In my mind Barrow Creek will always be associated with murder.
The disused but preserved Overland Telegraph Station at Barrow Creek is pictured on the left. On the far right of the photo a portion of the the Barrow Creek Pub can be seen.
Barrow Creek lies on the North Stuart Highway. The Highway was named after the mid 19th Century Scots explorer John McDowell Stuart and runs, almost in a straight line, the one thousand miles it takes to get from Alice Springs to Darwin.
The Highway was sealed in the 1940s during WWII. The road was a conduit used to refurbish allied bases north of Darwin in the South West Pacific Area. General Douglas MacArthur was in overall command of all forces - including Australian forces - in the South West Pacific Area.
Central Mount Stuart - named after the same John McDowell Stuart - is reckoned by some to be the geographical centre of Australia. It was in the vicintiy of Central Mount Stuart that I undertook two stints as a District Medical Officer [DMO]. The first stint was in 1983 and the second began in 1998 and lasted 4 years. All up, I spent 5 years as The DMO for the North Road.
It was my job to attend to the medical needs of people who lived beside the North Stuart Highway or on Aboriginal Communities or Cattle Stations off to either side. My patch, the name give to an area covered by a DMO, extended north to Neutral Junction Station and the adjoining Aboriginal Community at Tara, approximately 300 kilometres north of Alice Springs. The patch also extended roughly 100 kilometres east, and 100 kilometres west of the highway.
It was during my second stint, in July 2001, that a mysterious murder occurred near Barrow Creek. For several months after the incident I took a rifle with me when I did Clinic runs to the north.
The story goes like this.
Two British backpackers driving a VW Kombi van were flagged down by a man driving a 4WD in the same direction. He pulled alongside and indicated that something was wrong at the rear of the Kombi. The tourists stopped and Peter Falconio got out and went to the rear of the vehicle. His partner Joanne Lees remained in the passenger seat where she heard what sounded like a pistol shot. Peter Falconio has never been found. The man who pulled alongside the Kombi bound Joanne with electrical ties, but she managed to escape and and was able to hide in the bush. The man searched for her but finally drove away.
It is not known what became of the body of Falconio. Some suspect that he may still be alive, although a man is now in jail, convicted on DNA evidence that a blood stain on his shirt was that of Falconio.
After the man drove away, Joanne was able to make her way to the Barrow Creek Pub, which was already famous in my mind as the scene of murder. I was closely associated with the events surrounding a shooting which occurred in 1983, during my first stint as a DMO.
I was also aware of the killing of two white men which had happened at the Barrow Creek Telegraph Station in 1874. Barrow Creek was a repeater station on the Overland Telegraph Line which had been built in the early 1870s to connect Australia to England by overland and undersea cable. Morse Code was the means of transmission of messages - and repeater stations with primitive but effective batteries were required along the line.
The local Aborigines at Barrow Creek belong to the Kaiditch Tribe. In 1874 the Kaiditch men became concerned about some frolicking between their women and the Telegraphers at the Barrow Creek Station. They made a plan and enacted it on 28 February. During the day a party of warriors infiltrated the Station and concealed themselves at its rear. Toward dusk another party of warriors mounted a feint attack from the front. The Telegraphers inside rushed to close the heavy front gates and barricade themselves in, little knowing that they had locked themselves in with their executioners.
As a consequence of the killing of the Telegraphers, a reprisal raid was made and 50 or 60 Aborigines were killed just north of Ti Tree. Ti Tree lies to the south of Barrow Creek and was the administrative capital of my patch. I have many fond memories of my time there. However, when I travelled north from Ti Tree I had to cross Skull Creek - so named because of the many skulls which were found there after the reprisal raid in the 1870s. An element of gloom always set in as I crossed Skull Creek.
Barrow Creek was also central to the last massacre of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory.
In the 1920s Mounted Constable William George Murray was in charge of the local Police Station and also the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the area. When an old dingo trapper, Fred Brooks, was killed by Aborigines on Coniston Station, Murray led a posse which killed an estimated 70 Aborigines in a series of bloody reprisals. This occurred in 1928. Coniston Station was part of my patch. It is amazing to think that 10 years after the end of The Great War in Europe, in which thousands of young Australians gave their lives, that massacres could still happen in their homeland.
The 1874 spearing of the Telegraphers at the Barrow Creek Telegraph Station never left the minds of the whitefellas who lived in the area. There weren't many of them. Memories of what had happend at the Telegraph Station in 1874 might account for the state of mind of the white man who shot and killed an Aborigine in 1983.
A bunch of young intoxicated Aboriginal men had been refused service at a Pub farther north and so they drove down to Barrow Creek. It was dark, and their first action on arriving at Barrow Creek was to cut the diesel generator which supplied electricity, and therefore lighting, to the Pub. They then began an attempt to enter the Pub.
Inside, the occupants were understandably very concerned, and one began blindly firing a .22 semi-automatic rifle through a southern window. He killed one man and left a .22 slug in the sacrum of another.
The man who was killed had a wife who was 7 months pregnant.
One of my duties as a DMO was to go to the 'sorry camp' on the west side of the highway, where the pregnant mother and her female relatives were located in the bush, to carry out an antenatal check on mother and the yet unborn fatherless baby. I then had to cross the highway to visit the Pub on the eastern side and hand out Valium to the still shaking whitefellas.
About a month after the shooting the man with the slug in his sacrum appeared at one of my Clinics. He had urinary incontinence as a result of the bullet interfering with the nerves which control the bladder. He accompanied me back to the Alice Springs Hospital in my Government supplied Toyota Landcruiser. We changed several bath towels which I had brought with me, and which were placed underneath him on his seat, during that journey.
To this day I always drop into the Barrow Creek Pub whenever I am passing by on a journey along the North Stuart Highway - for it and its surrounds are full of memories - and ghosts.
Gum trees are renowned for dropping large branches from a still healthy tree. The wise camper always checks - if he plans on making camp under a gum tree - whether there are any branches which may be ready to drop. Trees with such branches are commonly referred to a Widowmakers.
However, I can hear a Lawyer arguing that in this case it was the responsibility of the Hospital to make sure that the trees in its surrounds were not Widowmakers. After all everything done inside the Hospital is done in a manner to make things Lawyer proof. One would think that the same rules should apply outside and that the person responsible for the surrounds of the Hospital might have been able to see this one coming. 
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