Longitude 131°
Australian Pioneers and Explorers
'They tell me of a city where the masses know not of God ...'
Jane Webb
1879 - 1933
The 'city' and 'masses' may as well have been foreign words to Jane Webb. This extract from a poem penned in her family Bible was one of her ways to 'scatter seeds of kindness' to those less fortunate.
Her own good fortune was to be on intimate terms with her God.
Jane married Ben Webb in 1908 before joining him on the rush to the Arltunga goldfields, in the hills northeast of Alice Springs. It was a distinctly different honeymoon.
From the railhead at Oodnadatta they travelled by dray over hundreds of rocky kilometres in a procession of hopeful prospectors on foot and on packhorse, some pushing all their worldly goods before them. They arrived at a rugged valley of unrelenting hard work for rare reward.
Jane made an immediate discovery - she was one of only two women in a community of five hundred men.
Ben swiftly ran up a stone hut for her, which soon became the local 'hospital'. Common fevers and even more common accidents among the miners would see them delivered to the soothing hands of the young Jane Webb.
The gold of Arltunga and the faith of the Webbs soon petered out. They packed up their dray once more and headed further east, leading a few sheep over the rough hills until they found grazing land. Ben dug a well and built Jane another hut of slab timber. They were 200 kilometres from the few tin houses that made up Alice Springs, and all there was to the east of them was Queensland.
One Gum Well, they named it, and settled down to raise sheep, cattle and a family.
For the next twenty years Jane didn't see another European woman. She had five children who grew up speaking the Aboriginal languages of the Harts Range far more fluently than their own. They learned riding, shearing and bushcraft from their father, and the Bible from their mother. They learned nothing of the outside world until one day a lean and dusty old man turned up on their doorstep.
H.W. Walpole was an educated man down on his luck. Jane saw an opportunity to turn both their fortunes around. If he would stay with them to teach the children, she would provide for him a home. 'Wally' dearly wanted a home.
For three years he stayed with the family, teaching them to read and write, riding a hundred kilometres each month to take delivery of the correspondence lessons, encouraging them to venture beyond the boundaries of their narrow world.
Materially, that world had become vast. Mount Riddock Station as it was now called, had grown to 15,000 square kilometres, running great herds of cattle, sheep, goats and horses. Eventually Jane was convinced. Ill health compelled her to travel to Adelaide. Doctors there found that a quarter of a century of hard life had taken its toll.
When she knew it was the end, she went out and found a shady tree, just like the Aborigines. Joy, her youngest daughter found her.
The hut that Ben built her had grown over the years. It is now listed by the National Trust. A home where simple seeds of kindness were scattered, and where a devoted woman raised a family who knew of God.
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