Unearthing Love on the Central Australian Frontier

Linda Wells

doi:10.22452/sare.vol56no2.3

Abstract

This story centres around a tin shed known as the Bungalow that was built in Alice Springs in 1914 to house Topsy Smith, an Indigenous Arabana woman, and her seven children. Topsy’s husband, Welsh-born Bill Smith, had died at the mines. Topsy lived in the Bungalow for the next fifteen years, raising her own children as well as about forty other “half-caste” children, who had been taken from their families in the surrounding desert lands. I am the white Australian mother of a mixed-heritage Indigenous daughter and have lived for nearly three decades in Central Australia. My aim, through this piece, is to create a post-colonial, literary reimagining of the story of the Bungalow, using techniques of speculative biography, archival poetics, ekphrasis and auto-ethnography. Part of my doctoral research, this paper explores how I have used methodologies of practice-led research and creative non-fiction to reimagine Topsy Smith’s life and come to see her, not as a shadowy and little known figure of history but as a woman full of life and love. My supervisors encourage me to interrogate my motivation for this topic. I offer intellectual, political and personal explanations, but still they prod. I dig further to arrive at my own core provocation of love.

Highlights

This story centres around a tin shed known as the Bungalow that was built in Alice Springs in 1914 to house Topsy Smith, an Indigenous Arabana woman, and her seven children
History abounds with people whose contributions have gone largely unrecognized
How can we bring those quiet heroes to the foreground? How can we honour their memories and contributions and in doing so, create more complete understandings of our history? How do we move them from being shadowy outliers to people of our past, as fully fleshed as the ones with the biggest names and the most extensive archival records? A range of literary techniques of creative non-fiction hold the key

Summary

Introduction

This story centres around a tin shed known as the Bungalow that was built in Alice Springs in 1914 to house Topsy Smith, an Indigenous Arabana woman, and her seven children. Topsy Smith is a little-known hero of the Central Australian frontier. Topsy was an Arabana woman whose life partner was a white man.

Results

Conclusion