He was five years old when they took him. The story passed down among his people says that when the authorities came, the boy was hiding behind the skirts of Daisy Bates, the eccentric Englishwoman who kept a camp out on the Nullarbor. It did not save him. Archie Barton was carried off to a children's home in Port Augusta, severed from his Pitjantjatjara mother and the desert country of his birth, one more child swept up by the policies that would later be named the Stolen Generations. It would take him decades to find his way back. When he did, he came home not only to his people but to a fight - and he won it.
Barton was born in March 1936 at Barton Railway Siding, a lonely stop on the Trans-Australian Railway where the steel line runs dead straight across the saltbush. His mother was a Pitjantjatjara woman; his father, never known, is thought to have been a white railway worker. As a small boy he spent time at Ooldea, the Aboriginal mission near the Maralinga country, before the welfare authorities took him at age five and placed him in the Christian Brethren's Umeewarra Children's Home. The institution gave him an English education and took away nearly everything else - his family, his language, his place in a culture that measures belonging in country and kinship. He grew into a gifted Australian Rules footballer, but the wound of removal followed him into adulthood.
His early working life traced the hard edges of outback labour. Around twelve he became a station hand at Bon Bon, near Coober Pedy; later he worked as a railway fettler, then dug trenches for the gas company in Adelaide. By his thirties, alcohol had nearly killed him - a doctor gave him six months to live. He stopped drinking. He survived a year in a sanatorium with tuberculosis. By the mid-1970s he was in Port Augusta, working for an Aboriginal alcohol rehabilitation service, helping others climb out of the hole he had escaped. In 1981 he became community adviser to the Maralinga people, then living at Yalata. The boy who had been taken from this country was finding his way back into its leadership.
Between 1956 and 1963, Britain had detonated nuclear weapons at Maralinga, scattering plutonium across land that belonged to Barton's people. After land rights legislation passed in 1984, the senior men asked Barton to return as administrator of the new Maralinga Tjarutja council. He testified before the McClelland Royal Commission into the tests. In 1991 and 1992 he travelled to London with two elders and their lawyer to confront the British government. In a gesture no diplomat would have scripted, he handed the army minister, Viscount Cranborne, two bags of the red, plutonium-tainted sand. The point needed no translation: this is what you left on our country.
The campaign stretched across twenty years, and Barton was at its centre. In 1994 the Australian government admitted its complicity and paid $13.5 million into a trust for compensation and further cleanup. Compensation funds helped establish Oak Valley, the remote community where his people rebuilt life on returned country. In May 2004, fulfilling a pledge first made to Barton in 1991, Premier Mike Rann handed back title to roughly 21,000 square kilometres of land. Barton was named South Australian Aboriginal of the Year in 1988, made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1989, and given an honorary doctorate by the University of Adelaide in 1996. His record was not without shadow - late in life he was found to have misused community funds, dismissed amid an explanation of age and cultural obligation to relatives. But the larger arc of his life bent toward restoration. He died in Ceduna on 18 October 2008 and was buried at Oak Valley, in the country that had been taken from him as a boy and that he had helped take back.
Oak Valley, where Barton is buried, lies at roughly 29.40°S, 130.74°E, at the southern edge of the Great Victoria Desert in remote western South Australia, about 1,000 km northwest of Adelaide. This is some of the emptiest airspace in the country - no controlled fields nearby, sparse navigation aids, and vast unbroken desert below. The nearest sealed runways are at Ceduna (YCDU), several hundred kilometres south on the coast, and the restricted Woomera (YPWR) complex to the east. Daytime visibility is often exceptional, but heat haze and dust can reduce it in summer; clear, cool mornings give the best view of the red dune country and the salt lakes that stripe this landscape.