The scholars of Borroloola

1835 Andrew Carnegie (d. August 11, 1919), Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist, who gave away more than $US350 million to charities through the Carnegie Institution.

The scholars of Borroloola

A one-horse town and its 'Carnegie Library'

Near the Gulf of Carpentaria, on the north coast of Australia, 60 kilometres (35 miles) from the sea, there’s a place called Borroloola. It’s just a tiny place, like many small, remote settlements in this big continent, where most of us live in a few major cities of several millions – the most urbanised nation in the world, despite our reputation.

Borroloola lies about 700 km (434 miles) from Darwin– not that much in Australian distances – in the Northern Territory. Despite what Territorians might tell you, Darwin’s nowhere, so Borroloola’s about as remote as you can get on God’s earth, and a hundred years ago it was the back-blocks of the back-blocks – the other side of the Black Stump, as we say here.

This hot, tropical bush settlement, a hundred years ago, was as close to the Wild West as Australia ever had. Stock drovers – men on horseback who led cattle overland for thousands of kilometres, through jungle and near-desert plain – sometimes stopped over at Borroloola with their herds. No doubt the men were tough, and Saturday nights must have got pretty wild in this one-horse, one-pub outpost.

One thing though, that visitors to Borroloola found over the decades last century, was that the few people who lived there seemed darn well educated, for a mob of bushies.

Sometimes a man could be seen sitting under a tree by the crocodilian river, reading a copy of Virgil, or Plutarch, or Henry James. A visit to the aboriginal encampments of the region might reveal an illustrated leather-bound Shakespeare whose pictures would be appreciated, and a drovers’ camp might turn up a fine Bible, the pages of which made useful fire starters or toilet paper.

There was a bloke lived around there, name of Roger Jose. This old eccentric and his aboriginal wife lived outside the ‘town’, like Diogenes and his barrel, in an upturned water tank, sweltering in the nearly equatorial sun. When a rare visitor arrived, Roger would treat them to some of his favourite fare, which included a glass or two of metho (methylated spirits), a shot or two of sal vital, and a nip of strychnine as a bolting heart starter ...

Categories: australia, northern-territory, folklore, library, librarianship