FULL CIRCLE
Decades after his life was saved by a chance encounter in the remote Western Australia desert, Helicopter Tjungurrayi meets the daughter of the man who flew him to safety
It’s 36 degrees when we arrive at the art centre, but nice and cool inside. It’s taken a long time to get here. Helicopter Tjungurrayi is sitting in a corner, waiting for a meeting that will transport him back 65 years, to the day his life changed forever. A living link to 60,000 years of history, Helicopter was about 10 in 1957, living a nomadic existence with his people, with no knowledge or need of the modern world, when a fluke encounter with a white man saved his life and transformed the lives of everyone he knew.
The renowned Indigenous artist is waiting at the Warlayirti Art Centre in Balgo, in the remote northeast of WA to meet the daughter of the Queensland helicopter pilot who rescued him when their lives, and worlds, intersected. Lisa is ushered in. The centre director explains to Helicopter that this is the daughter of the man who flew him as a very sick child to Balgo, all those years ago.
“Your daddy?” Helicopter asks. “My daddy,” Lisa says as the tears start to flow.
First came the noise across the still desert.
A disconcerting chop-chop-chop that came from everywhere at once and didn’t seem to be of this world. The small group searched the land all around them, until someone looked up into the sky.
There it was, but what was it? Olodoodi Tjungurrayi thought it was manurrkunurrku, a dragonfly. The sick young boy couldn’t think of a word for it. It was the strangest thing he’d ever seen.
Then it was gone, and the family group of about 30, living on their country at Natawalu as they had for more than 2000 generations, was left to wonder what it was.
Some had heard about the white man, and the place north of their country where many of their people had gone and not returned, but this was something else entirely.
Over the next few days, the dragonfly returned. And by watching its movements they could pinpoint where it was coming to rest at night. The bravest men decided they would investigate.
Jim Ferguson had seen a young Indigenous woman, alone, as he piloted the Bristol Sycamore over the Tanami Desert in 1957. But he had a job to do. The chopper, leased from Sir Reg Ansett, was conducting gravity surveys around Well 40 on the Canning Stock Route, a rarely used and rough track that connects the Kimberley to the centre of Western Australia.
The survey was looking for anomalies that might indicate the presence of mineral deposits in this corner of WA.
At the crew’s camp, two worlds collided. The men, led by a warrior who would later take on the name Brandy – his job in the white man’s world was to brand cattle – approached Ferguson and his team through the spinifex and the red dust. Ferguson knew something wasn’t right.
A tough man with a thirst for adventure, Ferguson had grown up on cattle stations around Cunnamulla in western Queensland, where his mother was a camp cook. Seeing dust kicking up behind the approaching men, Ferguson drew the revolver that he always wore on his hip when out in the bush.
As Brandy’s daughter Frances tells it, Brandy sprung his trap. He was dragging a spear behind him, clasped between his toes.
He flicked it up behind his back, grabbed it firmly and threw his spear.
But Brandy didn’t launch his spear at the white men. Frances says he hurled it at the helicopter. Ferguson fired a warning shot that reverberated across the desert.
Contact made but curiosity running wild, the group later approached the camp as the white men were cooking a meal. Brandy went forward and asked for a drink of water.
The white man went to his fire and prepared a billy. He brought it back and offered it to the group. What was this black, smelly, bitter water? Brandy took a sip and spat it out. It was his first drink of coffee.
The two worlds began to tolerate each other’s presence – strange food was offered but not eaten, and a few of the desert mob even got to play with the radio.
But the desert dwellers knew there was something they must ask these strange men who came from the sky.
The boy, who was about 10, had always been a sickly child, but now they were worried that he would die. He was painfully thin, his knees were grotesquely swollen and he was covered in sores.
They approached the helicopter with the boy and Kupunyina – his aunty. She had a spear wound in her leg that had become infected and also needed attention.
Before he died, Helicopter’s brother Charlie Wallabi explained what happened next. “My younger brother was so sick; he had sores everywhere and he was helpless, a little boy,” Wallabi said.
“I grabbed my little brother and showed them. So kartiya (white person) looked at his sores and said, ‘OK, we will take him’, because he is so sick.
“So I ask the kartiya, ‘Are you going to bring him back?’
“He was speaking his language and I was speaking my language. I kept on saying, ‘Are you going to bring him back?’”
Ferguson took a photo of the boy and his aunty, and the group of proud warriors in front of the Sycamore.
Ferguson landed the chopper at Billiluna Station, and then continued on to Balgo Hills Mission, 900km east of Broome, a stark collection of stone buildings, shacks and tents in the middle of nowhere.
Already, many families from six distinct tribal and language groups had made the mission – run by Catholic Pallottine nuns – their home, as cattle and camels degraded vital water holes and made nomadic life in the desert even more perilous. They had traded their freedom for food security and the chance to give their children a white man’s education.
Ferguson brought the chopper into land in a cloud of red dust. He explained the situation to the nuns who were happy to take the pair in.
And that, for Jim Ferguson, was how the
story ended – at least for 51 years.
At some point during that job in the Tanami, he’d acquired a wirkli, or “number seven” boomerang, because of its distinctive shape. He’d found it at an abandoned campsite, and left some rifle bullets behind in exchange.
It was an act that had been repeated thousands of times on the Australian frontier. In 1777, Captain James Cook had left a specially minted medal behind after he found some native artefacts at an abandoned campsite at Bruny Island off
the coast of Tasmania. In 2010 Ferguson donated the boomerang to the National Museum in Canberra.
Ferguson lived an adventurous life – he’d flown fighter planes off aircraft carriers in the Korean War, and later choppers in Vietnam.
He’d had other first contact experiences, and passed them on to his children – how he’d spotted the dust at the warriors’ feet, how they’d spat out the coffee …
Then one morning in 2008 Ferguson was reading The Weekend Australian at his home in Willaura in country Victoria, and almost spat out his own coffee.
A feature story on the Canning Stock Route touched on a Balgo artist called Helicopter Tjungurrayi – so named because in 1957 a man flew him to a mission and probably saved his life.
Ferguson was stunned.
“I assumed the boy had died,” he told the same paper a month later. “I’m absolutely thrilled that after all these years, he’s still alive and I played a small part in that.”
Ferguson placed a call to the Warlayirti Art Centre in Balgo – the town had moved up the escarpment from the old mission in 1965 when the water dried up, and through an interpreter managed to chat to Helicopter.
“Thank you very much for taking me to Balgo,” Helicopter said to Ferguson. “I’m happy now.”
Ferguson, then in failing health, declared: “It might be the last thing I do, but I’ve decided I’d like to meet him.”
After the chop-chop-chop of the Sycamore
slowly faded, the desert mob were faced with a dilemma. Would the kartiya bring the boy back to them?
Charlie Wallabi said: “I waited, waited, waited for long and I wondered, ‘They’re not bringing him back.’ Nothing. It was getting a bit longer, and I said to myself, I think I’ll go after him north. From there I kept walking right, long way, all the way to Balgo.”
All of the Natawalu group – bar one who was completing his initiation – headed on the 300km trek north, eventually finding the boy, now known as Helicopter, and Kupunyina at the mission.
But Helicopter was not out of the woods when Ferguson left him with the nuns.
He was taken almost 800km to Derby Hospital on the WA coast. No one really knows what he was suffering from in the desert. Ferguson thought it might be rickets. It certainly wasn’t malnutrition, as others in the group look as fit as Olympic middle-distance runners in the photos. Some of the symptoms appear similar to rickets, which can be caused by a lack of dietary vitamin D and certain genetic conditions.
Helicopter says he was often sick as a boy and suggests he had an operation on his leg in Derby, possibly to drain fluid.
What is not in doubt is that Helicopter got better. He didn’t like school and didn’t stay long. He never learned much English, although he can hold a polite conversation.
As a young man, Helicopter toiled in the quarry, cutting the flint-hard red desert stone into blocks to build the church and other buildings at the new town of Balgo. He raised a big family with beloved wife Lucy Yukenbarri, who died in 2004.
In 1987, the Warlayirti Art Centre opened in Balgo – an institution that would gradually take over from the church as the heart of the community.
Lucy was an early star, with her kintikinti technique of overlapped dots hugely influential among the art community. Helicopter would accompany her to the centre, to support her, tell stories, and watch her paint. Gradually he was drawn into her world.
“Balgo is known for art partnerships – men and women finishing each other’s paintings,” centre director Poppy Lever says. “Helicopter was happy to sit there and help Lucy with her works. But towards the late ’90s he started painting himself – and he flourished.”
He quickly became a sensation, with solo shows across Australia and a trip to Tokyo to paint BMW cars, of all things.
There was even an exhibition in London. Helicopter, who wears a long-sleeve shirt and a jacket in the heat of the desert, remembers the cold.
“I was going to meet the Queen,” he explains through George Lee Tjungurrayi, linguist, community leader and Helicopter’s grandson. “But she was hunting.”
The art of Helicopter, and Balgo, is unique.
Tribes that lived in the desert had no rock art tradition like in the Kimberley, but they expressed themselves through sand stories – literally telling stories by scrawling in the sand, as well as body art and decoration for ceremonial purposes.
Iconography from these art forms was adapted to painting.
But when it comes to inspiration for the paintings, there is a re-occurring theme. “I paint my country,” Helicopter says. Like a view from a helicopter, he paints the ridges of sand dunes, the water holes, the soaks of a land 300km south, a country he visited again in 2000 for the first time since 1957.
John Carty, head of humanities at the South Australian Museum, wrote the book on Balgo. He went there in 2002 to research his PHD on Aboriginal art, stayed for years and returns regularly.
“Balgo is the sort of place that gets under your skin pretty quickly,” he says.
Carty’s magnificent book Balgo: Creating Country, explains the link between country and art. “Country is not just landscape, it’s people, relations and all of your memories,” Carty says. “To paint your country is to bring it back.”
On that visit to country in 2000, Helicopter began following the landscape, pointing out the features, and where to find water and bush tucker. All the while he was singing to himself.
Jim Ferguson never got to meet the fine
man the sickly little boy he rescued became. There were plans for a reunion at a Melbourne exhibition, but Ferguson’s failing health put paid to that.
When he died in 2018 at the age of 89 there was talk of getting Helicopter to the Brisbane funeral, but nothing came of it.
For Perth teacher Lisa Ferguson-bissell, her father’s death awakened the desire to meet this man, to sit down with him and share his stories. Tough and adventurous like her dad, the 60-year-old felt like she had unfinished business.
“He used to tell us all these stories from meeting Aboriginal people in the desert but he never spoke about the boy he saved until it was in the paper in 2008,” she says.
For me, the chance to be part of this incredible meeting came about at a funeral, or more accurately, a wake. Engineers Gordon Anderson and my dad Jim Hilferty were partners in a helicopter company called Rotor-work, along with pilot Jim Ferguson.
Formed a few years after Ferguson’s encounter at Well 40, the three had all worked extensively doing mineral research in the desert, and loved to share firstcontact yarns during smoko at their hangar at Bankstown Airport in Sydney.
At Anderson’s wake on Sydney’s Northern Beaches early this year, Lisa and her daughter Amy invited me to come along to meet Helicopter.
After months of planning and a couple of days driving the 1200km from Darwin we met Lisa and Amy in Halls Creek, 260km north of Balgo. They had flown from Perth to Kununurra and picked up a hire car from there.
We were all excited when we met up in the beer garden, only to hear the Tanami Rd, the only way into Balgo, was closed after recent and unseasonal heavy rain.
The next morning, boosted by rumours the road might be open, we headed down the Great Northern Highway to the Tanami Rd turn-off, with every eye straining for the road conditions sign:
Tanami Road: open.
The Warlayirti Art Centre at Balgo welcomes travellers, but it’s not a tourist attraction. It exists to benefit the artists, provides materials and a welcoming space. It markets their works and splits the profits. But it has become so much more to a town that is very much out of sight, out of mind.
Successful artists help support extended families. About 350 people live in Balgo and most rely on Social Security payments. Prices at the community store are steep as everything has to be trucked in along a road that can close at any time.
Many locals supplement their diet by hunting kangaroos, goannas, feral cats (known ubiquitously as pussycat), foxes and rabbits. Bush tomatoes, onions and potatoes are highly valued.
Change may be coming to Balgo. There are plans to pave the 1000km Tanami Rd all the way from Halls Creek to Alice Springs. It will increase safety, job opportunities and reduce the price of goods at the community store.
My younger brother was so sick; he had sores everywhere and he was helpless, a little boy. So kartiya (white person) said, ‘OK, we will take him’
At their first meeting, after the tears have
subsided, Helicopter – now about 75 – starts telling his story to Lisa. He’s so expressive that even when you can’t understand what he’s saying, you think you can. “He bring me from Natawalu to here, Balgo, when I was a little boy,” Helicopter says.
Lisa tells him she had recently been on a European holiday and had seen one of his paintings in Paris. She asks if she can show the photos her father took back in 1957. Helicopter starts naming his relatives.
“This one, my brother, this one my brother-in-law.”
He explains what life was like before. Although he was often sick he remembers playing and learning to hunt kangaroo, goanna, rabbit, fox, pussycat.
They weren’t yet familiar with the kartiya, but they knew his feral animals.
Later, Lisa is still wiping away tears as she
reflects on the meeting. Helicopter also admitted he was fighting back tears.
“After all these years of thinking about it, it was very emotional,” she says. “I was so surprised he was so interested in me, and I felt like I knew him.
She’s proud that her dad took the time to get to know the people from the desert, and cared enough to fly Helicopter and Kupunyina to Balgo. “He could be such a gruff old thing, but on the other hand he could be a very kind person.”