packhorse mail arrived once every six weeks from Camooweal. A regular air service hadn't been thought of.

In the years that followed Gordon Stott rode thousands of miles on patrols through the never-never lands, perhaps in search of a native murderer, perhaps looking for a lost traveller, or perhaps simply collecting data for the latest census — at places like Timber Creek, Roper River, Borroloola, Newcastle Waters and others that are little more than a name to most Australians.

He rode for days — often for weeks — with native prisoners and witnesses, some of them chained, others not.

He had to swim rivers, cross deserts and scale mountains, many of them nameless. Prisoners had to be freed while they crossed the larger streams and he had nothing more than their word for it that they wouldn't escape.



One horse patrol from Newcastle Waters to Wave Hill went on for 30o miles. Another on camels covered 1,40o miles in three months through the inhospitable country north-west from Alice Springs.

In 1934 Stott became the first Policeman on the recently-opened Tennant Creek goldfield. His bed was a swag beneath a tent-fly.

The Police Station was a bough shed.

His kitchen was an open fire behind a windbreak of mulga bushes. There were no refrigerators in the riz degrees heat and no iced water. Ordinary bore water, in fact, cost 3f- for an 8-gallon tin.

On his long patrols Stott had to carry enough food for three months — six 5o lb. bags of flour, two 70 lb.

bags of sugar, zo lbs. of tea, and a few tins of fruit and meat.

" I liked camel patrols better than horses because I could live in comfort ", he recalled. " I could carry saucepans on a camel and make stews and puddings : that wasn't possible with horses ".

Luxury, indeed]

To-day, few travellers go far in the N.T. without a car-fridj. filled with iced beer and fresh food.

Stott's water generally came from muddy billabongs, often polluted by animals. " I used salts as a distilling agent ", he said. " Once I was forced to eat a dead emu I found ".

Remember, too, that in most of the country Stott patrolled there were no roads, and seldom even a bush pad.

His bushman's instinct told him which way to go, and how far. Or his aboriginal Trackers led the way.

The natives he encountered were often naked, sometimes half-clad, but generally wild and occasionally dangerous. There were times when he rode his camels to the limit of endurance to put as much distance as possible between him and what he describes as " the bad blacks ".

" I was often forced to secure prisoners so they wouldn't run away.

" With modern means of transport that is not allowed.

" But there was no option in the days when we were Mounties and were weeks getting back to civilization ".

An era will have passed when Gordon Stott retires. The camels and the horses have gone. So have the black people who threw spears to kill white people.