Amelia Kunoth née Pavey ( 1880s – 1984) was an Aboriginal Australian woman who developed well-known cattle stations in Central Australia, including Utopia, Bond Springs, Hamilton Downs and Tempe Downs.
Early life
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.
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 waterhole at Alice Springs (directly next to what would become the Alice Springs Telegraph Station); however 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.
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.
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; it is said that she was so loved that she was almost a part of the family. 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:
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.
Working life, marriage and children
After the Bradshaws left, Kunoth stayed on at the telegraph station, now doing laundry for the telegraph operators and other single male staff at the station. Kunoth developed an ongoing relationship with Harry Kunoth, who was then working as a linesman (sometimes recorded as a blacksmith) and this relationship, which had resulted in two children by 1911 (one deceased), drew the attention of the newly arrived Robert Stott. Stott took over from John Dow as the senior police officer in Central Australia and, in this position, was the Sub-Protector of Aborigines. Stott, concerned about the mixed-race nature of the relationship, made the linesman promise that he would end the relationship but, after another child was born, it was clear this had not happened and John McKay, the then station master, decided that he would send Kunoth away to Hermannsburg, which was then operating as a Lutheran mission. In a seeming change of heart, and after Harry Kunoth appealed to him, Stott granted him a licence to employ her, causing tension between McKay, Stott and Harry Kunoth. Following this Harry Kunoth decided to leave the telegraph station and briefly worked as a mounted constable with the South Australian Police Force, with Stott.