Amelia Kunoth

Kunoth was the granddaughter of Unchalka/Erruphana (also called King Charlie) who controlled the land around Alice Springs before the white man came and decided who could enter his country through Heavitree Gap.^[4] Dick Kimber records his name as Errumphana [Ampetyane].^[5]

There is a story, told by Arrernte descendants today, that Unchalka and other Aboriginal men were at Honeymoon Gap when the first white man came through the area. People say that he approached them in a spirit of friendship and offered them water and some also say that he showed them the way to the Atherreyrre, a waterhole which would be renamed the Alice Springs Waterhole, and was directly next to what would become the Alice Springs Telegraph Station). When Unchalka recounted this story to Kunoth she saw this as an example that colour should never cause barriers.^[5]

Despite this account there was no mention of this made by surveyor William Mills. Unchalka was also the principal informant on ceremonial matters to Francis James Gillen, a former Alice Springs Telegraph Station station master turned anthropologist.^[6]

Her father was butcher Edgar Pavey, one of the first European residents in Alice Springs, which was then known as Stuart, and a local Arrernte woman whose name is not recorded.^[6] There is no official record of her birth and, at her death, there were conflicting reports that put her age at 93 or more than 103.^[4]

It does not appear that Kunoth was raised by her father and, after her mother died when she was very young, she lived at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station and was "brought up" by the Bradshaw Family, the family of the station master Thomas Bradshaw. From a young age she then worked for them as a companion and nurse for their seven children;^[6] it is said that she was so loved that she was almost a part of the family.^[4] This period of her life in recorded in some detail in Alice on the Line, written by one of the children, Doris Blackwell, who remembers her as a significant figure in her early life. When the Bradshaw family left Alice Springs, in 1908, according to Blackwell:^[7]

Our pretty little half-caste nursegirl, Amelia, wept for days when she learnt that we were leaving. She begged and implored mother to take her too. Like all aborigines, she had come to love the children she cared for as though they were her own, I thought my heart would break. Mother was so disturbed by her grief that she talked it over with my father, but both agreed it would be foolish and no kindness to the girl to take her so far from her tribe, with little hope of getting back if she once grew homesick, as she inevitably would.

— Doris Blackwell, Alice on the Line (1918)

Kunoth recalled in her oral history that she never attended school and that, although, there was no formal school set up in Alice Springs at that time Atalanta Bradshaw, the wife of Thomas Bradshaw and Blackwells mother, did want her to attend classes with the children but she declined; preferring to do work around the home.^[8] Kunoth and Doris Blackwell would send letters to each other for much of their lives.^[8]

Despite this description as being part of the Bradshaw family, it is elsewhere recorded (by Gordon Briscoe) that she did not live with them but worked as a "day girl" and lived at a camp on the opposite side of the river. Briscoe describes that she would go to work each day, shower and dress in clean clothes as an unpaid domestic servant and then, at the setting of the sun, leave her clean clothes and return to her camp in rags.^[2]