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James Stapleton arrived at Barrow Creek early in 1874, while en route to Adelaide from the telegraph station at Katherine River. Finding the station master ill he took over from him and sent the ailing man on to Adelaide in his place. At this time the Aborigines were becoming quite friendly and some were employed as assistants to the linesmen in return for food rations.
On the evening of Sunday 22 February, while the five station hands and two were sitting on the verandah to get some relief from the hot summer night, the Kaiditj attacked unexpectedly. A hail of spears suddenly flew through the air from behind the group. The men rushed for the heavy, double back gates but found their way blocked by another hostile group. At the gateway Stapleton fell, with four spears through his body and his breast. They fled to another entrance, dragging Stapleton with them. The assistant station master was speared in the side, police trooper Samuel Gason was hit with clubs and John Franks, the linesman was killed when a spear pieced his breast. Once safely inside the men retaliated with a barrage of shots from pistols and rifles and the aborigines retreated.
The injured were treated as well as they could be in the lonely, ill-equipped outpost.
Five hundred miles to the north on the Newcastle Plain that night, Billy Abbott from Powell's Creek was out mending the Line. He has said that by his lonely camp-fire he longed for company, so he climbed a pole, clipped on the wires of his handset, and called "AG - Alice Springs". Somebody else was calling Alice, an insane stuttering in Morse, no hope to understand it ....Then came SOS repeated again and again, followed by the slowly tapped word "Blacks". Billy climbed down and looked fearfully around him, at the great silent plain peopled with shadows. He rigged his net, then caught his horse to ride a few miles off, just in case. The next morning he tried the line again and heard the brief and tragic report from Alice Springs running through to Postmaster Little in Darwin .....
An all night vigil was kept, but there were no more attacks. In a desperate attempt to save Stapleton's life, Dr Gosse was rushed to the Central Telegraph station in Adelaide to relay medical advice. It was to no avail. Stapleton was dying.In his last hours they carried him to the key. He asked for his wife.
On the morning of February 23, at the Central Office, Mrs Stapleton listened to death calling, one thousand lonely miles from Barrow Creek. She waited , wide eyed with grief, listening to the expressionless tapping of the Morse. It stopped. Todd gave her the written message "God bless you and the children". Stapleton died shortly after....
....A year later came a message, carefully worded;
"Blacks have been followed up very sharply and considerable amount of retaliation supposed to have taken place."
Franks and Stapleton were avenged. The innocent suffered for the guilty. A punitive expedition of police and bushmen, led by a trooper named Wormbrandt, rode three hundred miles, herding all blacks before them, from Ellery's Creek Gorge on Finke River to the Haartz mountains, a hundred miles east of Barrow Creek. Out there a range, for grim and sufficient reason is on the map for ever with the name of "Blackfellows' Bones"
James Stapleton was among the word's first telegraphists in Canada, in the United States and in Central America. He was one of Todd's most trusted and experienced men. When he was killed he was riding south to see his wife and four young children after four years at Katherine River.
In 1976 the Barrow Creek Station
was the only one of these stations still owned by the Post Office
.
