You may or may not have heard of the name Jimmy James, but I'm sure it'll ring a bell as you read on. In October 1966, an eight-year-old girl went missing near her family's dairy farm in the small quiet rural town of Mylor. Wendy Pfeiffer was abducted, brutally stabbed three times in the chest and left for dead. However, she survived in the thick scrub bush alone for three days and two nights, until eventually, found sitting under a tree by Pitjantjatjara tracker Jimmy James, and his relative Daniel Moodoo, despite the efforts of 150 police and volunteer searchers.
Jimmy James' actions were heroic. He had learned to recognise plants, track small game and predict seasons as a young man. He held all knowledge of the land in his mind, and knew when something was missing, added or out of place. In a career spanning 40 years, he helped solve murders and capture killers by seeing and identifying unseen tracks of people without being distracted by other footprints on the ground. In the search for Wendy, Jimmy James tracked her prints across 20 kilometres of bush in under two hours.
Jimmy James passed away in 1991, but a
memorial sculptured out of two large slabs of black granite lives on, in the Riverland township of Berri, to commemorate him and his heroic actions.
