The Hard Light of Day: An Artist's Story of Friendships in Arrernte Country

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Author: Rod Moss

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THE

HARD LIGHT OF DAY

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ROD MOSS

THE

HARD LIGHT OF DAY A N A R T I S T ’ S S TO RY O F F R I E N D S H I P S I N A R R ER N T E C O U N T RY


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First published 2010 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia www.uqp.com.au © 2010 Rod Moss This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Cover and text design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko Typeset in 12/16 pt Adobe Garamond Pro Regular by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group Author photograph by Ronja Moss National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Moss, Rod, 1948– The hard light of day: an artist’s story of friendships in Arrernte country / Rod Moss. ISBN: 9780702237744 (pbk) ISBN: 9780702237966 (pdf ) Subjects: Moss, Rod, 1948–. Artists, Australian – Biography. Art – Australia. 759.994 Please be aware that this book contains the images and names of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may have passed away. The author has included the photographs with permission from the participants and/or their families. University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.


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F or the Fathers : Geoffrey M , w ho k new the equal force of action and passi vity; War wic k A, who un veil ed the vital ‘ presences’ of European art; P ierre E, who, in insisting on being ‘ j ust a man’ , chal l enged all tendencies to exaggerate; and Arranye J , whose humi l ity all ow ed his country to speak through him .


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A rt, all art, i s a h i ghly respectable m atter, b u t i t i s s u p er f i c ial a nd frivolous if it is compared w i t h t h e t er r i ble seriousness of life. O rtega Y Gasset


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contents

Prefaceâ•‡ xi N eigh boursâ•‡ 1 The S hedding O f Skin â•‡ 11 We l come To C ountryâ•‡ 41 Weaving A nd Writhing â•‡ 65 Rock s A nd Hard Pl acesâ•‡ 103 T he Boy C hi l d â•‡ 133 O f Snak es A nd MEn â•‡ 157 S afety N ets â•‡ 185 The Fall ing Dark â•‡ 221 Af t erwords â•‡ 243 Pa intings â•‡ 251 Re lat ed Readin gâ•‡ 295 A c k n o wledgments â•‡ 297


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L e f t to r i g h t Bac k ro w: Joseph Johnson junior, A m b ro s e N e i l , Eric Neil, Ja m e s y J o h n s o n , N o e lly J o h n s o n M i d d l e r o w: M i c h a e l S t e wa r t, Ba r t h o l o m e w J o h n s o n , Jude Johnson F ro n t ro w: C h r i s to p h e r N e i l , M i c h a e l D r ov e r , X av i e r N e i l , R i c k y Ry d e r , Dav i d J o h n s o n , Peter Yungi Johnson


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A football team photo, the men at Whitegate called it. Though no one looked like a footballer. Anyway, they lined up in three rows and I snapped them, with ten-year-old Ricky Ryder as mascot. You can see he’s got a swollen cheek. Had mumps at the time. Going along the back row that’s Joseph ‘Amulte’ Johnson. He died suddenly in 1998. Then Ambrose died in a fight at Mt Isa. Eric ‘Bulldozer’ Neil’s eye exploded after rolling into a fire. I was with him when he died a few months later. Jamesy Inkadampe Johnson was ‘sung’. Then there’s his older brother, Noelly. Until recently, still puttering – the only male survivor in that generation of the family. But sadly Noelly passed away as this book was about to go to press, from a range of diseases of neglect, untreated diabetes paramount among them. In the middle row there’s Michael Stewart, blinded four years after this photo by a kick in the temple with steel-capped boots. Bartholomew Johnson died of kidney failure. Gregory ‘Eyeglass’ Johnson,

I took this photo in 1 98 5 .

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who’s not in this photo, was the first to go from the team. Then there’s Jude Johnson. Pneumonia. Asthmatic, Christopher Neil is in the front row. Alcohol and Ventolinâ•¯–â•¯fatal mix. Michael Drover is well and happy. Lives mostly in his wife’s homelands near King’s Canyon, hundreds of kilometres southwest of town. Then there’s Xavier Neil. He’s about fifty now. I look at him and am amazed that of all these guys, he’s lasted. Living out in the open, the drinking and the rest. David Johnson battled throat cancer for several years, but is gone. Lastly, his brother, Peter, had alcoholic dementia, wandered off in the bush. Presumed dead in 1995. Ricky, in and out of jail, was stabbed to death, April 2006. Terrible family business. All these deaths of men in their prime. This photo has been reprinted dozens of times on requests from the men’s families. But there’s been a lot of funerals, and not just for the families of those in the photo. In my twenty-five years in Alice Springs I’ve been to over sixty funerals of my Aboriginal family. Only three or four were for people over fifty. Only a war zone or plague would offer comparable figures. To some degree I’ve come to accept the fact of these premature deaths as much as the landscape, along with the shared pain and despair. But each death is razor sharp and stirs indignities, injustices that continue to be unacceptable viewed against the total demographic. How does our community normalise these frequent deaths? By wilful unconsciousness? By denial, ignorance or psychic numbing? There isn’t a war. And attempted genocide has been unfashionable since our early nineteenth-century Â�Tasmanian experience. Have we sided not with survival, but with death?

Alice Springs, the only large town in the central deserts, located in the heart of Eastern Arrernte country. The lives of my Arrernte friends were crucial to my experience of this place. Edward

I chose to live in

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PREFACE

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Arranye Pengarte Johnson’s significance in my life was especially so and I sense him as the book’s presiding presence.* Arranye asked that everything he recorded on video or audiotapes remain accessible, and he was relentless in facilitating records. ‘Gotta keep it rollin’, Sonny Boy. Younger mob might be pick it up,’ he used to say. He did not want his name removed from use. Nor did he want his humble humpy dissembled after his death. Both actions contradict Â�Arrernte custom as I experienced it. This stands as my acknowledgment of the protocol in publications concerned with Indigenous peoples and their dead. Those immediately concerned with this book have been consulted and assented to Arranye’s wish. While a little of what Arranye and I taped has entered these pages, this is not his story, not an ‘as told to’ story. His material deserves another publication with assistance from someone fluent in Arrernte language and thinking. This story is mine. It isn’t derived from or motivated by historical archives. It is about personal experiences, travelling and enduring friendships. While there is some historical research, mostly presented as footnotes, I want to be clear that this is a memoir, not an official history. Nor is the perspective related from the Arrernte claiming to be more than from the families themselves. Arranye insisted his stories weren’t merely for his or my edification. Was it okay for him, this book, its reality and roll call of the dead? When I asked him this he stared back incredulously from his pillows. ‘What you think I been tell you all this story for?’ During his final months I read parts of the text to him for his pleasure and approval.

*â•…

Since the reader unfamiliar with Arrernte will encounter the name ‘Arranye’ frequently, I suggest that the sound ‘Ah-run-yah’ be adapted for the English tongue.

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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ ARRANYE

to Alice Springs after my Christmas vacation, I discovered I had new neighbours. Over the fence, in a shallow gully 100 metres away, this guy and his wife were living on the dirt in the open weather with just a blanket, billies, a dog and a transistor radio. They didn’t even have water. I could see him each morning trudging off to fill their billies somewhere out of view. After half an hour he would be back. I was coming back home from dropping a letter in the mailbox to my lady friend, Elaine, when he passed me with his wife and an older Aboriginal man. He asked for a light. I did not smoke, but delighted by his initiative, I asked him home where I had some matches. The couple, Xavier Neil and Petrina Johnson, followed me to my flat, while the more senior man, Kenny Rogers, kept walking the 3 kilometres into town. I recognised Kenny from an earlier meeting, a few months prior, when Elaine had been in Alice Springs. We’d seen him standing alone by the post office one night. We were the only people on the street and

I n e a r ly 1 9 8 6 , u p o n r e t u r n ing

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asked him if he wanted a lift somewhere. We drove a few kilometres east along Undoolya Road and dropped him just inside a white metal gate. His belongings were hanging in three plastic carry bags in a tree. His dog’s eyes pinked up briefly in the headlights. This was his home, he declared proudly, under his mother witchetty bush. He was in his fifties. Apart from taxis, he said, he had never been in a whitefella’s car. Xavier and Petrina were in their late twenties and both of the Eastern Arrernte language affiliated group. Robust, if gangly, Xavier was a fine-looking man, liquorice locks spiralling loosely to his shoulders. Petrina’s shiny, dark skin was spoiled by numerous scars on her faceâ•¯–â•¯not the kind of cuts that seemed deliberately struck upon her husband’s torso and arms. He quickly assessed the proximity of his camp to my flat and arranged to come in the morning for water. I went to bed excited, but thinking it improbable that he would come at six-thirty as stated. He came all right. Right on the dot, scraping a stick up and down the fence for attention. I pushed the hose under the fence for him to fill his billies. He told me he’d got the time from the local Aboriginal radio station, CAAMA. I first thought that he had watched the position of the sun. This routine continued in the mornings and evenings, and we’d drink tea, quizzing each other along the way. I wasn’t sure who owned the land Xavier and Petrina were camping on. He spoke of ‘his country’, pointing to the ground at his feet, or he’d sweep the dust in front of where he squatted to draw a map of it. Though I had a pretty full lecturing timetable during the day at college, my mind ticked over with the prospects of developing a friendship with Xavier. A week or so later, when just home from college, I heard a terrific argument ring out from the gully over the fence. It had to be Xavier and Petrina. I ran upstairs to look out the bedroom window. They were clouting each other on the head with rocks, both denouncing the other in Arrernte juiced with English expletives. I was shocked, fascinated and glad of the safety of my flimsy premises. Should I interfere in their domestics, I 3


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wondered, when they were in the middle of a flurry of blows. Or should I keep a cautious, respectful distance? The decision was taken from me by Xavier’s now familiar sound of a stick scraping along the fence. The two of them were there and Xavier wanted the hose to wash the ugly gash he’d inflicted in Petrina’s scalp. Given their violence only minutes before, his tenderness amazed me. He told of how a bikie had ridden into their camp and inexplicably shot their dog right before them. What most appalled me was the impotence of their rage as they turned it on one another. The next weekend I decided to photograph the rotting carcass and later made a painting. The dog had already deteriorated into a thin sack of skin, fur and bones. Ants and maggots had worked furiously. Next to the body was a thong that I included for scale and an indication of the human agency in its death. There was an elegant curve in its spine and tail and a massive hole torn through the chest. Something about its contradictory appearance in the silent dust attracted me.

L at e F e b r u a ry, o n e m o r nin g around 7 a.m. , a police wagon pulled

up, disrupting our morning chat. With me on the blind side of the fence, Xavier’s activity around my house had aroused the officers’ suspicion. ‘Are you Xavier Neil?’ Xavier looked nervously over his shoulder and gave a barely audible, glottal ‘yes’. ‘What are you up to?’ ‘Just having cuppa tea.’ I chose to reveal myself at this point. ‘That’s true, officer.’ They were confounded, shook their heads and muted their tone. ‘Well, we want him for stealing a car, running the lights and being 4



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under the influence, as well as failing to appear in court. Better come along with us, Xavier.’ They escorted him to the back of the paddy wagon and drove off, Xavier sipping from my pannikin as Petrina waved goodbye.

about Aboriginal culture since childhood. With access to acres of wild scrub and heavily treed range country in the eastern foothills of Melbourne, I spent countless hours with my buddies pretending to be bush natives, whooping in war paint and feathers. Stone axes, boomerangs and spears were lovingly improvised. Charles Chauvel’s movies fuelled our imaginations. As a nine-year-old, I took it upon myself to write a fictional piece about myself on holiday in the outback on a cattle ranch. The tension in the story was between pastoralists and Indigenous people on whose land the cattle grazed. My father rewarded my effort by having it typed up and submitted to the Sun News Pictorial. I was in my mid-thirties when I summoned the courage to leave the pleasant green suburbs and strike into a place and a culture I knew next to nothing about. In 1980 I visited an old school friend, Dave Morgan, who was working in an Aboriginal community called Strelley, situated in the Pilbara of Western Australia. He had been recruited to operate Strelley’s bi-lingual book production centre. Then in 1984, I stayed in Batchelor, 100 kilometres south of Darwin, with Dave who by now was working in the printery of the Aboriginal Teachers’ College. We collaborated with students to produce bi-lingual books and a newspaper. This voluntary arrangement lasted three months before I sought paid employment and responded to an advertised position at Centralian College, Alice Springs. As I winged in low over the MacDonnell Ranges for the interview Alice looked alluring from the air. I hadn’t anticipated that a desert zone might be a natural spectacle. When I originally left Melbourne, I fully

I h a d b e e n in t r ig u ed a n d myst ified

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believed I was gearing myself for work in a Top End community. Perhaps I would find myself on a lush, semi-tropical island such as Elcho or Millingimbi as an art adviser or school teacher. I never thought of living in the centre of the continent. I soon began work at Centralian College as an art lecturer. After spending the first six weeks in a motel, I was allocated a little, two-storey flat in a complex leased by the Northern Territory government for their teaching staff. The blocks abutted the eastern boundary of town.

T h e s a m e day X avie r wa s carted away,

Petrina moved back with her family at a camp called Irrkerlantye, known as Whitegate. She asked me to help her with her few things and I came after work with my car. As I unloaded Petrina’s stuff, her mother and two of her brothers introduced themselves with a gentle touching of the hands, not so much a handshake as a gliding on the surface of my palm. Then hands from other relatives were volunteered and names exchanged, too many too quickly to remember. I was delighted in the unexpected fuss made over me, though wary of where it might lead. There were about thirty people living there in crude shelters made of corrugated iron sheeting and star pickets among the odd car body. I couldn’t believe that slap next to this wealthy little town, the Aboriginal Hayes, Johnson and Neil families lived in such poverty.*

*â•… Their English surnames, taken from their earliest association with whitefellas, were commonly used, as were their Aboriginal names. Miners, missionaries and pastoralists were the outriders of settler culture, though the overland telegraph line workers, on the heels of the explorer Sturt, were the first non-Indigenous men in the Centre between 1870 and 1872. The cattle industry began at Deep Well with William and Mary Hayes. Hayes expanded his empire as other leaseholders failed. One of his sons, Ted senior, took up Undoolya Station, 10 kilometres east of the present township, in 1920. His descendants still live there.

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Xavier went to court and did his time in Big House, as the jail was commonly called, and was back in camp three weeks later. He was a regular inmate, both before our meeting and during the next five or so years, and the regime at Big House provided him with three meals each day and fresh linen and clothes. Most Arrernte men who speak to me of being on the ‘inside’ are quick to point out how much healthier and stronger they become while they are there. Quite often men with warrants would elude the police until the winter court sentences would give them refuge from the freezing nights.

quickly became a highlight in my life. His presence, though random, was frequent. He would come around for a chat or ask for a lift somewhere. When we glided around the few streets of town or rolled into one of the town camps, he would thump the side of the car or yell loudly to people with a self-satisfied grin. He had scored a whitefella friend. On one occasion he asked me to slow down by the Shell Todd petrol station to chat up this large Aboriginal woman. He coaxed her into the back of the car and made verbal advances from the front. ‘I’m a Jay Creek woman. Don’t you get cheeky for me, you black bastard, or I’ll give you this one.’ She thrust her fist between us. ‘Take me to taxi rank.’ He shut up, jamming his hands between his thighs. When we dropped her by the taxi rank, he shot me a wicked grin. He scoffed at elderly tourists gingerly wandering the footpath near Anzac Hill. They were seemingly jolted by the brilliant lightâ•¯–â•¯and the novelty and profusion of blackfellas. ‘Arrernte don’t be let old people walk round town that way. Might be get run over. Old people gotta be stay in camp. Look after him.’ My d e v e l o p in g f rie n ds h ip w ith Xav i er

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He would often drop by just to shove his carry bag in the fridge and ask me to look after it. Off he would go and return for the food five, six days hence. Sometimes he would be lying outside on the footpath by mid-Â� afternoon, sleeping off his drunkenness. Or he would come sloshed to the door and I would say to him, ‘No drunks in the house, Xavier.’ I drew the line here, not wanting to encourage such a state. Nor was I willing to tolerate it. What did my respectable neighbours think of my interaction with Aboriginal people? No one ever said a word. Not, at least, until the woman some doors down came and asked me if I would mind coming to her flat to help extricate my Aboriginal friend. ‘He’s taken off his shirt and I’m worried about his intentions,’ she said. I followed her back to her flat. I found Xavier sitting comfortably in a beanbag in front of the TV. ‘Xavier,’ I said, ‘Clare has to mark her students’ homework. She needs to do this alone. You’re humbugging her.’ Xavier pretended not to hear and feigned sleep. ‘Xavier, come on now. Come with me. I’ll take you home. Or you can come to my place for supper.’ I could hear the school teacher voice in me, the parent. Reluctantly he got up and followed me down the stairs. ‘Rod, you spoil my fun,’ he said, momentarily crestfallen. One morning he came upon me in front of the flat under the shade of the spearwood tree doing my tai chi. He stood and watched for a few minutes, then mirrored the routine of the complex gestures for twenty minutes. Over tea, he reckoned I might be Bruce Lee. ‘Or might be ninja, Rod. Might be do that dance for woman some time. You think it too much woman, like Elvis Presley.’ Xavier and I laughed as I struck up a crane’s pose and then broke into a parody of Elvis’s pelvic thrusts. Xavier’s own dreadlocks, he said, made him like the Rastafarian Bob Marley. 8



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One sunset Xavier and Petrina brought witchetty grubs, still wriggling, as a gift. I fried those I could find the next morning in an omelette. One had crawled down the bench and was pursuing a course to the back yard. Another was snuggled up among bananas in the fruit bowl. What delicious nuttiness. And so rich. I made a drawing of Xavier from a photo I had taken, which was a huge hit with him. I was fascinated by the scars on his arms and chest, shiny creases raised from his skin. He told me they were ‘sorry cuts’ made when his relatives had died. Three of his brothers and a sister had died. So had his mother and father. ‘But don’t cry for me,’ he insisted. ‘I’m too much crying already myself.’ He would bring relatives from Utopia and Harts Range to see the drawing when they were on town visits. Other people from town camps trooped along with him, expressing their excitement in Arrernte between themselvesâ•¯–â•¯and broken English to meâ•¯–â•¯and ran their fingers over the graphite. They took to wandering around in the kitchen, curiously handÂ� ling the gadgetry and appliances as if they had never seen them before. One man took me aside. Holding both my shoulders, he eyed me intensely and whispered close to my face. ‘I can see God in heaven any time. My time or yours.’ I didn’t really know what angle he was coming from. Nonetheless, I was disarmed by the power of his belief. When Xavier visited his father’s traditional country in Harts Range, or was not in his usual haunts, Petrina would come and sit near the drawing. Often she would draw pictures of her ‘country’ and affectionately talk of it, and of her sisters, brothers and mother. Once she came drunk and argumentative and hit the drawing. I jumped from my seat and led her to the kitchen, trying to assuage her with a cup of tea. Petrina and Xavier loved looking through my journals and coffee table books, delighting in the sight of earlier versions of me with family. I’d 9


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kept journals since I was sixteen, substantial quarto-sized books in which cards and photos were included alongside the written entries. One image of me dressed as a woman for a school play when I had long hair made both of them laugh until they fell over. It was a great favourite when they wanted to show other relatives the albums. Photos of dwellings that I had taken in Rajasthan in 1984 perplexed Xavier. He could not believe that people would live inside houses made of mud in case they were washed away in a slither of clay. One day Xavier came across my copy of Geoffrey Bardon’s book Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, which documents the emergence in the 1970s of the Papunya Tula Aboriginal painting movement. When he came across a particular reproduction of a sacred painting, he hurriedly closed the book and walked with it to my bedroom. He laid it on the floor and scrutinised it. He summoned me. ‘Do women sleep in here?’ Elaine was in Sydney for a year studying pre-school education. ‘No, Xavier.’ ‘This only for men’s eyes.’ Xavier also studied the collection of photographs by Frank Gillen and Baldwin Spencer from my 1912, red clothbound volume of Across Australia. It had been given to me, but I’d never spent much time reading it. Spencer’s racist paternalism was a deterrent and I found more appeal in recent scholarship and anecdotal writing. It was long out of print. Even an abridged, large-format version published in 1982, emphasising the photos, had been removed from local bookshops. This was due to concerns from conservative Aboriginal elders who, now conversant with the reproductive capacity of photography, considered its material too secret for general publication. On most occasions when he visited me during the following three months, Xavier brought other men from Whitegate to see the book.

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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ Fa m ilies on sand hill of H o m elands

Apa r t f ro m t h e pain t in g o f Xavier ,

the artworks I made in the eighteen months after arriving in Alice Springs were surrealist, symbolic images about the tensions I had felt in coming to terms with the land’s somnambulant boniness. The lavenders, oranges and pinks were foreign to my palette. I stuck mostly with pencil. The open expanses were overpowering. And yet the colour and structure of the landscape made me feel that I was floating in a digestive system, all coruscated liver and fat. The intimate scale of rock forms and their interlocking geometry gave me a sense that they were playthings for capricious, creative hands. The natural beauty was omnipresent. The valleys in the unsettled country near my flat looked more ordered, more garden-like in their selfpropagation, than the efforts of suburbanites. An astonishing number of buildings had been erected as the population doubled through the mid1980s. Buildings were not permitted to exceed two levels, and perhaps developers banked on the awesome beauty of the MacDonnell Ranges to 12



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distract the eye, as block after block succumbed to the most banal structures, resulting in an ugly confusion of colours and designs. This had its own surreal bent in an unintended way. But what kind of art might make a less offensive bridge? I was disrupted by the noise and the uncouth thrust of materials and men on the landscape. Making drawings from my flat of the nearby despoliation enabled me to express my uneasiness. The desert lifestyle was also unfamiliar to me. What constituted an ordinary day? What was a regular chain of events? What of the weight of the air, the pressure of great radiance on the eyes? There were seasonal guarantees: the yellow-topped flowers pursing through after winter rain; summer migrations of kites and bee-eaters; the mournful trill of the curlew mid-winter wending his way up the creek beds from south; and the irritation of a trillion tiny ants with the initial heat of spring. As repetition gradually became meaning, these were fixed in my calendar as certainly as the advent of tourists filling the town’s few corridors after Easter.

south of the Northern Territory– South Australian border was unmade and a formidable challenge. Abandoned auto-carcasses littered the road at 50-kilometre intervals. Coober Pedy, where garages profited on the fallout, was a halfway haven and a measure of one’s fortunes. Car stories were rife. All the teachers in the government flats had extraordinary tales. While these highlighted the difficulty of living such a distance from the nearest, sizeable population, they gave us a sense of camaraderie. My first trip to Melbourne was during the winter semester break in 1985. It was a chain of events, not the long distance drive I had anticipated. I made the trip with an English backpacker with the idea of sharing the driving and hefty petrol costs. I’d been up since well before dawn, stacking the car. Just before the South Australian border, I asked Sylvia

U n t il 1 9 8 8 , t h e S t u a r t Hi ghway

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to take a turn at the wheel. I slipped into slumber within minutes. We advanced only a few kilometres when she lost control on the corrugations. I awoke to the bouncing and jolting of the car as it rolled several times. Amazingly, a light aircraft witnessed the whole event from above and soon taxied up beside us. Somehow we escaped injury. Within minutes a lorry appeared with the road crew’s mechanic. They popped out the windscreen, refitted and inflated the tyres, and pushed out the roof. A busload of Japanese tourists stopped and got out briefly to photograph the event. In an hour we were away, minus the windscreen which marked ‘the site’. Just before departing Coober Pedy, pre-dawn the following day, I picked up two folded fifty-dollar bills scuttling in the breeze. The find helped buoy my spirits as we blasted south into the first rain on the plains in eighteen months. Then five hours south, at Hesso pumping station, we had two tyres repaired. The light alloy wheel rims had been mauled into octagons. The high-speed wind and rain caused cold sores to form on my lips and blood curdled in the corners of my eyes. We stumbled, almost eyelessly, into Melbourne. My closest friends, John Anderson and Graeme Drendel, would revel in my accounts of these experiences with fascinated horror. But my parents never understood why I would put myself through such ordeals. After that trip, I walked the nearby hills, reflecting on where I had come from, and the friendships I had sacrificed to be here. Each time I left Melbourne dramatised the warmth of my family and friends whose faces I saw less and less.

city were Aboriginal people so conspicuous. Nowhere else was the disparity in living styles so clear. While whitefellas busied themselves in a nine-to-five work regime, blackfellas seemed in perpetual party mode at the river, lolling around under the shade N ow he r e e l s e in an Au s tr al ian

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of the gums. During down time, whitefellas relaxed in the air-conditioned comfort of bars, cinemas and cafés whose dress codes prevented access to a large proportion of the blackfella population. Singlets and thongs were impermissible. Shoes were essential. Blackfellas occupied the parks, seeming to refuse participation in labour and production. And that was enough to provoke anger and racist comments among some job-holding, tax-paying whites. The tense racial situation was palpable. Property and theft crimes regularly took the front pages of the Territory tabloids, sending messages that its black community was out of control. You could feel the red alert in shopkeepers when Aborigines entered their shops. As many as two hundred teenagers meandered the streets at night, at loose ends, and, given the violence and drinking parties at home, they had little incentive to face their family campfires. School drew in some of the teenagers, but sizeable numbersâ•¯–â•¯disinclined to engage in the education systemâ•¯–â•¯also drifted the streets during the day. The deepening divide between blacks and whites was revealed by the petty crime and vandalism of so many disenfranchised black youths. I was surprised to learn from the town’s lone police forensic officer that most of the criminal violence in and around Alice Springs was inflicted by blackfellas against other blackfellas. The statistic at greatest variance from the national averages was homicide; rates here were between five and six times higher. Vandalism and petty theft by blackfellas of white property were mere nuisances in comparison. How much of the recklessness conformed to the brutal archetypal lessons of Altyerre/Dreamtime myths? These creation stories that accounted for the form of the country and shaped the mode of social conduct were as rife with rapes, dismembering and murders as the Greek myths. The many video shops in town were generously stocked with dramatised images of contemporary violence. But that was film and mostly American content. For Arrernte it was not some remote, historical event. Here, now, the 15



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escalating and largely grog-fuelled violence was the inevitable expression of a culture weak and lost. The growing numbers of people from differing Aboriginal groups drawn into town, which was built on land traditionally belonging to the Arrernte, had escalated these difficulties.

to Melbourne then Sydney with a handful of my students to the Turner and Monet blockbuster exhibitions. Both nineteenth-century artists had altered the way European people looked at land. We found that both men eschewed topographical detail, enlarged the colour palette traditionally associated with landscape and emphasised clearly visible brushing, which enlivened and agitated the images. While in Sydney I arranged for us to visit Lloyd Rees in Lane Cove. He was generally regarded as the grand old man of Australian landscape painting, a living national treasure. It was a coup to meet a painter whose late career work shared some of the spectral manner of the great Turner and Monet paintings. ‘Have you got a question to ask me?’ he said when I rang. ‘I will by the time we meet,’ I demurred. The students and I spent a long afternoon with Rees whose speedy mind and tongue belied his arthritic jauntiness. During our conversation I asked him how it might be possible to produce metaphysical art in Australia. ‘We do not really accept this land,’ he said. ‘Nor do we have sufficient density of population. Not until one or both of these conditions is satisfied will we get metaphysical landscapes.’ But the finest Aboriginal paintings are touted, among other things, for their metaphysical language, and Rees acknowledged that. ‘How can you walk barefoot in this prickly country?’ I asked Â�Xavier’s youngest brother, Christopher, a few weeks later. L at e in 1 9 8 5 I t r av e l l e d

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We were standing in the scree near a water-holding crease in a granite boulder, at the base of a low hill. Xavier said it was his ‘one-eyed Dreaming’, drawing attention to the squint in his left eye. Both men seemed untroubled without shoes. In fact Christopher had removed his thongs at the car so that thorns wouldn’t wreck them. There was no way I could make my bare feet accomplices to this foraging among the bullhorn jacks and the bogan flea burr. I had just slashed my jeans on a splayed branch of dried witchetty bush. ‘I’m not frighten of country, Rod. I love my country.’ Rees’s equation came to mind. I doubted I’d ever get to Christopher’s acceptance of the earth. I saw how the Arrernte kids played forever in the dirt while non-Indigenous kids moved over it, about it. A significant amount of tourist trade in town was based on Aboriginal culture and its artefacts. The shopping mall on the main street was choked with so-called galleries filled with acrylic dot paintings. These coded patterns, depicting stories or parts of stories, explained the artists’ relationships to their country. Their products ranged from up-market, large canvases to the shameless, expediently prepared canvas boards that they made, hoping for a quick sale to procure a flagon of wine. Many Indigenous desert painters had rocketed to international stardomâ•¯–â•¯their paintings, that is. A day after stepping off a flight that gave him introduction to the Queen, I saw Clifford Possum in one of the storm drains by the railway, dotting a boomerang. When I asked Xavier whether he did any painting, he answered disdainfully that he would never sell his Dreaming. His father had never taught him painting. ‘Only been teach me country.’ Not much art activity extended to Whitegate. However, Xavier and the others could interpret the dotting tradition, derived from ceremonial sand paintings. No one had paid employment and the only money came from social security cheques each fortnight. 17



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A few Eastern Arrernte relatives still living at Santa Teresa community painted watercolour landscapes. In 1952, a Catholic mission had established Santa Teresa, 80 kilometres south-east of Alice, where Xavier’s generation of Whitegate families grew up. Their style is reminiscent of the conservative artist Rex Batterbee and his Western Arrernte student, Albert Namatjira.*

Ea r ly in Ma r ch 1 9 8 6 ,

an American poet and critic, Peter Schjeldahl, through mutual friends, had arranged to stay with me for a few days. My friends said he was a prominent name in the United States, but I had never heard of him. The apogee of his tour was to be the keynote speaker at the Adelaide Arts Festival. Part of his agreement to tour the art centres of the eastern capitals was to include some experience of Central Australia. I picked him up amid a gaggle of American travellers at the airport. He was lean, edgy and way out of his New York martini and art milieu. He wanted the Rock, and he wanted it direct. I suspect he felt it lay around one of the few corners in the initial thirty kilometres. With the long weekend in view, I obliged, and with only the clothes on my back we headed directly to Uluru/Ayers Rock. He even wanted to drive, to feel the vast and fast-moving bitumen kilometres under his hands. We talked relentlessly on art, baseball, football (his code and mine), and a great deal on film.

*â•… The emergence of Santa Teresa’s art was encouraged and informed by the fame and economic success of Namatjira and his sons. At this time official politics were changing to the social experiment called assimilation. Not that Namatjira assimilated into white society or became Europeanised. But his landscapes came a long way towards European pictorial convention, and his art made serious money and was regarded in the market place as art rather than artefact. Ironically, the money it generated was a problem for government bodies and the mission on whom the Arrernte were still dependent.

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He appreciated the cinematic dimension of the country immediately. But he refused my invitation to sleep outdoors, having made enough concessions to space in the previous five hours’ drive. While we circumnavigated the Rock he scribbled notes, small epiphanies of praise and surprise. We walked the Valley of the Winds at Kata Tjuta/the Olgas, a potent setting for filmic revelations. A couple of days hence we lobbed up at my flat. I couldn’t believe how well we got on. We shared a few tastes in painting, and most particularly we enthused about the great Frenchman Manet. We were midconversation when a torrent of stones hit my neighbour’s roof. Going to the upstairs bedroom, we caught a glimpse of some Aboriginal kids from the nearby Ilpeye Ilpeye camp darting around the corner of the fence. Peter’s equanimity had been troubled since he had got off the plane on the Alice Springs tarmac. And he reflected on this in a letter two months later, reporting that he had already told me that he found shaking hands with an Aborigine at Uluru to be a ‘slighting’ experience in spite of the man’s gentleness. Hand shaking had been rendered inconsequential. And there had been a small, dusty bloke of Aboriginal descent with an unfocused gaze and rangy posture standing in a store. Peter had felt the temporality of the building as a sense of the bush’s eternity pervaded through the bushman’s being. Now he saw kids provoking my neighbour, a security guard at the Pine Gap Surveillance Station. What if he came out shooting? Right then, in my flat, he questioned why I didn’t paint what I was encountering. He challenged me, saying that the country lacked a visual history of such stories and suggested I paint those stone slingers. ‘Put up or shut up. There is nothing like it in Australia,’ he said bluntly. While there was little realist, figurative social commentary in Australian art, he indicated that the situation was otherwise overseas. I’d dined out on descriptions of my encounters. How would I meet the challenge in constructing paintings of equivalent impact?

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to consume and confound me. I am a fourth generation Australian, astray in my own country. There were many sources for my reverenceâ•¯–â•¯the sound of the Arrernte language, the barrage of requests made of me, and the amount of touching and embracing that occurred in casual encounters. Even things familiar to meâ•¯–â•¯like the few transistors and carsâ•¯–â•¯were adapted and placed according to community needs that I had little sense of. If I purchased a radio my controlling rights would be insisted upon. However, I was amazed that Xavier spent his entire pension cheque on a formidable cassette radio and, though he called it his, he offered no resistance to any of his brothers borrowing it for as long as they liked. Whitegate is one of many fringe camps set in the margins of ‘Crown land’ around Alice Springs. These evolved in the early 1970s under the umbrella of the Aboriginal organisation Tangentyere, which had negotiated special purpose leases on the camps around the town. Despite their appearance of being Aboriginal through a generation of occupation, they are not actually owned by the occupants. The camps are decrepit and run down. They comprise mostly discrete language groups. The Warlpiri Â�people, consistent with the direction of their remote homelands, camp on the north side. The Pitjantjatjara mostly camp south of Heavitree Gap. The Western Arrernte live along Larapinta Drive and Lovegrove Drive to the west. And the Eastern Arrernte camp along the east side. Few whiteÂ� fellas, other than those employed to service them, ever visit. They are no-go places. And what business would you have there anyway? Some of the camps had been more or less continually used before the 1880s when the idea of a town for whitefella settlement was gazetted. Older members of the Hayes family later showed me creek beds and gullies that their grandparents had camped in, when only improvised stick wurlies provided temporary shelter from the harsh weather. The estate that the town occupies is traditional Hayes’ country. The Johnsons’ and Neils’ traditional country abuts the Hayes’ country. Some members of these Exp e rie n c e s s t e m m in g f rom W h itegate continued

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families have intermarried and consequently jointly inhabit Whitegate. In these conjugal arrangements, it is not usual for the wife to take on her husband’s surname, unless she chooses. Whitegate looked like a site of ruin, with random scraps of iron and tin and old mattress frames flung together for shelter. The other town camps at least had modest government brick housing and were connected to town power, water and sewerage, and had garbage collection. Although a member of Tangentyere, Whitegate was not party to the lease arrangements and enjoyed few of its resources. Garbage was only occasionally collected by Tangentyere’s workers. Wood supplies to the elderly during winter were few and far between. The only water was stored in 44-gallon drums, replenished by the Tangentyere. It was used for drinking and cooking. Two kilometres south of camp, along a rugged dirt track, was a dam fed by sporadic run-off. Most people carried their washing to it on weekends. How clothes were cleaned in such brown water, I could not guess. When the dam dried, the clothes were stewed in old flour drums in camp and hung to dry over sheets of corrugated iron. Tangentyere works to bridge what often seems an implacable chasm between modern economy and the values held by Arrernte culture. Prioritising kinship above public obligation continues. So too the value of placing gift sharing and conviviality above personal saving; so too the hesitancy to self-promote, or leave family and country ties and submit to regimented suburban life. Visits to Whitegate left me with a sense of blighted hope, of a twilight zone. The feeling was very different from my only other experiences of Indigenous culture, such as that of Batchelor and my visit to the Strelley Community. The families at Strelley lived in similar housing to that at Whitegate, although there was a substantial building for the literature centre and administration office and proper houses for the whitefellas they employedâ•¯–â•¯a cattle manager, school staff and the literature production staff. Several hundred people lived there and they knew that housing 21



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acceptable to whitefellas had to be provided to attract them to live and work there. First appearances of Strelley had concealed from me how intact the community there was and how it continued to thrive, and caused me to pause before judging blackfellas with poor whitefella equivalents.* The families at Whitegate seemed to be without the confident leadership and direction shown by the senior men at Strelley who had deliberately chosen the settlement an hour’s drive from Port Hedland and banned alcohol consumption. I heard from Dave how younger men might occasionally drift into town and go on drinking binges. The blackfellas referred to these blokes as ‘livin’ on green bag’; at the town rubbish dump they retrieved food scraps from garbage bags. But the attractions and perils of Port Hedland were nowhere near what they were at Whitegate. Whitegate had its regular campers as well as many visitors. Relatives came and went. I found it difficult to sort out let alone understand the numerous and complicated connections, though certain family resemblances helped me place some people. I arrived on foot sometimes, but most often by car. At night, camp life was close-up and emphatic. Faces were exaggerated by the meagre light of the fires. The stars above and the campfires below were Whitegate’s only illumination. Those who didn’t interact with me during the day would be all over me around the night fire, tongues and

*â•… Strelley Community had a history of united action for rights and justice against pastoralists, miners and governments. In 1946 a prospector, Don McLeod, had helped the senior men at Strelley resist the exploitation by the station owners who had employed them. The story of this is recounted in his book How the West Was Lost. Paul Roberts, who was the principal of the school at the time of my visit, also made an excellent documentary film with the same title. Though people still crawled out of old car bodies to greet their breakfast fires, there was unmistakable enthusiasm for the school they had created for themselves, and for the literature centre that produced books and a weekly newsletter. The determination and pride of the young cowboys who undertook the work on their cattle station was very evident.

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self-consciousness loosened by grog. The English spoken in camp conformed to Arrernte rhythms and phrasing, but even sober speakers could present me with a challenge. Sometimes without me knowing, a drunk would swing into the back seat of my car and pass out. Before I could drive off, I would have to drag them out. Whenever I’d pull up to let Xavier or his brother Christopher out of the car, several people would lurch out of the darkness, pulling my hand through the window to shake and ask for a lift somewhere across town. There was no way I was letting drunks into the car. I couldn’t tolerate the fuzzy or unreasonable requests. Not everyone was drunk. But many were. A day’s drinking could do a lot to exacerbate feelings. This could be humorous, of course, as with drinkers anywhere. And it could be pathetic and dangerous. I remember Jamesy Johnson flaring up with a star picket at his wife, Big Christine. She retaliated by removing her clothes and challenging him to hit her, naked and without a weapon, in front of his family. I winced at the passion in the couple’s glares and snarling. ‘She been got no shame,’ mocked the Johnson women. No one stood to intervene. Perhaps they understood the Â�theatricalityâ•¯–â•¯or protocolâ•¯–â•¯of this risky and violent behaviour. In an argument with her husband, Rosita Ryder broke away from his arms and jumped into my car as I was dropping off Xavier. Noelly Johnson slowed my car as he danced and wielded an axe in front of the headlights. His eyes glinted like the steel. He cursed his wife through the zipped window and thumped his fist against it. No use arguing with drunks. We drove to the refuge of her sister’s home in the suburbs, leaving him warbling in the dust. When I caught up with him the next day and confronted him about his rage, he was meek and contrite. Even so, at Whitegate, I encountered the most amazing family communal warmth I’d ever experienced. Whenever I had not seen someone for a while, or indeed if I had been out of town for a few weeks, 23



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I would be embraced with astonishing generosity. It’s hard to describe this viscerality. I was taken in to bodies, passed aroundâ•¯–â•¯in a word, accommodated. It was like, I conjectured, in the absence of substantial housing over the millennia, people operated with the same warmth we expect of shelter. I had never encountered this kind of physical affection as a natural, unaffected transaction. The cohesive energy in the camp was a given, greater than the stresses it endured. And it exercised a peculiar, addictive power over me.

meat under the fence for me to cook. I took it back to her and Xavier, interrupting yet another brawl under the oaks. Xavier and Petrina would alternate between Whitegate and their camp near my flat, most probably to defuse family tensions. ‘I’m not cooking this. You think I’m running a restaurant?’ I said, determinedly asserting my boundaries. They didn’t contest the matter or seem put out. Petrina followed me back for water and told me that she was soon going to Adelaide hospital to get her finger fixed. From her appearance it seemed to me that there might have been other things that needed mending. There were strange, tumour-looking swellings on her neck and back. Xavier was too frightened to accompany her south, but he said he would sing her home. He told me he could communicate with her by crackling paper. Often over the next fortnight I saw Xavier sitting listlessly alone on the ridge above their camp. He was missing her. He subsequently told me that he had cut off her finger while she slept because she had refused to give him some grog dollars that he’d felt entitled to. But he was emphatic that she would get compensation for her mutilated digit. I found it difficult to reconcile the way he’d rationalised his violence as being of pecuniary advantage to them both. When I saw them strolling together in a carefree

On e a f t e r n o o n Pe t rin a l ef t some

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fashion into town the next week, I didn’t dwell on the implications of his violence. At dawn and sunset each day, I caught sight of a couple as they dawdled in and out of town. They were fringe dwellers from Ilpeye Ilpeye camp and would walk along the track running parallel to the drain near my flat. First I’d hear the husband, Robert Ryder, yelling at his wife who invariably walked fifty metres behind him. He called her kwementyaye, the name given to all whoâ•¯–â•¯in keeping with Arrernte customâ•¯–â•¯shared their first name with a relative who had died. Xavier had mentioned me to him and he came to the fence one evening near dusk. He asked if he could have a cup of tea. He spoke about his family. His sister, Rosita Ryder, was living at Whitegate with her husband, Noelly Johnson. His young son, Ricky Ryder, was also living at Whitegate under the care of his ex-wife, Jennifer Johnson. He raved about Xavier and Petrina being legendary fighters and how he’d hit her in the belly when she was pregnant, causing her to lose the baby. This day, I asked him if I could accompany him home. As we walked along the dirt track to his camp, he talked about his cattle work and his injured spine from a horse fall. Not a single word passed his wife’s lips, nor was there any eye contact. When we got to his shed, he unlocked it and told her to go inside. I scaled the steps to my bedroom window one late morning, having heard a woman yell from a gully nearby. It wasn’t the same shrill edge of violence I’d heard before during fights. This young woman came and went from the gully two or three times. I could hear a man’s voice coughing and muttering, but couldn’t identify it. He was completely hidden in the scrub. If she was so upset why was she returning? She must be angling for something, I thought. Half an hour later, Gregory Johnson, whom I saw regularly at Whitegate, sidled up to the fence for a drink of water, his scratched sunglasses askew. ‘You hear us two over there, Rod? We been doin’ jig-a-jig, bush way.’ ‘Bush way, huh?’ 25



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He leaned closer in confidentiality. ‘Not like whitefella way, Rod. I been Port Augusta. It great place for woman. Mini-skirt white woman like blackfellas there too, Rod. One shag me silly for whole week. Stars tumblin’ down. Her on top at ninety miles an hour. Oh, I can take bumpy road. You know, like bush way. But speedy one too great. They take all their clothes off. Go lie on bed. Do everything.’ Having enlightened me with his manly affairs, he bade me farewell and trundled off towards Whitegate.

in the park near my flat. During the following week, Johnny Stirling and his wife, Melita Johnson, walked by in the middle of my tai chi routine. They stopped and sat silently under the shade of the gums. Melita must have been quite intrigued. As soon as I’d finished, Johnny came over and remonstrated with me that I’d been showing off to his wife, and that he would fight me anytime. He had his fists up. I backed away, stammering out an explanation of tai chi as dancing a prayer. This placated him, although I wouldn’t say I convinced him. But we walked as a threesome away from the park, talking about his sister who was married to a whitefella, a local apiarist. And I was gratified the conversation had sweetened. Six Aboriginal men came to my flat one morning not long after this. The only one I recognised was Xavier’s brother Ambrose. I nervously ushered them inside. Their curiosity outweighed their reserve as they brushed by me. They were wide-eyed at the most mundane stuff. Even the vertical blinds were unravelled. After small talk they broached the reason for their visit. They wanted a lift to Anthelke Ulpaye/Charles Creek camp. Xavier had apparently fled from there due to an arising conflict the previous day, leaving his ghetto blaster behind. They had teamed up in an effort L at e m o s t a f t e rn o o n s I p r actised ta i chi

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to rescue Xavier’s property and decided that wheels were needed for a successful getaway. ‘Maybe we can take this painting of Xavier,’ jested Ambrose ‘Bronson’ Neil. ‘We fool that Charles Creek mob. Use it as shield. They be hit this Xavier!’ We crammed into my Subaru. The car slouched across the causeway towards the town’s most central and oldest camp. My tension mounted as we neared the gate. ‘Keep the car running,’ said Ambrose. He glided along the cyclone fencing of ‘number one’ house, grabbed the radio from the verandah and swiftly ran back to the car with it stuffed beneath his denim jacket. We sped off. I was as gleeful as the others over the smooth retrieval. I dropped them at Whitegate where I was told that Xavier had caused quite a ruckus. Apparently, two carloads of Charles Creek men were after his hide. One freezing winter night about a month later, I drove past the Eastside grocery with Dominic Gorey who lived at Whitegate. He asked me to stop. He was wearing only jeans and a shirt. He got out of the car, ambled over to the median strip and removed his shirt to give it to another man wearing only jeans. No words were exchanged. No explanation was given when I enquired after the other man’s name. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ I asked. ‘I’m angangkere [doctor]. I don’t shake,’ he said bluntly. Did traditional doctors increase their healing powers by steeling their bodies in the cold? What obligation was he under to give the shirt? I could only guess. Another night he left some smokes on the same median strip. As we drove away I saw someone move from the shadows of the store to collect them. On a subsequent occasion he implored me to make the 20-kilometre round trip to Amwengkerne, the Amoonguna settlement. He approached two old men sitting by a fire from behind and put a few tailor-made smokes 27



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on the ground. No one spoke or acknowledged the transaction. He ambled back to the car. Again, he gave no explanation. I was baffled.

waited for hours in the scrub next to my flat to meet my parents who were visiting from Melbourne. Xavier had gone, as he said, ‘lizard walking’ for them, but found only echidna, the quilled monotreme. He produced a portion of its partly cooked flesh from his armpit. ‘Keep it from flies,’ he said. Its greyish appearance and means of marination alarmed my parents. Dad obligingly ate some and said that it tasted like bacon. ‘I’ll save mine for supper, dear,’ Mum said as she folded a tissue around it and popped it in her purse. Later that week Mum was in the back of the car sitting next to an old man whom we had picked up from Whitegate. He was clutching several ‘number seven’ boomerangs. He had made these himself, beautiful mulga ones. ‘They’re lovely, dear,’ she began in her lilting voice. ‘What do you do with them?’ ‘Fight ’em, sometimes. Sometimes sell ’em.’ ‘You don’t still fight, dear, do you?’ ‘Oh, yes.’ He stifled a yawn. ‘Number seven for man. Not kangaroo. Kill ’em dead, this one.’ I could feel the shift in weight behind me as Mum moved closer to the window. By the time he had got out, Mum had reduced their cultural differences to something that would come out in the wash. ‘Oh, Rodney, how can you stand the smell? Don’t these people ever wash?’

L at e o n e a ft e r n o o n , X avie r and Petr ina

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returned south, my older brother, Ian, visited. Xavier recognised him from my journal where he appeared in a photograph standing next toâ•¯–â•¯and caressingâ•¯–â•¯a massive Coca-Cola bottle in Luxembourg. Immediately Xavier dubbed him ‘Big Coke’, which he has remained to this day. Ian wanted to join the family parties when they dug for witchetty grubs and go hunting with the men. We headed out to Whitegate as soon as he had unpacked. Xavier introduced Noelly, Jamesy, Christopher and Jude, and commandeered the front seat. He was keen to show Big Coke his country. He got me to slow down and pointed out the window. ‘Look,’ he rasped. We followed his finger in the direction of distant Emily Gap. He got out and picked the bush banana that was dangling from a vine strung in a tree next to Ian’s window. How foolish we felt. Shortly, he drew attention to his hands. ‘They shakin’,’ he told Coke. ‘I be feel dreamin’ comin’ on.’ We drove on barely discernible tracks until we came to the banks of Emily Creek. Xavier knelt by Emily Soak, framed by a buried flour drum, cleaned the water’s scum with three outward strokes and blew firmly down on it. He muttered respectfully, ‘kwatye anthaye’, ‘give me water’, over it and then imbibed. We followed suit. The men at Whitegate had been impressed with Ian’s rum and Coke drinking regime. Ian was such a lark. A few drinks with supper and he was a one-man comedy act. He’d have me in stitches. That he actually had a doctorate in chemistry added to the image of him as a nutty professor. Jude and young Peter Johnson came with us to the airport to bid Ian farewell. The sleek, armoured limousine and cavalcade passed us south of Heavitree Gap. Pope John Paul was on his way to say mass for the multitudes assembled at the showgrounds. The town’s black community had been primed for twelve months about this visit. The Pope wished to

A mo n t h a f t e r m y pa r e n ts

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address the Indigenous peoples of Australia, and Alice Springs was the chosen spot. Father Phillip Hoy had been especially appointed to town for the Pope project. Local Catholic businessmen were urged to employ Aborigines. There were even a couple of masses held at Whitegate, one publicised in the national paper, the Australian. Ian joked that the columns of people lining the highway were there to farewell him and gave a papal wave to all the bystanders. After dropping him at the airport, we went back around the showgrounds and caught the last of the Pope’s speech. ‘You have kept your sense of brotherhood,’ he said. ‘If you stay closely united you are like a tree standing in the middle of a bushfire sweeping through the timber. The leaves are scorched and the tough bark is scarred and burnt, but inside the tree the sap is flowing, and under the ground the roots are still strong. Like the tree you have endured the flames, and you still have the power to be reborn. The time for this rebirth is now!’ There was a lot of distortion through the speakers but we did see the Pope raise his arms. As he did, the swirl of ink black clouds that had accumulated over the western range unloaded in a chorus of thunder and lightning. His homilies about brotherhood drifted east on the wind as thousands of people scrambled for shelter. Possibly not a lot of the congregation understood the ‘big fella’ Pope’s sentiments about the dignities of blacks, despite his clearly enunciated English. But they knew he had the power.

the family members and their washing to the dam. One time after walking to camp I found it deserted and twigged that everyone must have headed to the dam. I ran along the track to catch up then chatted with young Ricky Ryder as we walked a hundred metres ahead of the others. I followed him as he quietened into a crouch near the

S o m e S u n day s I d rov e

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crest of the dam. He stood and threw almost at once, killing an unwary duck. He astonished me with his timing and accuracy. He ate the duck for lunch. I walked back to camp that same day with Christopher Neil and was invited to meet his mother-in-law, Glenda Johnson. She had recently arrived from the rural river city of Mildura, on the New South Wales– Victorian border. Sixty-year-old Glenda and her whitefella husband picked oranges and grapes there, and a few family members had since settled in a Mildura caravan park. She was sitting around a half carton of beer with a few other women. No sooner had I taken a few sips of beer and she slipped her arm around my neck. She pulled me closer. ‘You want it with black woman, darling?’ she whispered. I was alarmed and embarrassed, and tried to distract her with another can. Instead she ran her finger slowly along the inside of my thigh, in full view of the other women. Then she ordered Barbara Johnson (Petrina’s mother) to go. ‘He’s for me, this one. I like it whitefella way.’ I immediately got up to go. She then thumped Iris, Jude’s wife, on the head with a nulla nulla/club, accusing her of interrupting her ambitions. Walking home from work one evening I could see, 50 metres distant, three dark bodies bathed in a cadmium cone of streetlight. I recogÂ� nised Petrina’s cry as Xavier poked a knife into her back, then hurtled off up Undoolya Road into the dark. The other man, Johnny Stirling of the tai chi incident, had also been cut, by putting his hand out to protect her. I ran home for my car and we headed to the casualty ward at the local hospital. I’d never seen so many bandaged and bruised bodies, nor such a profusion of people on crutches. All were Aboriginal. Some were in civilian clothes. Most were garbed in hospital-issue, blue pyjamas. With such a conspicuous amount of blood, we advanced rapidly up the waiting bench. The nurse came to ask what had happened. Could Petrina stand by herself? 31



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As she dragged herself to her feet and removed her blouse, a tear fell to the linoleum. Her body was a carapace of wounds inflicted by Xavier. The nurse remarked that her file was six centimetres thick. Her back was taped and she reeked of disinfectant. Johnny had his hand stitched and bandaged. Though feeling sorry for herself, on the way home from the hospital she asked to stop at the bottle shop to get a cask, with the same ten dollars that Xavier had knifed her for. Johnny also took the event in his stride. He asked if I had a video they could come and watch at my place. So, having driven from hospital, the car hummed in the bottle shop driveway. Petrina waited on the attendant to arrive with a ‘cask of fruity’. As we rolled out of the bottle shop, Xavier lunged at the car from the darkness and tried to drag Petrina by the hair through the passenger window. I managed to free her and drove away, dropping Petrina and Johnny just inside Whitegate. Back at my flat, I was replaying these events in my mind when Xavier burst through the front door. He shook his finger close to my nose, shouting at me about not being his friend and siding with his wife. ‘Me finish with you!’ he said. ‘But you’ve just poked Petrina with a knife!’ ‘Yes. This one.’ He produced a penknife. There were tears in his eyes as he angrily waved it in my direction. For a moment I sensed him debate whether I was worth knifing. ‘You’re not my friend,’ he said before stalking out the rear door. He straddled the fence and was off into the bush.

to drop in after dark on a regular basis to ask for a lift home, always with the story that they were too frightened to make the final leg because inentye or kudaitye men stalked the low range immediately before camp. Not knowing what the basis for this claim Pe o p l e f ro m W h it e gat e s tarted

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was, I usually had enough energy to make the ten-minute round trip. One evening after dark, while walking along the eastern hills, I came across Christopher staggering under the weight of half a dozen medium-sized rocks. I broke from the brush onto the road before him. He wavered and tightened his fingers around one of the rocks. ‘Werte, Christopher. It’s only me, Rod.’ He recognised me and relaxed. ‘This for inentye man, Rod,’ he stammered. According to Christopher, he had seen a payback man lurking in these hills a few nights earlier. I watched him wobble up the road and disappear into the dark, and have never doubted the profundity of his fear, or that of the others, since. Several of the men in camp coolly admitted to committing retributive killings. Others had done time for killings they hadn’t committed, to protect those who had. There was honour in this, not shame. Frequently people in Whitegate told me of inentye who had walked near or through the camp at night time. Payback is exacted and a close enough relative can substitute for the actual offender at any time. Blood feuding Old Testament style. The family is the basic political cell of action. This was justice and thus an expected response.

to the Yuendumu Aboriginal Sports Carnival, 300 kilometres north-west of town.* There were spear throwing events as well as the more conventional European athletics and team ball games. I gravitated to the Aussie Rules footy, the object of my

Ov e r a l o n g w e e k e n d I v entured out

*â•… Yuendumu is a community developed in 1946 by the Federal Government’s Native Affairs branch, and to which the Warlpiri people were the first to relocate.

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only sporting passion. Aussie Rules was one of the few sports whose dramatic tension and mobile physicality gripped both cultures with the same force. But the style here was a distant permutation of its city cousin, with the emphasis on sharing the ball around rather than scoring. The long kick to set position was definitely out. Players from both sides favoured short, chipping passes to each other; possession football. I was transfixed by the willowy bodies leaning with prodigious elasticity to haul in the ball. The handling in the thick red dust of the ovular pitch was breathtaking. At the same time there was remarkably little bodily contact. I suspected skin relationshipsâ•¯–â•¯the complicated system that determined communications between many of themâ•¯–â•¯curtailed the heavy tackling that featured in most Australian football codes. When the ball was locked up on the ground, the men jigged in small circles around it, waiting for someone to reach into the melee of legs and flip it out. It was more of a dance than any football drill I had ever witnessed. A freezing westerly whipped across the playing field, which hugely advantaged the side kicking with itâ•¯–â•¯the local Yuendumu Magpies to whose side I was immediately drawn. I have been a Collingwood Magpies fan since my childhood, committed to the black and white stripes. Docker River, their opponents, would presumably make their run on the scoreboard in the next quarter. I was standing next to a carload of Docker River supporters who sat silently. The car lacked a windscreen and a bonnet, not an unfamiliar sight in communities where the improvisations of bush mechanics were legendary. Fencing wire, elastic bands, plastic hosing and bottles were imaginatively re-deployed, as spare parts were inaccessible and prohibitively expensive. Twenty minutes into the second quarter and there was no joy for the small and patient crowd in the car. Counting started. Not of goals and points stacked on the scoreboard. The women counted the players loudly. Yes, Yuendumu had the full complement of eighteen. Then came the outburst. 34



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‘Docker River only be got fourteen. Hey. Docker River only fourteen men!’ The one Docker River player wearing boots responded by first removing them and then himself from the ground. There was no discussion. Soon others filed off after him. The game was decided. ‘Docker River be sung by bad medicine,’ was the cry from the car next to me. The disgruntled driver passed a four-year-old boy holding a screwdriver through the gap which had once been the windscreen. He turned the ignition as the child charged up a spark across the starter motor. The car catapulted across the ground to pick up the last two straggling players and left the scene in a haze of dust. In the packed community hall after the game, I recognised the two players in the Docker River Band. They were easily identified as they were still proudly wearing their football guernseys. They were part of the community’s rock and reggae band, exclusively composed of men, but their success on drum and guitar far exceeded any football prowess they had shown that afternoon. They thrilled the throng of girls who sat on the floor in front of them. In the final seconds of each number, the girls rose as one and shuffled sexily before dropping to the floor in self-conscious silence. Their male counterparts eyed them coolly, standing in lines along the walls. I stood there, shouldered by two Warlpiri, absorbing the scene in the lowly lit dust of the hall. There must have been several thousand people from various Aboriginal communities. I had never experienced anything like it before.

at Whitegate had a compelling freshness, a vivid surrender to the present moment. These friendships

I n t e r a c t io n s w it h t h e famil ies

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made me feel enmeshed in the lives of the Arrernte people. Before these connections were made, living in a town where one third of its people are Indigenous, for me, lacked resonance. It wasn’t just the content. Their embracing of experience, wringing detail from each encounter, magnetised me. The laughter we shared offset what would have otherwise been a rather melancholic and lonely existence for me here. I could see the limitations of being monolingual at Whitegate and decided I should try to learn Arrernte, despite having no aptitude for languages. My French was so bad that my French girlfriend, with whom I had lived in Melbourne before coming to Alice Springs, refused to let me speak French to her. In the Centre, the inventory of bush life had been extensively accounted for by the Arrernte, and I was curious to hear what they had made of itâ•¯–â•¯the place names, the birds, the types of wind, the foods which expressed the interlock of language and bio-diversity. It takes centuries of careful observation to understand and name the complex ecological relationships that maintain life. Even with this motivation, I had difficulty overcoming the blocks to acquiring the language. I had a poor ear for language. This was coupled with inadequate retentiveness. There was a prototype dictionary, an Arrernte word list, and tapes available from the Institute of Aboriginal Development, which I borrowed. The Institute ran a large variety of educational programs for post-Â�secondary Aboriginal people. Workshops that were aimed at non-Indigenous employees in the growing Aboriginal industry and which introduced the various desert languages were also periodically conducted. Xavier and Petrina urged me on at every opportunity. When Xavier heard the tape, he went through explicit and elaborate gestures without verbal interpretation, his entire body performing the words. He danced around the lounge, touching the walls on the cue of certain words that referred to things beyond the house. The hallway had the patina of stencilled cave art. Some of this helped. 36



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Although Xavier and the others would repeat words for me endlessly, my stupid pride would often prevent me from asking for more repetition. I feared my newfound friends would see me as an inadequate fool. I cross-referenced, whenever possible, with John Henderson, the one white Arrernte speaker I knew. He was very close to finishing the compilation that became the Eastern and Central Arrernte to English Dictionary. He showed interest in the list of words that I had made and amiably taunted me about its phonetic shortcomings. When I tried speaking, he sympathised, telling me that the movements of the tongue across the roof of the mouth and behind the teeth of natural Arrernte speakers was at great variance from other desert languages, as well as English. Unwittingly, I was trivialising the Arrernte sound system into the English one. This worked both ways. I had frequently misheard ArrernteEnglish and still chuckle over Xavier’s naming of a significant hill near Pepperill Creek which he called ‘Native Pig Dreaming’. I thought it probable that pigs had been incorporated into the Dreaming stories. Over the months, whenever I was near the hill, I would look at it and try to work out from its shape where the pig might be. I had mentioned it to a few people, blackfellas and whitefellas. So it was left to an old man in camp, Arranye Johnson, to eventually correct me. ‘That not pig there, my son. That native fig, you been see.’ Summer rains sometimes filled a pond below that hill. One afternoon the kids and I were hunting some black-helmeted ducks that had come to feed there. ‘Might be plenty billy can here for water, some time,’ said Ricky Ryder. I didn’t understand. We had our bottles of water. Ah! Pelicans, of course. Arranye once told me that ‘turtle’ sauce tasted just great on fried fish. ‘You know, that one you get in little bottle at supermarket. Turtle sauce?’ 37



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I later twigged. Tartare sauce! ‘Rod, you gotta bum?’ Ricky asked one time as he stood breathlessly by the lounge door one Saturday afternoon, his bike dumped on the ground behind him. ‘Same as you, Ricky, stuck in the same place on my body,’ I said, thinking I was returning the humour. ‘No. Bump. You know it. For bike tyre.’ Although my word stock has grown, fluency still eludes me. The blocks continue, even though I get the gist of most conversations. The Whitegate families talk to me mostly in English with Arrernte nouns mixed in.

and his wife, Janet, weren’t at their outstation at Little Well, they would trek over the plains north of Emily Gap with the kids and the dogs in search of bush tucker. This was a grog-free day for most family members. I did not need any further encouragement when Gregory invited me along. They taught me to read tracks, what to make of the continuous swivelling in the sand of the spinifex snake, the intermittent arc of the carpet snake, the elegant spokes of Â�atyunpe/perentie, the long toes of the long-haired euro, and the shorter ones of its larger cousin, the plains kangaroo. The stamina of the little kids impressed me. Three-year-olds walked all day without grizzling. We would walk from Emily Creek soakage to Emily Gap, a 5-kilometre hike. The kids constantly scrounged frogs in the sand, budgerigars in the trees, lizards, licking sugary apwerelje or lerpe scale from gum leaves, and eating coconut galls from bloodwood trees. They harvested whitebush tomato, banana and onion when they were in season. They’d rush to me with whatever they’d gathered and watch for my surprise, wanting to know what I thought of its taste.

On t h e S u n day s w h e n Gr e gory Johnson

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It took several treks for my eyes to detect bushfoods with anything approaching the skill of the kids. I was fascinated that the country looked so inhospitable and yet could yield so much food. These Sunday outings were great for improving my vocabulary and made me feel at home in a way I’d never dared to dream of. Whenever we walked the plains around Emily Gap, Gregory or Xavier would point out the soakages. All the adults were confident of the whereabouts of water. It was a survival essential given that there were often months on end without rain. To the uninstructed, there is no visual clue as to where these water sources lie hidden under the dry and sandy riverbed. We’d carry a plastic cordial bottle of water when we hunted kangaroos. But this was a supplement to finding the soakages. I still found it hard to imagine just how thoroughly this country had been camped in and worked over by their ancestors. They said that by using the soakages they remembered ‘old people’.

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A R R A N Y E O N M AT T R E S S

WELCOME TO COUNTRY 41


NEIGHBOURS

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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ X av ier ( right ) and the J ohnsons on the Todd R i v er F lood - out

to be prominent in the media. The first advertisement on the local TV station made it clear that AIDS was not confined to intravenous drug users and the homosexual community. It showed the skeleton of Death scything the heads of casual sex partners, a shock tactic that provoked much controversy. I started to hear from a friend in Melbourne of people he knew who had contracted the disease. A clinic was established in Central Australia to educate Aboriginal people about the precautions necessary. I hadn’t heard of any case in the Arrernte community. There had been speculation that bloodletting in sorry business mourning and initiation ceremonies would increase the chance of the epidemic sweeping their community. I had learnt that the men shared in the drinking of blood when they circumcised their young initiates; and when ritual cuts were made to grieve for the dead, any piece of glass, tin or knife would be passed around for the job. Would the TV images aimed at showing the risks of AIDS travel T h e AIDS e p id e mic wa s s ta r t ing

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across the cultures? And would Arrernte have access to them anyway, given the absence of TV at Whitegate? I raised the question of condom use with Michael Stewart late one April afternoon as we walked to Whitegate. He quashed my concern. ‘Put one on your own cock,’ he blurted. Months later I saw a comic strip poster at the hospital. Its hero, Condom Man, would have made explicit sense to Michael. Blundering on into camp at Michael’s side, I watched Jamesy Johnson stir the coals to check his cooking. ‘What’s that you’re cooking, Jamesy?’ I asked, wondering if it was lizard or kangaroo. He looked at me, then back at the coals, without answering. After five minutes he parted the ashes and raked out a tinfoil steak and kidney pie. These details stick somehow. I talked about them with Steve Tucker, my colleague who was an émigré white Zimbabwean. He had his own stories on AIDS, cultural ineptitude and naivety. He had just recently arrived at the college to make up our three full-time art department staff. He was finding his feet as a lecturer but had an eclectic range of exciting ideas in photography, printmaking and video. His energy and enthusiasm were also a boost to me. He sometimes accompanied me on kangaroo hunts with the Whitegate men. The men employed their inherent tracking skills, but the killing was accomplished with various types of guns. It was such a contrast, some Mondays, to come to work and deliver a slide lecture on early twentieth-Â� century art, say on Picasso. The class would sit demurely in the dark room until I finished, then politely ask a few questions. The basic theme would be how western culture rejuvenated and re-invented itself, frequently raiding ‘other’ and colonised artforms in the process. I’d stare out the window during lunch hour, wondering what anyone in camp would have made of my talk on Modernism.

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W E L C O M E TO C O U N T RY

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came to quiz me about the Supreme Court, which he had to attend as a witness the following week. I had less idea about any sort of court proceedings than most of the Whitegate men and only had a general sense of what Jude, in his quiet tone, was referÂ�ring to. And this was further confused by his referring to the ‘Spring Court’. None of the younger Whitegate men were as confident of their Â�English as the women. Most of the males left school in their early to midteens once they were initiated through ceremony into manhood. ‘High school’ or ‘university’ for Arrernte men was what you learnt about Aboriginal Law in Aki/bush business camp throughout their initiation. This was nothing short of an induction into a world view, secular and spiritual. And attendance at the Santa Teresa Mission Primary School before that had been sporadic anyway. Jude hoped the Aboriginal Legal Aid lawyer that he’d heard was arriving from Adelaide could help get Jamesy Johnson off. Jamesy had been charged with manslaughter after a recent car crash. Xavier was the only sober witness of the incident but, given his police record, there were doubts about his reliability. As I later learnt, Jamesy never served a prison sentence on this account. Xavier was already inside my flat when I got in late one night, a Â�little tanked, with Steve Tucker and a couple of female friends from the Folk Club. Xavier, who was sober, was amused at my insobriety. Form reversal! ‘You drunk, Rod.’ His grin, together with our cheerful mood, made it hard for me to chastise his intrusion. He stayed on and joined the party. Among other things, we talked about the Arrernte’s sense of being connected to country, how they identified themselves with it, to the point of speaking about particular totem trees and landforms as being them. The friends left after an hour. After their departure Xavier and I took up the conversation. The An ot h e r a f t e rn o o n , J u d e Johnson

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Dreaming, as he gave me to understand, were the powers belonging to specific places that continued to affect his life. In one of those moments that fizz long after, he asked me where I came from. This was not the standard conversational trope of whitefellas rotating on how long you had been in the Territory and where you worked. What you did for a job was crucial information in establishing your place as a whitefella here, but it was irrelevant to Arrernte perceptions of character. Xavier had met my parents. He had met my brother. He had seen the journals and photos of my country in Melbourne’s eastern foothills. ‘Where you from, brother boy?’ he asked. ‘Xavier, I’ve told you about my family and the hills near Melbourne.’ This wasn’t sufficient. He held me by both shoulders and searched my eyes. ‘Where you really come from?’ His question seemed to have assumed biblical proportions and it silenced me. ‘I been show you my country. Some time you be show me your country.’ It took me a long time to work out what Xavier meant by brother, father, mother and so on. Xavier had four brothers still living that I would call brothers in the way I referred to Ian, and my younger brother, Colin. But there were quite a few other men he referred to in the same way. The proximity of our ages, although I am a little older than Xavier, determined my brother and penangke or skin classification. Skin names were a shorthand code to family relationships. My relationship to Xavier set the pattern for all other relationships I had at Whitegate. Mercia, his older sister, was my sister too. So too were his father’s brothers and sisters. I eventually came to understand that uncles and aunts, as I understood them in the European sense, shared the same name and status as your actual father and mother. Despite all this, since I had not been initiated, for Xavier I remained 45



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a boy. For Arrernte, identity is a primary issue to settle before conversation can continue. Your social placing starts with your attachment to a specific conception site, and by association to inherited places of importance through your parents. Such kinship classifications were just as frequently used to address a person as a first name. These classificatory names came with behavioural expectations that altered through life’s stations. For example, a father could demand that a mature son give him the privilege of the choicest cuts of fatty meat. There would be no argument. It was an enormous challenge for me to clarify my origins and connections with kinship and the country I grew up in, which I knew merely by place names. The populous city suburbs were especially impossible to describe to Xavier and the others. From time to time I rolled over in my mind the possibility of taking Xavier and Petrina to Melbourne, but on each occasion I felt exhausted at the prospect of being a chaperone for six weeks in the city. Having an extra couple would exacerbate the effort of constantly moving around, catching up with friends and cramping their lives for short stopovers. There would be the logistics of handling money, the homesickness, the cooler latitudes, and their volatile relationship. Perhaps I would do it one day?

that a white bloke had taken a dog from a sack and shot it, just outside Whitegate. This distressed them. Soon after, I became aware that one of my students was dispersing her kelpie litter. I asked for one to give to Xavier and picked up the pup from her house. Given the two dog-shooting incidents, I felt I was helping them through the trauma. Xavier was delighted to have the pup, though it cowered from him on the car floor. He gathered it up and rubbed his hand under his arms then smeared the dog’s snout. ‘Make it smell it me. Then it mine.’ X av ie r a n d Pe t rin a r e p o r t ed to me

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At Xavier’s request, we set off for town to buy a leash and collar, the only ones I was to ever see at Whitegate. Coming back up Undoolya Road from town, we passed a bloke peeing in the scrub by the side of his car. ‘Hey, you white cunt,’ Xavier yelled. ‘What you doin’ pissin’ on my country?’ I looked away, hoping not to be recognised and thus implicated in Xavier’s abuse. That evening Xavier came to my flat, wanting the police. The Dixon family, another large family living at Charles Creek camp, had chased them in a car and beaten Petrina over the head. Xavier had a swollen wrist. The Dixons wanted a baby, which was now at Whitegate with the Johnsons. They felt it belonged at Charles Creek. I rang the station and two constables came and questioned Xavier without much interest. Then we headed for the hospital to get stitches for Petrina. This time it was a longer wait before she emerged, her head wrapped in surgical dressing. She wasn’t at all fazed by the nursing staff and was more intent on getting her brothers to square off with the Dixons. I dismissed her pleas for my involvement and promptly dropped her and Xavier in the centre of town. Not long after this Christopher came over one Wednesday afternoon with Bernadine and we all set off, as planned the day before, to a film night staged for Aboriginal people. Back to Our Country was being shown in the Gap Neighbourhood Community Hall. It was about an old Western Desert Aboriginal man who goes back to his country to visit some of its sacred sites. It was very touching to see the old guy eventually find these places again; he knelt and wept over them. I expected that Christopher would also be moved by the film. As we drove from the hall in the fading light, I suggested they share some supper. Back home, over sandwiches, I asked him what he thought. He was only interested in talking about his own family’s country at Harts Range. Christopher had a childlike innocence that could unsettle me. His conversation jumped all over the place and his responses were so tangential 47



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that I wondered if his hearing was impaired. When he mentioned that he’d often drunk methylated spirits as a fifteen-year-old, I wondered if his brain had been damaged. Bernadine spoke to him in a patronising tone, telling him not to babble on so much. He said his nickname, ‘Whale’, was derived from the shallow hole in the middle of his nose, a birthmark. He added, in a matter-of-fact way, that he was waiting for another young man to finish his seven-year prison term. ‘Then I be stick knife in his neck and cut ’im across.’ There was neither threat nor malice in Christopher’s tone. The jailed man and his brother were said to have retaliated after being taunted by Christopher’s youngest brother at a concert in the Santa Teresa Community Hall. They had stabbed and speared him to death with a star-picket. According to family custom Christopher was expected to atone for his brother’s murder, to effect a payback killing to set things in balance. His talk switched to Bernadine’s health. Contrary to her belief, he insisted that she was ‘with baby’. Before I took them home, he asked me if they could see a doctor. I started out towards the hospital, but the doctor he wanted to see was Freddy Fly, who lived further down Gap Road at Â�Little Sisters camp. Freddy was a traditional medicine man. We found him in the dark crouched over his fire, after several people from different campfires directed us to him. The old bloke pasted Bernadine’s breasts with some fat from a tobacco tin and confirmed Christopher’s claim. A promise was made to pay him with a six-pack of beer next pension day. ‘Green or blue can, all same,’ said Freddy. He turned to me and asked for a cigarette. Christopher quickly interjected. ‘Him Christian bloke. He don’t smoke.’ My assumed conversion to the faith seemed based on a very flimsy premise. They dropped by the next day and Bernadine confided that Freddy 48



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had removed a snake from her chest and that she felt much better. Really? Was this a metaphor for congestion? Christopher was jubilant about his imminent fatherhood although Bernadine did not share the emotion. He said they would name the baby after me, confident it would be a boy.

and his older brother, Edward, got me to drive over to Larapinta Valley to visit their ‘mother’, old Wheelchair Harold Ross. Edward lived mostly at Harts Range and when in town would stop at Whitegate. He was a large, surly fellow in his mid-thirties, not someone you’d want to get on the wrong side of. He sported a preposterously highcrowned, black cowboy hat, as many occasional stockmen did. Old Wheelchair’s tin shed was nestled near a startling quartz apwerte arlterre/hillock that looked set to launch into space. We got out and slowly entered the dwelling. I’d noticed how speedy, jerky body language by strangers could arouse concern. It took a few minutes to adjust to the shed’s dimness, and longer to adjust to its wallpaper. From dirt to ceiling, the humpy was pasted with centrefold pin-up girls. White bimbos in lewd, clichéd positions smiled seductively at us. Xavier and Edward watched for my reaction. The frail old man beamed at me from his wheelchair, his fingers arthritically curled, his whole body stiffened into the shape of the chair. ‘No jig-a-jig for me now. Me only old Wheelchair,’ he quipped. ‘You like it? White woman on wall, pretty sexy? Pretty nice chick, eh?’ ‘Unbelievable stuff, old man,’ I said, trying not to dampen his enthusiasm. Edward gave Wheelchair a plastic carry bag containing a shank of kangaroo and touched my arm to indicate he was ready to leave. He and Xavier had got a real charge out of that shed and their faces gleamed as we drove across town to Whitegate.

L at e r t h at w e e k X av ie r

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In response to Christopher’s excited and urgent plea I made an evening hospital visit to see Bernadine. Xavier and his other brothers were already there. They thought it was hilarious that Christopher had misheard the doctor’s report. Christopher had told the mob in camp that Bernadine had given birth to a baby boy. What the doctor had said was that she had a baby boil on her breast! Bernadine gave us a bemused smile. She was still months off having the baby, which turned out to be Lisa-Marie. I asked Xavier if he needed a lift somewhere. ‘Let’s go see Petrina,’ he said. ‘Is she at Charles Creek with her mother?’ ‘No. Long there. Other side,’ he said, nudging me down the duncoloured linoleum of the corridor. I didn’t know until then that Petrina was in Ward 6 with infected head wounds. The duty nurse told us the room number. Petrina’s name was on a card slotted on the door. We crept past the other sleeping patient to Petrina’s window bed. She was awake but when she recognised us, she ducked under the sheets and kept her head under the pillow, allowing just the bandages to show. Xavier tried to press five dollars into her hand unsuccessfully. So he left the note next to the pillow and we filed out to the car.

and Alice Springs became awash. Intermittent showers followed and for a fortnight the hills gurgled with thousands of tiny waterfalls. I wondered how Xavier and Petrina were faring. When I got to Whitegate, the camp was a shallow sea of water, filled by the dirt road which had become a running creek. Xavier had devised a small shelter of corrugated iron and planks. ‘I be carpenter now, Rod. You got hammer I be lend it?’ he grinned. In spite of his frenzied building, he and Petrina had been drenched. T h e r e wa s a h u g e t w e lv e - hour downpour

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‘Rain been walkin’ all over me, Rod.’ He asked me to take him to the army disposal shop off the mall so he could buy a tent. Surprisingly, the Whitegate mob wondered how the rain had affected me. Had I been kept awake by the lightning? Did the pelting of the storm damage my roof? Little lakes had formed, I told them, and the culvert beside the flat was a roaring tributary to the Todd River, one continuous muddy bleeding. As we returned from the army disposal shop, Xavier asked if I could help him with some extra tent pegs. We went to my home to collect them. He laughed at the two paw-paw trees growing either side of the back door step. ‘Husband and wife, you got there, Rod,’ he said. ‘Rain might make it come up baby.’ The rain continued for a week. Steve Tucker had a dinghy which, as the showers subsided, we took to the Telegraph Station, where the river appeared amiable. Though it was running swiftly, it was flat and free of floating logs and boulders. I gingerly helped launch the dinghy. We cruised into town, poking our pathetic little rubber oars at the curds of flotsam, and got out by the Riverside Pub. We could imagine ourselves sipping from long-stemmed glasses of champagne. Such a pleasurable jaunt! We then decided, in the failing light, to repeat the journey further upstream and drove to Wigleys Gorge. The sky was varicose to the east and a blaze of turquoise in the west where the sun had finally emerged through the clouds. On low beam, it flashed across the white trunks of the gums. We slipped the dinghy into innocuous waters. But the placidity was deceptive. Within minutes we were in white water, ripping through sawn-off ti-trees and uprooted gums, dropping 3 metres in twenty, totally at the mercy of the gushing river. We veered past slabs of sheer rock wrapped in coffee-coloured bubbles. It was electrifying. Both of us were soon unceremoniously ejected. Steve cracked his knee against a boulder. It could have been his head. Our 51



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heads! Somehow we held the tube and, when the country flattened out, I squibbed it. I walked the remaining few kilometres back to town along the bank, too stuffed to even yell to Steve who stayed with the dinghy. The river continued to rise overnight. A man drowned under the main bridge in spite of the efforts of a helicopter and sophisticated rescue gear. An Aboriginal woman whom I knew only as ‘Mad Alice’ was swept away to her death. She was notorious for walking naked in the main drag, ranting to passers-by. Once I saw her disrobing near the town pool, outside though, not inside. She then headed across Traeger Park Oval towards town, bearing only a handbag strung across her shoulder. Perhaps I read her epitaph a few months later. Scrawled across a fence facing a park she used to sleep in was the brief message ‘Mad Alice Lives’. Rain transformed the country. I loved how the moisture had brought out deeper greens and blacks in the spinifex, grasses and acacias; a vegetal varnishing. The ranges had a new clarity, washed of their customary curtain of dazzling magenta. Small, yellow-throated miners were repairing the storm damage. Grasses sprinted to maturity. Their sugar-heavy, sherryscented heads swelled and swayed with the faintest push of air. In the park, a hundred galahs mined for seeds, genuflecting every which way in garrulous competition. At night they roosted in the salmon gums along the back fence. Each ruffling wind started them chittering. Otherwise, there was a great stillness. The drenching softened things. It was as if rocks and bushes, the very earth, sucked up sound.

time been aware of an elderly single man who camped 15 metres from Xavier and Petrina, he remained a background figure to the more animated relationships with people of similar age to myself. During August 1986 I was formally introduced to Arranye Edward Johnson by his son-in-law, Dominic Gorey.

Though I had for some

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‘Good to meet you, sonny boy,’ he proffered his bony hand to greet me. I had no idea just how important he would become for me. During the rains, when I saw his meagre dwelling, I gave him the little one-man tent I’d brought up from Victoria. I said I’d talk more with him the following day. When I returned and stood with Dominic next to the tent, I asked why it was flapping on such a still afternoon. He replied, grinning behind his hand, ‘Arranye in there with woman. He been making jig-a-jig business.’ With respect, I hardly believed this possible, given his advanced years. But what else explained the canvas tremors? I chatted with Dominic for half an hour and postponed the catch-up for later in the week. Our early talks were pleasantly courteous without divulging much. He knew a lot about me from the others, far more than I knew of him. Judging by his wartime stories, he was about my father’s age, born in the early 1920s. He had a stick to help him walk but was reasonably mobile. His sight was poor and his stick was also used to fend off objects in his trackâ•¯–â•¯plenty of dogs felt its impact. Arranye had a broad English vocabulary and an easy approach to conversation. His confidence had been encouraged by moving over large areas of the Centre and working in different capacities that required him to deal with whitefellas such as stockmen, station owners, church leaders, teachers, truck drivers and police. He later worked as the community baker in mission and government settlements. In recent years these skills positioned him as a spokesman for the Whitegate families when dealing with lawyers over land rights. I gathered from him that he’d always been a forthright speaker. ‘I not sit around not speaking it like some other mob when whitefella be ask question. I talk it right back to them.’ He told me that he wanted to record some bush tucker stories. ‘People be come after me might want to be learn. Gotta keep story line rollin’, my boy.’ 53



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‘David, Noelly, Jamesy, Peter, they don’t be ask it. Want car but not toolbox,’ sighed Arranye. While the Arrernte hunted meat and collected medicinal plants and tucker in season, the species, according to the old man, were not sung over as they once were. The stories related to particular sites (known as increase zones) that regenerated foodstuffs. Even the knowledge of the location of these increase places was complex and slowly absorbed. Why bother with acquiring the old survival stories when the supermarkets promised unchallenged, year-round availability? One of the immediate effects of introducing refined flour at missions was the cessation of laborious seed collecting and winnowing for breads. Few residents of Whitegate ventured further than tinned meat, bread, chops, potatoes, onions and eggs. One day when we were shopping together at the Eastside shops, Xavier asked me what peaches and avocados were. On the rare occasions when I offered dried figs, sunflower seeds, almonds and other rather innocuous foodstuffs, he would tentatively taste them and spit them out in the garden. When I went on the Friday with a tape recorder, as planned, Arranye and Xavier were too far out of it to do anything. ‘Oh my son, we been havin’ too much that green suitcase,’ moaned the old man. ‘Can’t be talk it now. Sorry, my son.’ That green suitcase was the Coolabah cask wine, which people carted away from the town’s numerous liquor outlets. Coincidental with Arranye’s interest in recording stories, Jude Johnson started to visit more frequently, almost daily. He was often sitting by my door when I arrived home from work. Jude was shy, slightly built and in his early twenties. Unlike Xavier, he never asked for food. He was drawn to the old Spencer and Gillen book and would sit with it, spending a long time soaking up its images. ‘Me want to see it how them old people paint up,’ he said. I found it difficult to understand what he was explaining about initiation and ceremony. He pointed out photos of dances he had participated 54



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in. Quite a lot of them, he admitted, the families didn’t do anymore. He referred to these images of ceremony as the ‘time before shirts an’ trousers’. He occasionally read the text adjacent to the photos aloud to me, haltingly, unaware it rarely matched the images. He only ever wanted to talk about ‘business’ or Arrernte Law, which he took seriously. I’m not imputing that others did not embrace traditional law; however, Jude’s focus was exceptionally singular. Although often accompanied by his wife, Iris, he mostly came alone. It was a few weeks before I realised that English was their common language. Iris was Eastern Warlpiri, and spoke ‘soft Warlpiri’, as she put it. Jude eventually borrowed the book; he kept it under his pillow.

that Dominic Gorey stayed close to his tent, never moving far from it. When I asked Jude why, he said Dominic’s wife, Lizzie, lay sick inside. I hardly knew her but insisted on seeing her, as Dominic looked extremely anxious. Lizzie, Arranye’s oldest daughter, was small and frail. She had the stature of a twelve-year-old despite her real age of twenty-four years. She sprawled silently in the putrid roost of her blankets. I told Dominic she should go immediately to hospital. He said he had been asking her to go for weeks, but she was too afraid. I carried her to the car, where she lay across the back seat, panting for breath. Jude jammed up against me and sat on the handbrake, leaving the rest of the front seat for Dominic. Dominic went on and on about how relieved he was that I had taken charge. ‘I pay you hundred dollars or anything you been ask it. You my number one best friend,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it, Dom,’ I said, waving away his ridiculous offer. We waited in Casualty while Lizzie was being cleaned up. Then she

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was designated a ward and pushed along on a roller bed by an orderly with us in tow. Her skin was blotched and lacking pigment in broad patches. She had infected scabies and general malnutrition, weighing a mere thirtyfive kilos. She was promptly hooked into antibiotics and pumped with high doses of iron. She wouldn’t look at Jude or me. She mumbled something quietly to Dominic, then we walked out towards the lift. Jude sniggered as we passed a ward of Ernabella petrol sniffers who were either on the floor or tied to their beds. If Jude had not spoken, I would have had no idea how to account for this room full of contorted bodies with limp heads and mouths in frozen rictus. Their emaciated bodies and vacant, dark eye-sockets made for one of the most pitiful sights I have seen. Jude glanced at me, put his hand to his mouth and gave a strangely embarrassed smile as he proudly claimed that Arrernte did not sniff petrol. I didn’t know if he was right about that. I’d heard about hardware shop break-ins around town, where paint thinners and glues for inhaling were stolen. Presumably Arrernte youths were among the culprits. Years later I would see kids and young adults at Armata, in the Pitjantjatjara homelands, playing basketball, with cans of petrol strung around their necks. The harsh images from the hospital ward flashed before me. We visited Lizzie in Ward 7 every day for the six weeks of her stay in hospital. Dominic wanted me there to ask the nurses questions. He said he was ‘too shame’ to talk to the nurses and doctors himself. He was also ‘too shame’ to be near so many pregnant women in the adjacent maternity ward. Giving birth was ‘women’s business’, as far as Dominic was concerned. He began squirming as we walked through the transept dividing the two wards, wedging himself between the far wall and me. Lizzie gave a big toothy grin one afternoon when Dominic brought in a biro and a crossword puzzle. Lizzie had put on a few kilograms and the glow had returned to her skin. Her teeth had been brushed and she combed her hair while we chatted, something she was incapable of on admission. 56



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As we got to the car park, Dominic suggested we go to my place and play guitar. He loved to strum away and tried to teach me his language through song. He stated that he did not speak the language backwards. ‘Only be speak it forwards, right through, but not in reverse. Only old people able to speak it backwards and forwards.’ On another visit, I chucked the latest edition of the Phantom on Lizzie’s bedside table, knowing its popularity in camp. She picked it up and flashed another grin. She continued scanning its pages as Dominic gave her the news on Whitegate. They chatted while I quizzed the nurse about her condition. The nurse made it clear that Lizzie would always require medication. She was weak and had suffered from malnutrition from early infancy. Her liver and kidneys were damaged. Her respiratory system was weak too. She really needed to be hospitalised every three to four months; there was no way she’d keep to her bag of medications while in camp or receive anything like the diet required to give her long-term health.

one Friday evening in September to ask if I’d help shift his effects south of the dam. I helped him to scoop up his stuff in three armfuls and cautiously drove the track to the narrow creek bed, following his hand signals. Upon arrival, I could see that he’d hauled some of his belongings there already. The sight of his esky and his kelpie with its litter tickled me. His chickenâ•¯–â•¯‘chooka chooka’, as he called itâ•¯–â•¯stood astride the esky defending the food within from the hungry dogs. After depositing his gear we went to the dam to fill his tin quart pot. He broke the news of Johnny Stirling’s death. He was found dead by his wife, Melita. Xavier claimed that she had accidentally cut an artery in Johnny’s thigh during a drunken quarrel and awoke the next morning to the sight of her dead husband in a pool of blood. The story initially put about by her father, Joseph, to avoid paybacks, was that Johnny had

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poked himself in the leg. The payback system of obligatory reprisal killing would have made all the Johnsons vulnerable to an attack from one of the Stirlings. Melita cut her hair and wore a black scarf for the remainder of the year, keeping appropriately to herself. When she occasionally walked to the shops or to Tangentyere to get her pension cheque, she was accompanied by her sisters. Another time Jude arrived with Iris and his older brother, Joseph junior, who’d recently been nicknamed ‘amulte’, meaning ‘arm’. His arm had been smashed in a rollover. These accidents were sufficiently numerous to confuse me about who’d been in what car, when, and who was driving. He showed me how his left arm dangled feebly at his side. He said he was going to hospital on Friday to have a plate put in his arm, and he produced an appointment card from his shirt pocket to confirm his claim. He added that he had already missed three previous appointments. Iris showed me an egg-sized lump on her head. She then asked for tea, and to see the recently completed portrait of Jude. This was my second work depicting someone from Whitegate. I had developed it from a photo taken some weeks before. I tried to keep the sheen of the photograph in the graphite by gently rubbing the grey powder with a bit of tissue. Jude remarked that the sorrel strands of hair running through the middle of his chin were missing in the drawing. ‘That ginger part of my mother’s Dreaming,’ he said. ‘You gotta put that there.’ I’d never noticed them, and of course they didn’t show in the black and white photo. I got out a fine sable brush, mixed up ginger tone and painted over the drawing to his satisfaction. Jude recounted how his father had been killed for some misÂ� demeanour Jude had committed during his initiation. His father was made the sacrifice. He added that the custodians’ decision to spare him, the offender, was unusual given that he was accessible. This possibly explained his focus on the law. His father was brother to Arranye and had married a 58



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Pitjantjatjara woman. Jude was born in his mother’s country and that was where his calamitous initiation took place. I could hardly begin to understand this in terms of my family dynamics. I was no stranger to my father’s occasional beltings as a kid, but my petty transgressions usually earned nothing more than a school detention, the withholding of pocket money, or being grounded. And our family crises never spilled into the public domain. People in camp openly discussed their bruises and cuts from partners and relatives sitting near to them. Jude asked Iris to leave the room. Then he waited until he saw her pass through the back door. He told me that Iris had her tooth plucked by Warlpiri businessmen, indicating that she knew men’s business, or law. According to Jude, if men from other language groups discovered that Iris had this knowledge, both of them could be killed. She later came back into the room. I put saline drops in Jude’s eyes, which had swelled from infectious fly shit. Jude, Iris and Joseph agreed that Pintubi people of the Western Desert had dangerous magic. ‘When they go shooting, if you near kangaroo, you get shot. They be cannibal,’ said Jude. Had this been verified? Or was it the popular refrain for demonising the unknown other group of people? Neither Jude nor Joseph would cut their long hair now, as business time was coming up. Exceptional protocol was involved, all of it opaque to me. Jude said the grandfathers insisted that short hair would induce sickness. Initiation ceremonies galvanised the behaviour of everyone in camp and all contributed to the event. A week later Xavier arrived drunk and I poured him into the car to get rid of him at camp. During the journey, I decided to tell him of my recent unsettling news. I would soon be transferred to a Perth college for the duration of 1987. Upon arrival I opened the door and he fell out, then dragged himself up the side of the car with fingers hooked on the partly opened window. 59



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‘Are you going to be okay?’ I asked. He was crying. ‘I’m sad for you. This my country,’ he said. He sunk back on his haunches and fixed his stare on me. My work colleague Iain Campbell and I had flippantly filled in forms for the TAFE’s lecturer exchange program. It was a new initiative and Centralian College management wanted the college to be seen to be in the network. A lot of lecturers, it seemed, wanted to come to Alice Springs. In the belief that we were ineligible according to the criteria, Iain and I randomly chose locations. Much to my dismay, the director called me for a brief interview to state unequivocally that I had no way out. I was chosen to go to Carine TAFE in Perth. How could I convince Elaine about making the move? We’d agreed to resume living together in Alice Springs when her training was over. One consolation was an encouraging letter from Peter Schjeldahl. He said he’d felt he got some vital charge from Alice Springs, particularly the permanent, visceral image of the bush meeting the ugly flats, and from there, the threat of the purely wild. Elsewhere he felt Australia lacked ‘spiritual juice’. It was not an expression I was comfortable with, but I agreed with his perception of the flat dullness of the cities and towns. He was emboldened to repeat a request for a painting of the stone-slinging episode. I knew I had at least one very interested viewer outside the Whitegate audience.

of the academic year, I took a carload of women and kids on the 200-kilometre track to the Johnson outstation at Little Well. Outstations were associated with the ‘back to the land’ movement of the 1970s. Community leaders, like Arranye, took their families to live at sites where they had mythological connections. This did not mean returning to a nomadic lifestyle in any sense, though

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hunting and foraging were a necessity for the Johnsons, given the enormous distance that separated Little Well from town. Gregory, a younger brother of Arranye and Joseph, attempted to live most of the time at Little Well and lobbed up at Whitegate in between. It was a regular fact of life for Gregory and his wife, Janet, to depend on the personnel at Ingkerreke Outstation Service to remember to collect them every three or four weeks and take them to town to restock. The red ranges flanking the road were warped and rent in abrupt cliffs. The grasses were bleached and thrashed by the wind. Gidgee and corkwood trees framed the Numery road with their twisted, aged limbs. I felt that if I were to spend a summer camped alongside this road and endure its heat, winds and driving rains, I might well resemble these trees. I was pretty tense too. I’d never been so far from town on an unmade road in such condition of ruin. We were welcomed by Gregory Johnson who’d arrived back there earlier in the week. Eight tin sheds were clustered on pebbly ground. At the top of a narrow valley was a windmill that pumped water from the well to a tank set on a rise above the settlement. Gregory enthusiastically showed me the small cave that housed the sacred snake’s eggs, smooth rocks about the size of emu eggs, which were crucial to Little Well’s snake Dreaming. They were deemed to belong to the carpet snake, but were also associated with the Rainbow Serpent stories that swept the continent. Gregory teased me about my lack of business hair. That was grey hair. Contrary to whitefella vanity, the Whitegate men looked forward to their emergence, which they believed conferred eminence and wisdom. At the close of the weekend, we paused to say our goodbyes. GregÂ�ory gently pulled my head through the car window and tongue kissed me. ‘We all love you.’ Janet looked at the ground. I was flabbergasted. ‘You don’t believe me?’ 61



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Again he reached into the car and tugged my ears, fastening his lips to mine. As we returned to town, Mercia Neil, Xavier’s older sister, spotted a large lizard. I was astonished that she could see a camouflaged reptile in the bush some 40 metres from a speeding car. She swivelled her head, her eyes caressing the swiftly advancing panorama.

I made a valedictory circuit of Whitegate. Mercia and Joseph senior’s eyes were puffed with tears. I was passed from her group to Noelly’s then Xavier’s for more hugging and tears. The kids grappled with my knees and nearly caused me to topple. Jude jumped on me telling me I was his best mate. Arranye was so tearful he struggled to say his Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. ‘We gonna be miss that little white taxi, my son,’ he said, trying to add humour to the moment. He promised that when I returned, he would show me paintings in the country. This was the first I had heard of the existence of artworks in the region. I drove slowly out through the gate, my chest and throat throbbing, giddy with goodbyes, my shirt wet around the shoulders from a blend of tears. None were mine. I bottled my emotions, I guess instinctively, in an effort to stay clear, unlike the Arrernte men, who shed tears when the occasion drew them. Arrernte culture knows not of manly bravado on the subject; in fact, expressing sorrow allows them to share in each other’s humanity. The Spencer and Gillen book had continued to fascinate the Whitegate men. Apart from its appreciation in my flat, several times I’d come across a small group passing the book between them around Jude’s fire. That last night, Graeme Hayes, about Xavier’s age, came to my door to ask if he could borrow it while I was away. I didn’t feel comfortable

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with loaning the book for such a lengthy period. I was aware that the information and images of their ancestors were intensely precious to them but I didn’t want the book to vanish forever. It was long out of print and couldn’t be replaced. I was concerned about inadequate weather protection and storage. Rather than offend, I suggested he request a copy on shortterm loan from the college library. I packed a few art books, my paints, clothes and bedding into the Subaru. First I’d have Christmas in Melbourne, where I planned to meet Elaine, before making the transcontinental drive to Perth. We had temporary accommodation arranged with one of the Carine College staff, in North Fremantle. And my fears had been assuaged. As it turned out, Elaine was far more excited than I was about the move west.

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WEAVING AND WRITHING 65


NEIGHBOURS

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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ J ude with Ronja in a coola m on

was free of car mishap. I had driven the Nullarbor stretch on my way to Strelley in 1980 and it proved no more interesting to me this time. We’d given ourselves a week to find accommodation and reorientate. Apart from a detour to check out Wave Rock, we were happy to cruise over the Darling Range, sight the city, and have the plains behind us. At Carine College the class numbers were three times the size of those in Alice Springs, and the expectations and competition among the students were greater. We soon located the small Montessori pre-school in the northern suburbs, where Elaine had been appointed. February was far more oppressively humid than we’d anticipated. Alice’s rare days of humidity preceded a handful of wet summer days, troughs extending south from the Gulf of Carpentaria. Perth’s wasn’t Top End heat, but you wore the weather constantly like an unwanÂ� ted coat. And no weather map had prepared us for the sea wind that

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blew so regularly; it was affectionately named ‘The Fremantle Doctor’. If you fancied an ocean dip, you did so before 10 a.m. This was the stuff of skin cancers. Elaine and I talked about starting a family. She expressed confidence about the longevity of our relationship. Although I’d never seriously thought about having kids before, I warmed to the idea readily, and was glad of Elaine’s conviction in her own capacity as a mother. In early March we took a beach house at Watermans Bay, twenty minutes’ walk from the Carine campus. That walk twice a day through pristine scrub was a saviour from the tedium of the suburban beaches. At the start of June Elaine became pregnant and immediately terminated her job of a few months, fearing that stress might endanger the pregÂ� nancy. During June and July, she went to Dorset, England, to see her parents and siblings. After she arrived back in August, some evenings we’d walk up the nearby hill. We’d sit on top of the water tanks there, wondering if on a clear day we might see Madagascar, which, we joked, seemed closer to us than either Melbourne or Alice Springs. Jokes aside, the distance was actually productive. Being away from Alice allowed me to reflect on my interactions with the Whitegate families, and think about ways to compose paintings that would say something about the experience. As much as I could, on weekends I would walk over to Carine College to paint. The scale of the work I was doing was too big for the small fibro walls of our shack. My art was a talisman and kept me in contact with the Centre. But for the first time I suffered from homesickness. Walking to work through the scrubby park, I would imagine scenarios involving Xavier, Gregory, Dominic and Jude, along with the others. Petrina had suggested I could write to them via Tangentyere, where they signed for their pension cheques. After I’d written several letters without receiving a reply, I explained my communication difficulties to Steve Tucker, who stopped with us during the semester break, on his way to 67


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Zimbabwe. He promised that when he got back to Alice Springs he would arrange a pen and paper for them to correspond, then post any letters on to me. In fact, he drove them all to the college one September morning and sat with them until Petrina had completed her message. I was so tickled to receive their letter: How are you both getting on there at Perth? I hope you are still thinking of me and Xavier. We are still all right here at Whitegate. But we got a letter from you. But we are still talking of you. Also Little Lisa Marie is Big Girl now. But children from Whitegate is going to Catholic Convent School, Alice Springs. God bless you and Elaine. Love from Xavier Neil and Petrina Johnson. See yous soon mate!

For some reason,

Perth had numerous colour theorists and researchers. My new colleagues asked me about my preferred colour theory. I knew of Goethe’s colour sphere made in the early 1800s, but apart from that I did not have one. Most students in art school had copied Johannes Itten’s simplified version devised at the famous Bauhaus design school. Michael Wilcox, author of Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green, was introduced to me by his wife, who attended my classes. He came and spoke to the students about his colour-mixing discoveries. He was intrigued by the colours in my paintings and asked for my reactions to what was then the draft of his book. I found his practical colour mixing advice to be exemplary. That year, there was an international conference at the University of Western Australia focusing on colour, vision and light. I attended some of the lectures and got hold of the papers for later reference. I was interested in pursuing the luminosity of desert light. There was no art theory I knew that gave a direct pointer to such experience. The French and Australian 68



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landscape artists of the last decades of the nineteenth century had painted outside in order to achieve the fresh and transitory effects of sunlight. They used complementary opposite colours, say violets against oranges, which give a vibrancy that those colours in isolation would not possess. However, none of the Impressionists had to contend with the brilliance of desert light, or the deep colours found in shadows. As spokesmen for their society, Courbet, Manet and Seurat became my enduring heroes. Their paintings depicted mundane life, contemporary man interacting with his environment. Their messy brush strokes conveyed the hurly-burly tempo of the increasingly mechanised cities. Until this time, the human figure had been deployed in art to tell grand biblical, mythological or historic stories. The paintings I made in Perth employed some complementary colour harmony theories. And they made use of the dot, for which Seurat had been both credited for introducing to European art, and critically lampooned in the popular press. I felt these small atoms of paint had the potential to evoke a shimmering atmosphere. And, contrary to tonal brushing, their application would slow down the eye, keep it engaged for longer on the surface. At the commencement of the 1986 academic year, an American friend enrolled in an architecture course in Raleigh, North Carolina, that was devised by Christopher Alexander. He posted his notes to me, titled ‘Inner Light’. There were a number of colour laws that Alexander had refined over many years of practical research. These were insights into the proportion of large areas of colour set in combination with small zones of purer, up-tempo hues. As he saw it, the proportion of one colour to another contributed to inner light. This idea of colour boundaries and hairline transitions was news to me. Once they were on notice, however, I looked for them in artworks I came across and developed them in my own. These were wonderful revelations. An American artist I had never heard of, Willard Midgette, was 69



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featured in the magazine pages of Art in America. I came across him while eagerly catching up on back copies, looking for Peter Schjeldahl’s contributions. He was an American painter who had recently died. Briefly, in the seventies, he had been commissioned to paint a suite of four large realist works of contemporary Navajo Indians for the US bicentennial. I loved them. It was wonderful to see a realist painter documenting contemporary Navajo in social settings that neither idealised nor demeaned these people. Once I had amassed a significant body of work, I ventured into the commercial galleries of Perth. I was told the paintings were very attractive, but would have more appeal if the (Aboriginal) figures were eradicated. I wrote to Peter Schjeldahl about this critique and enclosed transparencies of the works to show what I had done. He replied in a subsequent letter: I like all the pictures and most especially the Stone slingers, which looks to be a masterpiece. It’s beautiful and narratively funny, shocking, and eloquent, a permanent image. The figures are wonderful. The great thing about the stoners is the way you get inside their kid pleasure in stoning. I can feel how much fun it is for them, even as the disturbing implications of their violence sink in. I’m appalled by the racist response in Perth, but I’m also (is this perverse?) happy for you. You’re onto something big, some live raw edge, and that’s more than half the battle toward making great art. Bear down hard, Rod, even if it scares you. Make the bastards squirm. With their yelps to guide you, you’ll find your way in the dark. You will also have great fun.

As my work had never been a mainstream event, Schjeldahl’s remark ‘make the bastards squirm’ has forever sounded like a mantra during subsequent bouts of self-doubt. Through his letters and columns, over the years, I have shared his exhilaration and despair with art. Few writers gave so generously with confidence to let their nerves have words. 70



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As e l a in e ’s p r e g n a n c y p rogressed ,

we discussed marriage. At length we decided on a small service in the garden of one of my fellow lecturers. Come December, we were ready to leave Perth and re-establish ourselves in Alice Springs. It was 44°C the day we left. At dusk, we stopped for supper on the council lawns of Coolgardie. It was strangely soothing to overhear some Aboriginal ladies in the park, next to the town hall. ‘That dog my uncle, you bastard. You don’t be hit him like that.’ That night we camped by the road, not far beyond Coolgardie. The vast sky was sprayed with stars. We hadn’t slept under them since travelling the same road west in January. What a release! A soft breeze protected us as we were watched over by clouds and cared for by grasses. We were headed for Melbourne to spend Christmas there, before returning to the Centre. Onwards ever east, the bitumen rippled under the heat, barely concealing the residual corrugations. We did the rounds of family and friends, and also gathered together a few baby items, the due date by this time being only a few weeks away. I dropped Elaine at her girlfriend’s flat and drove solo to Alice Springs. She travelled the remaining distance by plane. The upside of these long road trips was that they helped me to put the year into review, and such reflections balanced out the vigilance required at the wheel. Though getting back to work and renewing friendships at Whitegate featured in my thoughts, my greatest speculation was the unknown responsibility of parenthood. I could not even envision the multifarious needs of a helpless infant. Would the baby compound our relationship? In Perth, after becoming pregnant, Elaine had voiced some dissatisfaction with our relationship, saying that monogamy didn’t suit her. I had just got over the shock of her admission that she’d fallen for a guy during her trip to England. I hoped that the reality of raising a child would prevail and change her attitude to monogamy. Just after Pimba, the battery broke from its cradle and the terminals 71



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grazed the bonnet, shorting the car’s electrical system. This was only a twohour delay thoughâ•¯–â•¯nothing compared to other trips. The car skidded over the gravel, sunk through deceptive scabs of clay into loose dust, and sidled at weird angles through the thicker sand. The car and I were one, joined in a kind of auto-rodeo of pot-holed alliance. As usual, on the stretch near the Mintupayi turn-off, north of Marla Bore, I could see in the distance an early model car by the side of the road. It was a section where thousands of bits of dissected rubber offal lay on the verges. The car was slung low, crammed with human freight. It was clearly destined for one of the communities west of the highway in the Pitjantjatjara homelands. The man sensed from my ambling advance that I intended to help. ‘You got water?’ he asked. ‘Radiator be empty.’ I started filling their radiator from my plastic, four-litre jerry can. It gulped it all. The driver stood motionless at my side. I could hear a second hissing somewhere on the engine block, distinct from the fuss of the contracting radiator metal. I beckoned the bloke to join me at the driver’s side of the car. Bending further under the bonnet, we could see rusty water draining from the port of a missing welsh plug. I refrained from offering the contents of my last water container. The other eight passengers stayed in the car, which offered them the only shade in the visible distance. I wandered to the back of the vehicle and noticed two flat tyres. I tried to imagine what had led to what and how the situation could be retrieved. There were no legendary bush mechanics aboard, apparently. But fancy depending on me for mechanical advice. ‘You got tea bag?’ the driver asked. I rummaged through my esky. The bloke got under the car and caught the heated water running from the block in his pannikin. Then he dropped the tea bag in. He was not at all flustered when I shrugged off. One outback myth had it that Aboriginal people used their broken vehicles as decoys to abduct or harm whitefellas. Another was that the first 72



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thing tossed out of their cars was the spare tyre, and after that the jack to make way for extra passengers. It is true that the cars were stacked to the gunwales, but the resources were far too scarce to withhold them from circulation.

and arrived in Alice the day after Elaine’s plane landed. We rented a small house in Eastside, coincidently not very far from my old flat. The same day, we drove to Whitegate and received a warm and teary greeting. The women gossiped about relationship comings and goings. Mercia insisted that Elaine sit next to her ‘woman’s way’. We traded stories of travel and experience in Perth for tales of the camp and were hungry for their news. In our absence the town had been subjected to massive rebuilding. Yeperenye, the Aboriginal-owned shopping complex, had been erected and Woolworths had relocated there, vacating a space that would house twin cinemas. The mall had been closed to through traffic, effectively killing the north-eastern area of the central business district. Another huge shopping complex had opened off the mall. It was supervised constantly by uniformed employees, often mistaken by local Aborigines for the police. There was a sail straddling the transept of the mall, the likely congregation point for pedestrians, and a circular raised platform for concerts and meetings, but mostly used to sit on. Concerned resident whitefellas protested about the destruction of public spaces and rebuilding that had happened without any public consultation. Many locals avoided the northern complex for a year or so, also in protest. It took a few weeks for Elaine and I to reorientate ourselves. We wondered how it had felt for the Arrernte to witness the despoliation of their homeland, country that had remained intact for centuries.

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One day we came across a completely befuddled old gentleman stranded in the Yeperenye complex. ‘Scuse me, I Harts Range man. Please, I from country. I can’t get out this buildin’.’ He had been wandering around, unaware how the electronic doors operated, and was suffering from the air-conditioning.

for the house visits from Whitegate families to resume. And, to my surprise and pleasure, while we’d been away the bitumen had been extended as far as camp, reducing the regular belting of my Subaru by half. In our living room, Jude looked through the slides taken of all my paintings made in Perth. He pulled me aside from the huddle one afternoon and whispered that my painting called History Rolling was ‘dangerous’ for other Aboriginal tribes to see, because they might think Arrernte people still did magic things. For this painting, I had Arranye standing mid-point, some other Johnson men closer to the viewer and, at the far right, some young men in a ceremonial dance formation. The images of young men in dance concerned Jude. The ceremonial scene was lifted from one of the photographs in the Spencer and Gillen book. It documented the Arrernte at the end of the nineteenth century. I guessed the location to be the creek at Atherreyurre, a kilometre north of the Telegraph Station. The fact that the Arrernte held their ceremonies close to the Telegraph Station settlement up until Gillen’s time had been my motive in restaging members of the Whitegate community at that specific location. Apart from its popularity as a wedding venue, this being the only sort of ceremony held at the Telegraph Station nowadays, files of tourists daily loop between the historic buildings, the waterhole and their buses.*

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While in Perth, before making the painting, I studied Spencer and Gillen’s photographic collection. I had previously been deterred by the paternalistic tone of the text. Nevertheless, Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen’s glass plate negatives provided virtually state-of-the-art technological documentation of Arrernte ceremonial life. Closer study of the sequences suggested to me that two cameras had been used in tandem, with the anthropologists orchestrating the choreography to fit the lenses. I figured that the more experienced Spencer probably handled the camera close to the action, while Gillen took the more inclusive, panoramic shots. Jude was waiting in the garden at lunchtime the next day. He repeated that History Rolling should not be shown in Alice Springs. He asked if Elaine could leave the room and, when she had gone, he softly sang ceremonial songs. I never got to show the work anywhere apart from Greenhills gallery in Adelaide. It was stolen en route to Abrams gallery in Melbourne. That gallery had shown interest in exhibiting my work and asked me to send a few pieces, so they could decide about its suitability for their venue. I rolled five paintings, including History Rolling, into a tube and sent them by road freight, using a national transport company. Guy Abrams rang at the end of the week to ask why I had sent him an empty tube. I was

*â•… The original buildings were constructed for the people operating the Alice Springs repeater station in 1872. Today there are four beautiful stone buildings, which were rebuilt from the old foundations. In one of the buildings, there were photographs of the various families that had worked the station at the turn of the nineteenth century. There was one photo of Arrernte standing on the large rock on the eastern flank of the Athereyurre/waterhole. Otherwise, the black history of the place had been minimised. There was no mention, for instance, of the Aboriginal Ordinance of 1911 that empowered the Protector of Aborigines in 1932 to round up kids of mixed descent and place them at the station. This paucity of information was redressed in the late 1990s when the Stolen Generation controversy was in the public domain.

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horrified. As the sense of my loss hit me, the acids swirled in the pit of my stomach. Friends consoled me by suggesting the theft was, in one sense, also a form of flattery. Yes. I could concede that, but I was determined to remake the work at a future date.

after another stint in hospital. In the first week of February, Elaine and I took her and Dominic for a picnic to the Valley of the Eagles, 60 kilometres east of town, a site of euro kangaroo Dreaming. Dominic drew my attention to the low acacia scrub dotting the crest of the Eastern Ranges, which he described as hair on a man’s arm. A long, low hill stretching between the highway and Emily Gap was the alkngiltye or orange-yellow tar-vine caterpillar. ‘Arranye’s mother, old Magdaline Johnson, she been got that grub’s story,’ added Dominic. Recalling her stooped walk, I looked at the humped hill and imagined the grub bunching, then flattening as it accordioned over the terrain in its chosen path. ‘Two caterpillar story been running along that hill. An’ every gap, like Emily Gap, that is eagle hunting that caterpillar. He greedy for that one in caterpillar time,’ he told us. At Jessie Gap the eastern flank became, in Dominic’s language, an emu and the sand quarry its fat. There was now an active commercial business at the quarry and Dominic said he was disappointed that Marleen Hayes had never asked for money for the sand trucked from the site. Dominic was aware that Aboriginal people elsewhere demanded and received royalties for mining on their land, but this wasn’t a direct concern for him, as his totemic country was north, near Mt Stirling. ‘Blind snake Dreaming, my country. You see it one time. I be take you,’ he said. Liz z ie wa s l o o ki n g s t ro n g er

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Neither Dominic nor Lizzie went down into the valley with us. They chose to sit in the meagre shadow of a corkwood, while Elaine and I cooled off in the pool below. We plummeted from an overarching branch of whitegum. Ripples lapped to the edges, reflecting fluorescent on the red sandstone walls. There was a riot of vivid colours. Turquoise dragonflies fanned the brown water. The greasy cascades of rock arranged themselves in bands of indigo and orange to green-black. We moved from one cliff side to the other, hugging the shade with the insects. A wasp attacked a large black spider by our towels. Its sting paralysed the spider, freezeframing it in a rearing pose. Then it dragged the spider, four times its size, to its nest a metre away. Dominic had told us that the veins of white quartz trapped in the rumpled pink boulders were the fat in the remaining flesh of the fighting dog and the perentie lizard. I became mesmerised by the blue sky, which was intensified by the ochres of the narrow, spiralling valley. The water hardly ruffled the six pools it coursed through before plunging over a 5-metre waterfall. Thus, the sky seemed to have fallen in six immaculate flakes to the valley floor. After a few hours, we clambered up the wall to where Dominic and Lizzie were waiting. Together we trooped down to the car park, made some sandwiches and tea, then bumped on down the track to the Ross River Highway. On the return trip, Dominic spotted a huge perentie as we sped towards Jessie Gap. We all got out and Dominic and I grabbed some rocks. We stalked within 5 metres from where the perentie lay immobile in the hope of going undetected. Dominic’s first throw caught it on the thigh. He motioned me to throw. I was too astonished at its great size, its flicking tongue and dazzling pattern to comply. When I did, I was lamely ineffective. The lizard took off at terrific speed with us in pursuit. It was limping but had no difficulty gaining a rabbit warren. By the time we got back to the car, Lizzie had summed up the event, graciously excusing our failure. ‘Rod. You be pick up wrong rock.’ 77



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In camp, Mercia talked about her intention of buying Steve Tucker’s blue station wagon, affectionately called the ‘pachyderm’, as in elephant, for the deterioration of its upholstery and crumpled panels. But he was not willing to surrender it just then. ‘Next time you see that Kwementyaye, make him a cup of tea and put in it six spoons of salt from me,’ she laughed. Though there were several wheel-less hulks used for sleeping, no one in camp owned a running car. Visitors and relatives owned the only cars I ever saw there. Mostly they were from Santa Teresa, Harts Range and Atitykala, all communities at least an hour distant. Ford station wagons were a great favourite. You could get an early 1980s model from one of half a dozen yards on the North Stuart Highway that specialised in the thousand-dollar range geared to the blackfella market. Steve and I were talking about Mercia’s salted tea as we ate together that night in the Wild Waters Café. We had a window seat with a view onto the dry river. He’d parked the sleek blue pachyderm over the road by the public toilets. We gazed at it as we talked. It seemed to be moving slowly south. Was it the Cooper’s stout we’d been drinking? ‘Shit!’ said Steve, and almost in one motion had knocked his plate from the table and was out the door. By the time I exited the café, both he and his car were 50 metres in front. When I caught up, we were both gasping. ‘Ah, shit,’ Steve muttered. ‘Look at the bloody window. That bastard’s smashed it to hot-wire the ignition. He’s run off to join his mates in the bloody river somewhere.’ Steve reported the offence to the police and we returned to Wild Waters for dessert. A few months later the car was successfully stolen from the Shell service station while Steve was inside paying for his petrol. It was found, wrecked and abandoned, 20 kilometres west of town in the creek at Â�Honeymoon Gap, with a few more creases in its tired skin. 78



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one evening, Xavier and Petrina were by the front door. Inside we discussed ideas for paintings. The idea of Xavier holding a birdcage inside the prison was one. When he had gone to Big House last time, I had visited him and noticed a rather large aviary in the vegetable garden. What about a modest visual pun on ‘jailbird’? Christopher lobbed by soon after and we smiled as we hugged each other. He removed his t-shirt. ‘Give me that one you been got,’ he insisted, lightly tugging at the singlet I was wearing. I wasn’t willing to relinquish it and so he then asked for a glass of water. I laid my journal from the past year in Perth on the lounge room floor so the three of them could peruse the photos contained in its pages. I named the students at Carine when Xavier pointed to each one. They snickered when they saw Elaine, standing resplendently pregnant between two boulders at Green Rocks pool, south of Perth. They reckoned she was caressing giant testicles. It seemed a good moment to show them an artefact I’d recently been given. Melbourne friends had passed to me a bullroarer they thought would be more appropriately housed in Alice Springs. Phillip Jones, an anthropologist from the South Australian Museum, confirmed that it was Southern Arrernte, and was probably made during the early telegraph line trading days for the booming artefact market. The souvenir bartering system had operated from the beginning of contact. Christopher and Xavier inspected it. They laughed in embarrassment and escorted me to my bedroom. Xavier ran his fingers over its geometric incisions and admired its subtly twisting blade. They spoke softly of its secrecy. Yes, women knew what it was when they heard its whirring. But women should never see this thing. It was intended to keep women away at the end of initiation ceremonies. It should not be in the lounge room where anyone could have access to it.

On m y r e t u r n h o m e f ro m College

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On 2 2 F e b r u a ry 1 9 8 8 at 5 . 3 0 a.m. ,

Elaine had a strong urge to go over to Emily Gap. It was a special place for her, the place she had chosen to celebrate her thirtieth birthday. She had invited three friends, including me, for a moonlight supper on the sandy beach at the southern entrance to the gap. We had only recently been introduced at that stage and I was delighted to join them. That night, as we bade each other farewell, we kissed for the first time. Here we were, three years on, a day or so away from our baby’s due date. It is said that ayepe-arenye, the caterpillar, as with all the Dreamings, worked its power whether you are conscious of it or not. For Arrernte, Emily Gap was the location of the caterpillar increase place. But we did not know then of the symbolism attributed to this place. We drove the twenty minutes along the Ross River Highway and parked under the rivergums. We climbed the eastern flank to see the sunrise. I was amazed at Elaine’s determination, given her bulk, and was alarmed by every puff of shale that slipped from beneath her feet. We wanted to fix an image and activity to the birth. As the sun hoisted itself quickly above the eastern stretch of range, it gave a pale blue tinge to the foliage at its base. For twenty minutes or so, this trick of light made the MacDonnell Ranges appear to float above the plain. Budgerigars cut an iridescent green cape through the rivergums far below. Fairy martins hovered above the ridge, pecking at the insects skeining the currents rising in the early sun. A fat grasshopper, quartz and ochre spotted, the colours of its circumstances, jittered between us. Its camouflage was unmasked by prodding ants. Yes, these amazing images have been successfully fixed in my memory. That evening after supper, Elaine’s contractions began and we stayed home until they intensified. My high school art teacher and subsequent friend, Royden Irvine, had arrived from Sydney a day earlier, especially to witness our child’s birth. The hospital was an 8-minute drive from home. Elaine lay groaning in the staging room and reluctantly asked for gas to relieve the pain. The nurse unceremoniously placed her in a semi-sitting 80



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position and wheeled her down the corridor. We’d hoped to use the newly appointed birthing suite but another couple had arrived minutes before us. We were herded into one of the hospital’s standard wards. Throughout the labour, Royden was actively engaged, fulfilling his support role. On 23 February, at 5.21 a.m., after a long night of labour, Ronja squeezed out and the nurse plopped her on Elaine’s breast. I was overcome with joy, excitement and tears. Here was my first child covered in a milky film of vernix. She sniffed a few seconds around Elaine’s nipple and then was on to it. By ten we were home, both weary and ecstatic, drinking up the pleasure of our lovely child, and gazing appreciatively into each other’s eyes. After a few days we swaddled her up and went to Wigleys Gorge for her initial impressions of country. Again, at the time, we were unaware of the importance of this site for women’s healthy reproduction. The day after we returned from the maternity ward, Jude knocked at the door. He had picked some pink bougainvilleas from a nearby garden. He was tipsy. ‘I love that little baby girl,’ he said. ‘What ’is name, again?’ ‘Ronja.’ ‘Oh, Arranye,’ he repeated. He asked again if it was a boy. It was as if he had hoped it would be. He wanted to take our baby son through business. ‘No. Definitely it’s a girl.’ ‘I know,’ he said, pausing, ‘it’s a girl.’ Resigned to the fact, he asked me to take a photo of him with Ronja lying in a coolamon, a carved wooden cradle, from Pitjantjatjara country with the pink flowers as a blanket. He then asked me to relocate to the bedroom. He wanted to talk ‘business’. Young men were going to be made in the following weeks. He started singing songs. He was very worked up, relating how they cut boys but mostly demonstrating with his hands. Maybe I wasn’t expressing 81



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sufficient conviction. He unzipped his pants and showed me the cut head of his penis. It was a crude and open lateral incision, still looking sore. All the while he looked me straight in the eyes as he chanted softly in Arrernte and pumped his thighs. I was compelled by his deep engagement. He zipped his pants, removed his shirt and tied up his hair to dance. ‘Old grey-haired men be do like this.’ He was breathless. All this unsettled me, removed a protective layer, and plunged me into deeper feelings that I didn’t feel equipped to deal with. Had the birth precipitated in him some wish to communicate his own deepest experience? Was he demonstrating that men’s initiation was of equal importance to procreation? I was too surprised to ask him. A little while later when we came back out to the lounge room, Elaine exclaimed that the string beans had overcooked. I served Jude supper, which he gingerly accepted. Much of it finished on the floor. The long arcs he made to his mouth with the spoon kept missing the spot. His eyes fixed on mine throughout. Again he checked on Ronja’s gender with me. Then he asked for the bullroarer. Four or five times he spun it in the front garden until it roared. His effort was such that he nearly took off! I wanted to show him my current painting, Hunting, in which he featured. We walked to the college studio to see it. He identified the various figures but was most impressed by his spotted mutt, Wungi. ‘That dog real smart. Good legs.’ I dropped him at Whitegate. Please would I bring a camera to Whitegate’s community celebration after the men’s initiation, he wanted to know. Again he declared his love for our little girl and said that the flowers would remind us that this was so.

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when the new college librarian asked after the Spencer and Gillen volume that had been borrowed in my name by Graeme Hayes. It was more than a year overdue. I was surprised to learn that Graeme had acted on my suggestion, defying his timid nature by summoning the courage to enter the college, a whitefella institution. I asked around camp and one thread led to another. Graeme was not in town, I was told. Jude felt responsible for the book and promised to pay for a replacement with his next dole cheque. I struggled to convince him that it was no longer available for purchase. Dominic was sitting at Jude’s fire and sensed my urgency. At first he said, ‘It been get rusty from Jude. He put it under rubbish bin an’ I burn it.’ He let me squirm a minute then added that he had looked after it for a while when he camped at the Hayes outstation the previous year. Dominic drew a diagram in the dirt of where his bed was. He jabbed his drawing with the stick he had been chewing. This was where the book lay, beneath his pillow. ‘I be look after that law book proper good, Rod.’ I stressed the importance of the book to the library. Jude countered that it was important to Alphonse Hayes too. ‘Alphonse be leader of the pack.’ Jude and I drove the 35 kilometres east to Antulye, the Hayes outstation where Alphonse camped, hoping to retrieve the book. Compared to Whitegate it was an immaculate turnout. There was a duck and geese enclosure, vines growing on wire mesh to provide shade; the ground had been swept and there were irons in the fire for marking music sticks. Alphonse rose from where he was sitting with his wife, Mary Johnson, and sons, Graeme and John. He slowly approached the car. With Jude’s help, I told him what we wanted. He never spoke but wandered away towards the business camp and retrieved the book from an ironwood tree. It was now coverless, and rolled to fit a termite hole in the trunk. I t wa s e a r ly Ma r ch

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The men portrayed in the book were grandfathers to Alphonse’s generation, several of whom he recognised. Alphonse was a senior law man and had consulted the photos as they offered him helpful indications of ceremonial decorations and dance formations. When I took it back to the library, the librarian was shocked by its condition and said my friend could keep it. As one of the library’s regular staff customers I felt awkwardly compromised in admitting how the book’s neglect had occurred. She was new to our institution, but not new to Aboriginal lifestyle. We shared a shrug and a smile when I recounted Alphonse’s somewhat reluctant retrieval of the book but I felt sad for the library. The book was part of its small and excellent holdings of literature about the Centre. Still, I was happy to be able to hand it back to Alphonse. The photos of his relatives had come full circle.

the April night, dividing the known world. Hills were pulverised, discuses were shaved from stones, and saplings strafed into spears. At dawn the fury had subsided and we wandered outside. An apricot sky crept over the crinkled ranges. We wore the sky’s glow as we stood on the verandah, passing the baby between us. As the sun got higher, the clouds darkened and thickened. A sudden shower caused the bitumen road before the house to steam, diffusing the mounting humidity. Just before sunset there was a knock at the door accompanied by low talk and coughing. Some of the Whitegate kids shuffled into the house with Christopher and Bernadine, shaking rain-pearls from their greasy hair. They were totally drenched in spite of the plastic raincoats they had just bought from the second-hand shop. The bigger kids wanted to hold the baby and fussed over her. They were in a hurry to get to camp and wanted a lift. Christopher jumped in the front passenger seat and stared silently ahead.

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As they got out he said, ‘Men sit in front seat, Rod. Not woman.’ I turned the car back towards town and rolled over the cattlegrid along Undoolya Road. Under the cattlegrid, I could see the channel was filling. Some 212 millilitres of rain had fallen within twenty-four hours, producing sudden flooding. The river had muttered and seethed through the night, sweeping rafted trash from the camps and debris from the guttered upcountry. Torrents made brisk files to the river. After three days the water retreated. Tree matter had flattened and twisted against the great gums. In the curing mud, grass, cartons and empty tins were composed into weirdly rigid homologues, occasionally flattered by discarded clothing. A young Aboriginal woman, who had most likely been asleep in the riverbed near town, was found bloated, bleached and wedged up in the fork of a rivergum, near Amoonguna. The rains signified a change of seasons. Temperate March. Tree martins, cued to the dimming light, massed mid-air to maul the remnant mosquitoes, spotting the sky like currants stirred in a cloud mix. A few cooler nights and the mosquito population quickly dropped away, making outdoor camping very attractive. We drove east as cirrus scrummed together, for a 15-minute curtain call before sunset. The full moon prised itself from the track ahead; it looked within arm’s reach, fat and sassy. Its yolk whitened as the night passed, bleaching broad swatches of sand between the trees. Moonstruck. Could you be nocturnally blistered, I wondered? The campfire flickered low, alluring large moths that careered into the embers. I woke several times to shift into the rivergum shadow and found myself drawn to the satellites and meteorites unbuttoning from the crystal firmament and spearing through the pitch. The busy sky seemed so close that the meteorites looked to be fizzing to extinction just over the ranges. Once or twice brumbies clip-clopped nearby. In the morning we saw they had hoofed out sand around the soakage. A thin film of oily water 85



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was still evident in a small patch at its centre. I knelt to run my fingers against the damp grains. The morning air was so abundant my ribs ached. Camping out was an elixir, a charge. Right at that moment, it seemed the best of all possible reasons to be living in the Centre.

the following night when Â�Noelly and his wife, Rosita, dropped in for a cup of tea. Elaine and I were still rhapsodising to each other over our first night’s camping with Ronja. None of our guests were impressed. What were we on about? They camped out every night, with no choice in the matter. An hour later a man selling encyclopaedias managed to squeeze past my front door defence and unfolded his wares on the lounge room floor. He pattered on, a volume a minute, boggling our eyes with fourcolour maps, transparencies of human anatomy and flow-charts. ‘Who that fella?’ Jude asked diplomatically in the kitchen, where I had retreated to make tea. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘But he sound like he your friend. He talkin’ fast like drunken man. Might be little mad, that one.’ The salesman continued prattling. After twenty minutes Jude politely excused himself. ‘Too much talking, I suppose. I must be went.’ I rolled my eyes at Jude as he passed through the front door. The salesman was spent and took the cue to leave as Ronja started crying. ‘That a greedy milk crying baby there,’ said Rosita. We were consoled by comments like these. Neither Elaine nor I had family in Alice Springs and we were always grateful for such concern and love. Among various pieces of advice we were given was a warning not to carry the baby when she could walk for herself. We were to take her to

J u d e wa s h av in g s u p p e r wi th us

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old Arranye, who would make her walking legs strong by singing his emu song over them. A few weeks later, Elaine, Ronja and I visited the camp at sunset. There had been a recent meeting at Emily Soak with the Central Land Council, government representatives, and the Indigenous Hayes and Johnson families. A significant number of senior people had filed back to Whitegate to discuss the meeting. I had never seen so many family members gathered at the one time. Among them was an old man from Ilpeye Ilpeye, who dangled a twenty-dollar bill in front of Ronja for her to grab. When she failed to respond he handed the note to Elaine, telling her to buy some good luck for the baby. He told us that clearance had been given for the occupants of Whitegate to construct concrete houses, the same as at Ilpeye Ilpeye. Eight corrugated iron sheds were built several years on for shelter, but until this day, the concrete houses have not been constructed. We were about to go home when Mercia asked if we would take her in to hospital with her husband, Joseph Johnson senior. He had been drinking rum against medical advice and was vomiting blood. His skin had a greyish-yellow cast in the gloaming. He sat glumly beside her, completely indifferent to us. I dragged Joseph into the car and we drove to Casualty. At the front entrance I helped him to his feet and Mercia supported him as they shuffled through the double glass doors.

On F r iday 2 9 Ap ril 1 9 8 8 ,

my fortieth birthday, we movedâ•¯–â•¯as first home ownersâ•¯–â•¯to a new address. This was our consolidation, a neat little place with an established native garden. Arranye endorsed the property when he heard my news. ‘Young fella, that been market garden one time. Chinese fella been make it. Oh, Afghan time, I been think.’ 87



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There were horse yards nearby, and when Ronja grew a little older I would stroll with her before breakfast and hold her close to their pale grey nostrils as they nuzzled towards her. She would stroke their velvet noses until their lips rolled back over their teeth. Jude and Bartholomew Johnson were the first people from Whitegate to visit us in our new home. I fired up the stove and we were soon nursing cups of tea. Jude asked for the green law book so that he could talk about the ceremonies with Bartholomew. The discussion about ceremony inspired me to put on a record of Mevlana Sufi flute music and perform a few minutes of the ceremonial dance I had studied in the late 1970s under the eye of the Sheik’s son, Jelaluddin Loras. Jude and Bartholomew watched my whirling appreciatively from the couch. Afterwards, I put on some Congo music and mentioned it was performed by the pygmies in Central Africa. ‘I been read church paper this morning ’bout guardian angel,’ Jude said. ‘What kind of paper?’ ‘You know it. Little book, I suppose. Like comic,’ he added. ‘You believe it, Phantom?’ Jude asked, his finger touching his lips. Bartholomew looked at me expectantly. ‘It’s just a story in a comic,’ I explained. ‘Them people singing now be Phantom’s friends. Same mob in that comic,’ Jude said. In his opinion, the pygmies were also a type of guardian angel. His pronouncements were delivered with the same immense gravity with which he always spoke. I do not ever recall him changing key. I had nearly always been aware of Jude’s presence before he appeared. Whether I was painting in the lounge room or just having a chat with Elaine, an image of him would slip into mind. The air somehow altered, or my attention to it did. Within a few minutes, he would appear outside the house where he would lightly call my name or break a twig to announce himself. 88



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One Saturday afternoon I sensed he was outside and found him propped against the carport pillar. He reached up and asked me to hold his hand. Our hands softly enfolded. He told me that Alphonse and Graeme Hayes had been killed the day before in a ‘three times rollover’ near Amoonguna on the Ross River Highway. Once again, Jamesy Johnson was culpable. He had been intoxicated and warned not to drive. Worse still, he had walked away from the crash and not told anyone. For this transgression he would be cursed with a magic song. ‘I’ve got no more business now,’ Jude said in a distressed tone. Dominic and Lizzie arrived some time later. Jude’s somnolence made me uneasy and I suggested we all go out and see Crocodile Dundee 2. But the clichés of the film failed us and we returned home for a supper of honeyed crumpets. Jude was awkward, seeming to eat only to oblige the rest of us. He had such minimal control. The crumpets kept slipping from the plate to the table but he was not the slightest bit perturbed or self-conscious about his inept table manners. He was attracted to the piano we had just acquired, like no other object except the Spencer and Gillen book. He stood at the keyboard, depressed the black keys, and stared into the wall as if it bore some musical notation, his fingers in irresponsible medley. The music suffused him: an improvised harmonious jazz that moved me too.

As t h e c o o l win t er m o r n ings set in ,

I started to partake in the Sunday family hunting on a regular basis. I’m not gun crazy in any sense of the word; I think the only time I was into guns was a flit of rabbiting as a teenager. Although not interested in handling guns per se, I joined in all other facets of the day, including tracking, carting carcasses, cooking and occasionally relishing the fresh meat. Sundays were the easiest days to organise hunting or picnic outings, as many rested from the grog. 89



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We drove out towards Emily Soak on one occasion, my car packed to the hilt with adults and kids. Xavier indicated to slow down. I tensed up. He got out and cocked the magnum .23. His brother Eric said it was an anthill. Anyone can make mistakes. But we hadn’t gone a hundred metres when Xavier again asked me to stop. He crept over the trough of the steeply cambered track. This time, even I could see it was a horse. David Johnson quietly relieved Xavier of the rifle. David was Arranye and Gregory’s youngest brother, small like them, but more muscular. ‘That nanthe, Xavier,’ chided Jennifer Johnson, ‘not kere aherre.’ Hunting kangaroo sharpened the senses. Tracking, and assessing scats, movements and particular birdcalls all informed us as we hunted. We would walk for three to four hours, carrying only guns and water in 2-litre cordial bottles. David helped me identify various scats: the cubed scat of the kere arenge/euro kangaroo, and the soft-cornered scat of the kere aherre/red kangaroo. The red kangaroo, being the largest living marsupial, occupied the open plains. The euro, the hairy one, was smaller and chunkier, and prized for its sweet meat, nurtured by grazing on the herbs in hilly country. While we hunted our talk was minimal and replaced by gestures. I was told that day to turn my red-chequered shirt inside out, as it would frighten prey. We stooped and walked slowly over the low ridges, keeping in the cover of rocks and trees, and upwind of the quarry, while retaining as straight a line as possible. The crusts of quartz, David whispered, were the shit of the mythological witchetty grubs as they made their procession towards Emily Gap. He slipped his clacking thongs up over his ankles. I followed his steps, soundless in the soft sand. Once or twice there was a snorting and a thump on the ground as we surprised our quarry and ourselves. The roos dashed off. Maybe two or three of them. Later David saw what I could not see, until my vision followed the barrel of his gun. He crouched on one knee and slid a bullet into the 90



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chamber, paused, then stood and walked closer. My tension mounted as I followed. Surely it would sense us from 30 metres? A misplaced step on a twig. A shirt catching on a bramble. Any twitch would give us away. My entire body felt like an eye. The roo turned in our direction and stopped munching. David crouched again and squeezed the trigger. The crack of the gun seemed incommensurate with death, inconsequential to the expanse of the surrounding plain which swallowed it. But the bullet was not lost. It collided with the buck’s cranium, splitting and removing a sizeable chunk of jaw. Ignorant of the connection between the crack and the fizzing trajectory of the .23, the roo had leapt at the sound, but towards the bullet, tumbling mid-flight to the gravel. A clean kill with no damage to the edible choice cuts. Xavier felt around the roo’s eyes, telling us that there was plenty of fat there that would make for good eating. The buck was so large we butchered it on the spot, each of us lugging a quarter to the car. When we got back to camp the meat was distributed systematically, the male hunters proving their worth through such sharing. Thereafter, when each hunt was mentioned, each feature of it was replayed. The places we walked over were remembered for the food they had provided. While the men and the older boys hunted on foot, which could consume near a whole day, the women and smaller kids stayed under the rivergums by a fire. Short lengths of these gums were hacked from the banks and carved with tomahawks into lizards, snakes and music sticks. The women brought bits of fencing wire and rotated them in the embers until they were hot enough to blaze simple, repetitive patterns on the artefacts. The kids helped their mothers scrape water from a soakage in the creek. The billies soon simmered away. The women also brought flour and syrup to make johnnycake or damper. It was just as well. More often than not the men returned empty-handed. This form of hunting was not the exclusive or preferred practice of Arrernte men. If a Toyota was available, they would drive it hard across 91



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all sorts of terrain and shoot roos from the cabin. This method guaranteed meat. The dead roos were tied with their own sinew to the bull-bar or slung on roof racks. In places with water and good feed, kangaroo populations were obliterated at rates unknown to the fathers of most of the men. The kids also demonstrated their hunting skills from my moving station wagon. Even without guns, they would pick off an eye with a slingshot, causing the roo to stumble. A dog would leap from the car and tackle it, and the boys would finish the job by clubbing the head. The rainwater that collected in the gutters along the roads and highways nourished the desert grasses and attracted livestock and kangaroos. On the odd occasion when I passed a freshly hit roo, I heaved it into the back of the wagon and took it to camp. ‘Where you been get ’im?’ ‘North Road, on the sixteen mile.’ ‘Oh, that Stephens’ mob. That okay, that one.’ Roo steaks were available in the supermarkets, but the families bought minced meat or lamb chops. They had a problem with the supermarket kangaroo. No one in camp could verify whose country the meat came from and what part of the animal had been butchered. The roo tails were, it seemed, a different matter; the same questions didn’t apply to these fattiest of morsels. The small, local shops kept freezers full of furred tails and ran a brisk trade in them. It was common to see Aboriginal women with plastic carry bags bobbing along with this ludicrous luggage, protruding tails lapping at their thighs.

that her birthday was on the last day of June. At her request we agreed to hold a party for her that following Wednesday night. We insisted that there would be no alcohol. Elaine baked a wonderful carob cake.

Pe t rin a h a d to l d El ain e

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Xavier, Dominic and Lizzie arrived half an hour before Petrina. I heard her muttering to herself as she swayed up the driveway. But before I could say a word, Xavier roundly scolded her for getting drunk. She sulked off to the steps of the chicken coop while Xavier and Dominic turned the meat on the barbecue. I failed to persuade either of them of my culinary prowess. They declined the exotic rice pilaf that I had ripened with bay leaves and cinnamon bark. ‘You cookin’ with gum tree, Rod. Bark and leaf. We don’t be eat that one. Not like it, gum tree.’ ‘Why doesn’t Petrina join us? The party is for her, after all?’ I asked. Xavier yelled for her. But she just sat there in the dark silence for a further 20 minutes. Then we realised that she was waiting to be ‘called in’, like at bush ceremony. She was keen for the song and to blow out her candles. We put the meat on hold and ate the cake first. Now Petrina was happy. Dominic belted out his repertoire of country and western and Top End gospel songs. Then Xavier snatched my guitar from him to crank out a tune, but soon realised that his miserable thrumming discouraged the celebrations. He handed it back to Dominic. Before retiring, Xavier crammed the candles into his pockets as souvenirs. ‘This one be nice, quiet party. No grog,’ he said. Dominic wanted to pick up his swag from Amoonguna before being dropped at Whitegate.* We drove to Amoonguna, slowing and hushing, respectfully, on the Ross River Highway where the recent

*â•… Amoonguna was set up in 1960 by the government as a showcase for its assimilation policies. High on the agenda was the removal of blackfellas from the town, after dark. All blackfellas, that is, not just Arrernte. The resulting mix of cultural groups created its special brew of difficulties. Offensive vagrancy, grog abuse and violence were established practices at the settlement according to newspaper reports of those times. The same complaints about blackfellas made in today’s papers were articulated just as vehemently then. The journalists had changed. But the blackfella family names endured into the current policy of self-determination.

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rollÂ�over had occurred. A collection of concrete houses and dongas sat beside the sealed road. The land around here was dotted with peppercorns, a popular introduced species that accompanied settlement in Alice after World War 1. Most of the houses were damaged, and three or four gutted by fire. It looked like it had succumbed to a recent siege. A few days after the party, when we noticed we were missing our knife, we recalled Xavier covetously eyeing the meat cutting. I told Mercia of our suspicions. She tongue-lashed her younger ‘jailbird’ brother. Â�Xavier’s larrikin, teasing behaviour was flagrantly opportunistic. He had told Mercia we had given him the knife and that it wasn’t in camp anyway. The next weekend Mercia, Peter Yungi Johnson (David and Â�Arranye’s brother) and some kids accompanied us to Little Well. Only days before, Gregory Johnson had paid three hundred dollars for the Ingkerreke Outstation Service people to take David, Janet, Frieda, Xavier, Petrina, Joany McCormack and Eileen Ross out there. The first thing I noticed as I unsnibbed the car door was Xavier slipping our knife under a blanket. Elaine and I felt awkward about starting our weekend with the issue of the knife, but I was sure we couldn’t let the matter slide. Mercia again started right into Xavier. ‘What you stealin’ from Rod for? He’s our friend. Where’s your shame?’ We began setting up our camp. I struggled to belt some pegs into the pebbly surface for our mosquito net. We hadn’t counted on the swarms of flies in constant attendance. They heavied up Ronja’s eyelashes and Elaine improvised her a net from an onion bag. A few weeks in town and I’d forgotten what a pest they were. Except in the wettest of years, the town’s gradual greening since the 1970s seemed to make for an invisible deterrence to bush flies. As soon as the net was erected we retreated inside and watched fifty nyingke/finches flitting beneath a scraggly eremophila. As if by some subtle gaseous exchange, they seemed to have been inhaled holus-bolus by the 94



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shrub. Then, with twittering consensus, they would reappear and dash in sudden arcs for the water tank. After we ate our lunch, Gregory asked me to drive him 10 kilometres to Kevin Pick’s abode at Todd River Downs Station, in the hope of getting a nanny goat to eat. Kevin’s father, Taffy Pick, was born in Wales and had come to the Centre during the Depression and mined for gold at Arltunga. He married Ada Smith, a part Aboriginal woman, and had two daughters and a son with her. Ada was the sister of Walter and Willie Smith, both legendary bushmen.* We crossed the Todd flood-out to get to Kevin’s sheds. The track was a mix of deep sand, riverbanks and ruts left by Kevin’s Toyota. Gidgee trees grew on the Little Well flank and boxwood on the Pinjee Pound side, where most of Kevin’s horses ran. The grass was lush after the rain and redolent with grasshoppers, on which the artewe, bush turkeys or buzzards, gorged themselves. David shot one from the car. It flew several metres then floundered to the ground. He also shot two kangaroos. The second didn’t fall, so we got out and trailed its blood drips. He could tell from its uneven tracks that it had taken the bullet in the left leg. After 15 minutes, he decided to track it later when we returned from Kevin’s. By then it would have weakened. There was an uneasy silence when we pulled up in front of Kevin’s caravan. He had fine, olive skin and bright penetrating blue eyes, the

*â•… Walter, the subject of Dick Kimber’s evocative history, Man from Arltunga, was born in 1893 and bred in Arranye’s country. He created the well by dynamite at Uluralkwe/ Little Well in 1929. Though of mixed descent, he was a major law man and teacher, an Ingkarte. Like Walter, as a youth Arranye frequently journeyed from Oodnadatta with Afghan cameleers, servicing various pastoral properties. Willie, Walter’s brother, later took the lease on Todd River Downs Station, at Pinjee, from old Ted Hayes. Willie’s nephew Kevin Pick, who had worked the horses for him, now occupies the station. The Johnsons made a successful fight in court for the tiny excision of land at Little Well, after a neighbouring pastoralist, one of the Bloomfields, bulldozed the well to discomfort them.

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inheritance of his Welsh side. He was upset in the belief that the Johnsons wanted to have him run off the block at Pinjee on the Todd River Downs Station lease. He suspected the Johnsons were in league with the Central Land Council. This wasn’t the case. The government anthropologist had perpetrated this malice, setting him against the Johnsons. But the gossip still had him riled. ‘I seen that old man, Arranye, there talkin’ in court. He was makin’ like all youse Johnsons want this place for yourselves.’ The old man had appeared in court to settle his claim on Little Well. The Central Land Council’s efforts to protect Indigenous interests were constantly buffeted by the Country Liberal Party government (which had enjoyed uninterrupted power for nearly a quarter of a century and ran shamelessly racist tactics at elections). The questions asked in court by the government counsel were couched so that Arranye’s relationship to Kevin didn’t emerge. The questions didn’t allow Arranye to expand very much. Nor did they reveal how he valued Kevin and didn’t want him chased off. Though Gregory and the others spoke to Kevin in Arrernte, in which he was fluent, he answered them in English. He belittled Peter, who stood on the far side of the vehicle, away from the rest of us. ‘What’s up with you, Peter? You’re pretty quiet there,’ he taunted. ‘You been drinking too much of that cheeky water again?’ Kevin wanted David and Peter to do some fencing for him. They agreed and Kevin said he would pick them up later that week. We were in the car and about to leave when they finally broached the subject of the goat. Kevin promised to deliver it that night, which he did. Returning over the flood-out, we stopped and followed the roo tracks ten minutes further this time. The blood trail thickened. But then we lost the tracks. The animal turned into cushions of heavier grass and its narrow path became embowered in burr-heavy weeds. We had one roo anyway and goat to follow. I wasn’t usually one to salivate around the 96



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barbecue, but I regarded fresh roo as the chocolate of meats. I ate breathlessly that evening, with a canine ferocity that tickled Dominic. ‘Look like it eatin’ you, Rod,’ he laughed. Arranye had once told me that he preferred euro to plains kangaroo. He showed me a birthmark on his calf muscle, the same place where roos were speared. He wasn’t so cautious as to abstain, but he wouldn’t relish it, mindful of his link to the plains kangaroo through his Dreaming. We left for town the next morning, while the buzzard boiled in an old flour drum, the offal being fought over by Gregory’s dogs. ‘Don’t forget. You tell Ingkerreke mob we be here when you get home,’ Gregory reminded me. Gregory was now able to contact the Ingkerreke Outstation Service Centre in town on his new solar-powered radio. Unfortunately for him, the radio was a one-way machine. The town end was not always attended and he would sometimes spend a frustrating day or two trying to get through. Whenever they made it into town, they would spend the morning at Coles getting fresh meat to last the first few days. There was no refrigeration so they’d also get tinned meat, usually corned beef. There would be tea, sugar, flour, salt and cooking oil. Once the meat ran out, they were left to forage for lizards to supplement the tea and damper. Gregory didn’t have a gun and his one eye wasn’t good enough anyway. He’d lost an eye as a teenager when playing around a munitions dump in the 1950s. His mate’s finger had exploded in his face. If kids were there, they would have their slingshots out for budgeriÂ� gars and zebra finches. The small birds never ventured far from water and were easy to disturb into flocks, which swelled into a larger target. Dozens of puny carcasses could be pinged within half an hour. Pigeons also provided supplementary flesh. Urbanised whitefellas invariably recoiled from what they saw as cruelty in the Indigenous kids who played with lizards and birds until their last twitches of life had been teased out of them. 97



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During Gregory’s longer absences from the outstation, such as a recent funeral, the dogs would have to fend for themselves. They were an odd assortment of colours, shapes and sizes. ‘Lady’ was his favourite and boss of the pack. Lady had been resourceful enough to be the sole survivor of two starvation stanzas. Gregory had returned to find the dogs dead around the sheds. He could never gain continuous occupancy of Â�Little Well without a vehicle of his own. Moreover, with his poor vision he couldn’t get a licence, and his younger brothers regularly lost their licences from driving convictions.

my relationship with Arranye. He loved Ronja and called her his little tyape akweke or witchetty grub. Without subscribing to Arrernte perceptions, I could resonate with his description of her as an appetising morsel. I kissed and made myself dizzy on the scent of her gorgeous little fat body. ‘Too much greedy for that one,’ said the old man. Arranye sang his ‘emu walking’ medicine song over a tin of fat that had been infused with utnerrenge/emu bush. He then rubbed it along Ronja’s legs to ‘strengthen them’. The emu bush, with its drooping leaves and red flowers, was easy to identify. An elegantly patterned edible grub, utnerrengatye fed on its leaves. Knowledge of its medicinal properties was widespread among the Arrernte. It was used to brush sacred objects and babies were sometimes held over the smoke of its burning leaves. Young initiates also were smoked with emu bush. Many of the kids in camp received Arranye’s emu walking medicine. He regarded most of the Arrernte kids as his grandchildren. They were all little grubs living under the power of the Emily Gap Dreaming. And he related to Ronja in this way too. ‘I be spoil them proper,’ he would say.

I t wa s h e a r t e ni n g to d e v elop

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When the mobile food van rolled into camp, he would hurriedly dig his pockets for coins and pass them around to the kids, who delighted in ice creams, lollies and soft drinks. The Whitegate kids often came to our house, with or without adults. They played with Ronja and everything else within reach. Trinkets, toys, pens and papers were shifted within minutes of them entering. And they were in and out constantly, never shutting the door no matter how often I reminded them. There were no doors to speak of at camp. They always asked for fruit. Sometimes we noticed small change had gone after their departure. At one stage Ricky Ryder entered the house twice during the day when we were out, taking food and a few dollar coins near the phone. Another time he larked off with Elaine’s bike. I complained to his mother, Jennifer Johnson, and said we wanted him to return the bike. She sent him to guide me to it in the scrub. Reluctantly, we started locking the door after that and being more careful about leaving coins about the place. About two months later, Ricky broke a window after finding the house locked. He took some eggs and a few oranges. No great detective work on my part. The shells and peels were on the kitchen counter. I approached Jennifer and Eric Neil, his step-dad, and asked for recompense for the window. They promised to pay me the following pension day. On that day, Jennifer called me over to a card game. She had raised the eighty dollars from her winnings, and counted off four twenties boisterously before the small gambling circle. As I left she said, ‘Hey Rod, you got any eggs?’ We had chickens, but they had just gone off the lay. ‘No.’ ‘What about between your legs?’ ‘Yeah. Eggs between the legs,’ chimed Eric. The gambling circle erupted in laughter. I stared back with an embarrassed grin.

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that Dominic’s athletic ease and perennial cowboy apparel made him an attractive portrait model, so I invited him to pose for drawing classes at college. He was shy at first but, once he got the hang of it, he loved posing and wandered from easel to easel in the breaks to see the many Dominic heads. His presence yielded terrific work, the students really lifting their standards. Dominic wanted to draw the students, but we ran out of time. When I paid him, he handed back half, being money he owed me. Then he asked me to drive him over to Charles Creek to get his rifle. When we arrived, his brother told him the gun was hidden in an ironwood tree, somewhere in the bush near Iltyarrkwe/‘sixteen mile’ creek. We drove north up the Stuart Highway as I kept an eye on the odometer. It was all random bush to me. Suddenly Dominic told me to stop. He wandered a hundred metres into the scrub and, sure enough, there was the gun, stashed for the past fortnight in the fork of the old tree. One day I invited the Whitegate men to come to our home that afternoon to watch a TV documentary that was being screened. The subject was the state of the cattle industry in Central Australia, and the men had taken part in two days of filming at the request of the film crew. Dominic still did occasional stock work and wanted to see the film also. I had already arranged with Arranye to take him to his appointment at the Congress Dental Clinic to have his remaining lower front teeth removed. His gums were infected and his teeth had almost fallen out from a lifetime of dental neglect. At the clinic, we waited longer in the queue than I’d anticipated. I felt anxious that we wouldn’t get home in time for the TV show. During the next two months we made five visits to prepare a set of dentures. I’d sit next to him and read the captions and dialogue displayed in the health charts stuck on the walls of the clinic. There were enlarged laminated photos of Aboriginal kids eating all the appropriate foods that contributed to healthy teethâ•¯–â•¯fruits and dairy produce that made the kids have big cheesy grins. One day he gave me a dig in the ribs.

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‘Might be I get one red apple when I get me eatin’ machine, my boy. You take me Eastside shop, I be get it. Oh that make me happy.’ The Whitegate mob were ambling up the driveway, right on time, as Arranye and I wheeled in from the clinic. The documentary revealed the strong links between the Northern Territory government and the leaseholding cattle barons but the most disappointing aspect for us was the fleeting grab on the families. Here they were again, being edited as victims into a minute or two of TV time. The most galling aspect was the whitefella Hayes, leaseholder of Undoolya, contemptuously referring to the families at Whitegate as being worth much less than their cattle. ‘These blacks took up useful space,’ he said. ‘And what did they produce?’ I could feel the ripple of resentment in the lounge room. The older generation had helped raise the Hayes now on camera, and respected Ted senior and his son. Although they retained property access for hunting, a rift now existed in the relationship. ‘Old Ted Hayes was proper good to Aboriginal people,’ said Arranye. ‘He be give it flash American cowboy shirt at Christmas. Not rubbish one, like you see today.’ He took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away the spittle that had gathered in the corners of his mouth. ‘He talk our lingo, right through that one. Always give us feed and proper Christmas party. Whole mob.’ Before Aboriginal people were given citizenship and voting rights in the 1960s, many lived on cattle stations such as Undoolya. Arranye and the older Hayes men had plenty of contact with their country and continued their cultural responsibilities. But equal citizenship helped make a case for equal pay, which made it impossible for the cattle industry to sustain such a labour-intensive means of farming. The beef industry had been synonymous with Aboriginal labour. A number of factors contributed to the picture today. I could sense that life in camp now, waiting for the 101



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fortnightly unemployment benefitâ•¯–â•¯or ‘sit down money’ as it was often calledâ•¯–â•¯was more disruptive. Until that afternoon, David had never been to the house. He sat crosslegged on the carpet, a partly smoked tailor-made cigarette tucked behind his right ear. When the show finished he went outside to re-light his smoke. ‘Young fella,’ he beckoned to me. It surprised me to hear David address me so when I was probably ten years older than him. But in Arrernte kinship I was in a son relationship to him, just as I was with his brother, Arranye. I filed through the door after the others, and over to where he stood beneath the grapevine, flicking ash. ‘Kwementyaye [Kevin Pick] more fair to work for. He not cheeky for Johnson mob. I be catch horses for him. Night horses. Creep up on them in dark and rope them legs. Four hundred dollar that Kwementyaye be give it. Four hundred this month and any month I be work it.’ As sunset approached, the men squashed inside the car. Arranye sat up front, sunglasses on, both hands resting on his stick nestled between his legs. David jammed in beneath the hatch and I lowered it behind him. ‘Oh my son. That TV talk make me too much sorry. Might be better thing when we get Loves Creek Station runnin’. My number seven bore there, near Limbla.’ The Central Land Council was helping to concentrate political action and create balanced dialogue in the process of accessing land on Crown and pastoral leases. With the Council’s assistance, the Johnsons were hoping to take over the Loves Creek Station when the whitefella Bloomfields vacated their lease. ‘David and Gregory got Little Well. I been help them get it. I gotta be get that Number 7 bore. Oh, sweet water there. Can grow it pumpkin, watermelon, anything you like it. Put in chicken and nanny goat.’ He got out and shuffled towards the glow of his fire, the other men dispersing to their own camps. 102


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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ A rranye , Ronja and m e in A rranye ’ s shed

F o r l o n g p e rio d s ,

Elaine and I seemed content, and no issues were raised. For me, the sheer joy of Ronja and the work of nurturing were sufficient glue for our relationship. I didn’t regard Elaine’s occasional dissenting remark with gravity, especially since our marriage was not argumentative. In May 1988 Elaine went to Melbourne for a month and I joined her there for the week of the semester break. Upon returning she again voiced her feelings about monogamy and said she needed to show her love to others. She also talked of her need to travel regularly, saying it was in her blood. She felt like a poor relation to her rich friends living interstate, she told me, and felt that becoming involved with the Herbalife pyramid sales company was her answer to creating wealth. Mid-August and the ants re-emerged along tentative memory lanes. They stuttered in broken files, burdened with nesting detritus. The final weeks of winter would run hot and cold before the unmitigated hotter weather asserted itself. By then the numbers of ants would have 104



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accelerated so they formed into continuous black columns. Cockroaches, also harbingers of the encroaching heat, slunk out from their dormancy within bark and woodwork. The roaches scurried furtively, inviting my scornful eye. Gyrating dust whirls erupted, sucking litter 50 metres into their intestines. They augured over tracks, plains and hills, sniffing disdainfully and then spewing their cargo. When I walked the hills, angepe, the crow, veered close to my exposed pate, warding me off its nearby nest of infants. In December 1988, over the Christmas break, Elaine, Ronja and I travelled to Melbourne. The first day back in town in early January of the new year I saw Jude with Michael Stewart and Bartholomew. They were sauntering down the pedestrian ramp of the Yeperenye undercover car park. Jude broke from them, tearful and distressed. His emaciation worried me, as he wandered unsteadily towards me. He explained that Iris and he were going through hard times. So I asked him to come home. He wanted to see the ‘business book’ and reminded me that, with summer halfway through, initiation ‘business’ would be starting again soon. We talked about marriage and sex and the differences in our cultures. He said our freedom of choice was ‘more better’. But, given the parlous state of my marriage at the time, I didn’t hurriedly agree. He felt he had to leave Whitegate as the pressure from family was too great on him. ‘Iris wrong side for me,’ he told me. ‘If she die, I get this leg poked with spear, I suppose. Whitefella marriage more easy than blackfella way.’ ‘Sometimes we debate about staying with each other,’ I answered. ‘But whitefella can just get up and go. He don’t have family come round and make it cheeky for him.’ That might be true in Alice Springs where most whitefella families came from somewhere else, I thought. Well, that’s how Jude saw it anyway. Still, both marriages were problematic. Days later, Iris turned up after lunch and pleaded with me to look for Jude. She was frightened of the other Johnsons and wanted me to 105


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attend camp with her. When we arrived Jude was asleep on the ground in the noonday sun. Ants with singular persistence filed over him without disturbing his slumber. I wanted to leave him be. Despite telling Xavier not to wake him, he spilled a pannikin of water in Jude’s ear. Jude shook the water off then opened his eyes. When he saw Iris, he said he was now a ‘single man’ and told her to leave. She had been snubbed. Without contest, she turned and walked off towards town. Iris disappeared from our lives within the next month. I asked after her and Jude said she had ‘been finish, somewhere back in her own Â�country’. Whether the secret of her men’s knowledge had been divulged, I never knew.

the waterholes. We swam a lot during these warmer months in the pool by the Telegraph Station.* We would usually pick up some kids from Whitegate and squeeze them into the car. One Saturday afternoon John Hayes, Xavier and Bartholomew joined us. The kids swam with Ronja and me. Close to the car park was an enclosure that held peacocks, emus and kangaroos. The men stayed up at the enclosure and inspected the kangaroos with the kind of professional eye farmers run across their herds. Xavier tried to coax one to a more secluded spot from the car park, behind a hill, so that he could kill it and take it home. John joked that the enclosure provided the camp at nearby Middle Park with regular meat. This wasn’t true. But roos were trapped by the Middle Park campers in the sizeable Telegraph Station Park area, with

S u m me r r ain s h a d r e p l e nishe d

*â•… This small body of water trapped in the Todd River was the original Alice Springs. It was mistaken to be a spring but is actually a waterhole that dries up during a long dry spell. The town Alice Springs was originally gazetted as ‘Stuart’ by explorer and surveyor David Lindsay in 1888.The rail link from Oodnadatta was completed in 1929 and soon after the town was proclaimed as Alice Springs.

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snares made from fencing wire. These were attached to acacia scrub or saplings along the euro tracks and were checked each morning. As guns could not be used close to settled areas, it was a safe and unobtrusive technique for catching meat. During a morning’s camp visit, Mercia begged me to drive Joseph to hospital. Was he vomiting blood again? I had thought he was hunched in copious sleep at her side. But Joseph was unconscious and difficult to drag into the back seat. He had rolled into the campfire during the night and his ugh boots had fused with his flesh. No one volunteered to help us because, as I discovered later, the families didn’t condone their marriage. He had a wrong ‘skin relationship’ with Mercia. At the hospital, the doctor pinched the skin on Joseph’s wrist and watched it tent up before puncturing it with a needle. He wrongly gave him bicarbonate sodium, then corrected it to glucose. His cavalier disregard for this error disconcerted me. He’d obviously hoped I hadn’t noticed and waved away my worry. ‘It’s all the same for this bloke. He needs whatever we put into him.’ All I knew of Joseph’s medical history was that he suffered from diabetes. I told the doctor and went home, not wanting to watch the separation of flesh and footwear. A few days later, I was amazed to hear that Joseph had been returned to camp the following afternoon.

and a car load of kids, including Ronja, to Little Well. When we returned late on the Sunday, we were stunned to discover that Joseph’s foot had been amputated because gangrene had set in. I was outraged. If he had not been returned to camp so quickly, if he had been more adequately diagnosed, maybe he wouldn’t have had to lose his foot. We went to see him in hospital. Mercia tried to

T h e n e xt we e k e n d I to o k Mercia

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lift his spirits, talking about his bravery and about the meat caught on our weekend trip. I was so angry, I wrote a report of the matter and gave it to a local investigative journalist to help him with a story on incompetence at the hospital. Years later, after forming acquaintances with health workers, I reviewed my naivety. I heard their frustration while servicing the town with its large number of Aboriginal people. Inadequate resources equated to understaffed facilities and doctors at the hospital rostered for 24-hour shifts. One doctor friend told me of his sense of irrelevance and absurdity when working at a bush clinic. He felt he was merely a ‘pus and blood’ doctor, tending the many wounds and infections. A few weeks later, I ran Joseph from the hospital ward to camp for the day, to sit with his brother, Arranyeâ•¯–â•¯the first of several weekend trips. Though he was still jaundiced, he was more vocal. There was a strong easterly at work when we arrived, which Arranye said was good for getting rid of flies. The planet Mars was exceptionally red these nights and the old man was interested to hear my whitefella stories and myths of the warring starâ•¯–â•¯Mars the battle god, the intensifier of the senses who heightens fellow feeling into action. Arranye told me Arrernte felt the same way about that ‘star’, and when it was so bright, young people were warned not to mix with others. At 3 p.m. when I returned to take Joseph back to hospital, he had a red cord tied around his head. Older men used red cords and headbands when they were involved in transmitting traditional knowledge. Dominic refused to help with getting Joseph and his wheelchair into the car. Joseph summoned Jude, but he lacked confidence in collapsing the chair and strength for lifting. Joseph swore relentlessly at him for lacking initiative, and getting his instructions wrong. ‘Not leg. Arm. Didn’t you go to school? All you understand is Coolabah. You silly black cunt!’ It embarrassed me to hear Jude humiliated in my language. And I 108



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felt concerned for Joseph, for his justifiable anger, and for his inability to help himself now.

a housing commission house a dozen houses up the road from us at number 22. This was intended as a retreat for Joseph, and to enable him and his wheelchair easier access to and from the hospital. Soon, just about everyone from Whitegate, when not actually lodging in Joseph’s house, was visiting us. We found this terribly demanding. There was no respite for Joseph and no respite for us. We sometimes took to hiding on the kitchen floor of an evening, to avoid a third or fourth set of people lobbing in for a cup of tea or a lift to Whitegate. Both Elaine and I got progressively intolerant as the visits wore on into the night. It was weird seeing the Whitegate mob in a ‘money house’ lounge room playing cards. There were the many dogs, just like at Whitegate, no furniture and swags all over the floor. I was called several times to unblock the toilet and sink, to show various people how the gas stove worked, and to change light bulbs. This overuse would rapidly age the house, I explained. At one point, Joseph was so exhausted by all the visitors that he wheeled himself to our front door and asked me to move him back to Whitegate. One night, a handful of kids sought refuge with us from Noelly Johnson. I wasn’t there when they came running in to Elaine. They were still sitting quietly together on the floor when I got home. Elaine had rung the police and they had gone to number 22 to quell Noelly’s marauding. My respect for the police grew during this period. Mostly the police came to our place to hoist Xavier and Petrina away. Having already been ejected from number 22, they would sleep noisily in our yard instead of returning to Whitegate. Xavier would fall asleep, his teeth grinding loudly, only to be aggravated out of it by Petrina’s

Me r c ia s u c c e e d e d in ge t ting

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arguments. I’d get up and tell them to shut up if they wanted to stop here. After the second or third warning, I’d let them know that I was about to ring the police. Xavier as often as not asked me to ring them, so he could get a good cell bed and a feed at breakfast time. To our mighty relief, neighbours objected to the all-hours partying at number 22 and the house soon passed from Mercia’s hands. This was our most negative interaction with the Whitegate mob. On Ronja’s first birthday, Joseph returned to hospital to have his leg amputated above the knee. He had a false leg fitted but his health degenerated very quickly. His gathering pallor was indicative of his demoraÂ� lisation and failing blood. He became dependent on regular use of the dialysis machine. Eventually Joseph returned to camp and was confined to bed. The nurses told us there wasn’t really much more they could do for him, and he might as well be around his family. Mercia, who had some training as a nurse’s assistant, knew how to inject the insulin, and assisted him with his assortment of drugs. She had quite a pharmacy tucked away in her handbag.

in his country at Harts Range. One day he appeared at our door, his hair matted with red clay. Ronja couldn’t stop staring at him. Xavier got self-conscious and asked me to tell her to look away, then to cut his hair. His coyness surprised me. After I cut his hair, we shoved the locks into a plastic carry bag. ‘Keep that business hair. Might be need it some time, when I got more business,’ Xavier said. He told me he wanted to shave for my next painting and suggested he strip to his jocks and stand with one leg resting on the other kneeâ•¯–â•¯the stereotyped image of blackfellas that could be found in kids’ textbooks X av ie r h a d b e e n in bu s h ‘ bus iness’ camp

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from the 1960s. This stance was still used to advertise Indigenous culture in some of the souvenir and art shops around town. If I were to follow his suggestion, I thought, it would have to be as an ironic comment on the demeaning paternalism of such an image. Not long after this, Bernadette Turner arrived at our house with her mother, Kemarre Margaret Mary Turner. (The Turners, Neils and Johnsons are related families; Arranye’s late wife was Kemarre’s sister.) Bernadette could barely walk for the pain in her soles. I propped her on the couch and massaged her feet for twenty minutes. She talked about Arrernte healing foods and was interested to learn from Elaine and me about traditional whitefella healing plants. Kemarre mentioned her asthmatic condition and her periodic need for Ventolin. ‘What did people in olden times do for lung sickness?’ I asked. ‘That yerrampe or honey ant,’ replied Kemarre. ‘That’s still the important one. Arrernte never speak of eating honey ant. We only say we “suck their bums” or “lick” them. We suck it and then throw away the head. They are the best thing for chest complaints. When you dig up their nests, you can see all their little tunnels there that look like lung with tubes runnin’ to it. Just like human being.’ They later called a taxi to go to Aboriginal Congress Health, but the medics couldn’t give Bernadette a clear diagnosis and she walked in pain for months. Throughout, Kemarre insisted that the pain was caused by a ‘wrong way’ relationship that Bernadette had with a man from Jay Creek settlement, 45 kilometres west of town. She thought he might have taken an item of Bernadette’s clothing and sung love magic over it. Kemarre wanted him to come and sing the complaint and the lingering bad feelings away. When Kemarre discovered that he was now residing in the Arnhem Land community of Maningrida, she flew there to ask for his help. He didn’t comply. Eventually Bernadette was diagnosed with worm infestation, which 111



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was soon expelled with hospital medication. News of the worm invasion was not irrelevant, Kemarre remarked. She said it would have been this same bloke who had put it there.

the issue of her need for extramarital relationships. In the meantime, she fulfilled her ‘travel needs’, which financially depended on my job stability and put a strain on our single income that could not stretch to include me in any of Elaine’s travel plans. The cost of her trips was an issue that we always debated. I resented being stuck in the working week routine while she was away. I also resented being without Ronja, particularly because she was changing so rapidly. We underwent marriage counselling, which did little to reconcile the place we shared in each other’s lives. Instead, it opened up a Pandora’s box. There seemed to be no end to the faces that certain friends and I apparently wore for herâ•¯–â•¯mother, father and infant sister. This was the psycho-jargon used during our counselling sessions. We could not reach agreement on loyalty or our ideals on raising our child in a family unit. I was pro maintaining our sense of family, keeping that priority front and centre. I felt powerless. Elaine continued to maintain her right to travel and I inevitably conceded. After these few months of counselling, Elaine and Ronja left for England for seven and a half weeks. Part of the holiday was to be spent in Greece with Ruben, Elaine’s friend from Melbourne. He paid for her flight between London and Athens. In early September Elaine and Ronja returned via Darwin. For the first couple of days, Ronja didn’t seem to know what to make of me. But it felt great to be reunited as a family. Three weeks later Joseph died in hospital. Gregory arrived with the bleak news of his older brother’s death. I was hallucinating in a fever, I n c r e a sin g ly El ain e b ro u g ht up

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hardly able to move, the weight of each thought pounding in my temples. I dragged myself from bed and joined him and Janet on the lounge. He proffered his hand and slid it with gelatinous ease along my palm. Blood from a sorry cut seeped through his trousers onto the couch. Before I’d absorbed the loss of Joseph, Gregory added that his son Hilary, about twenty, had had his throat cut in a fight in Darwin. Gregory was frightened to go and collect his pension cheque from Tangentyere. The woman cashier at the bank, his cousin, was obliged to thrash him for his ‘negligent parenting’. He worried that she would kick him in the kidneys again for letting Hilary go to Darwin. They were still sore from early in the week when he’d broken the bad news to her. I drove Gregory and Janet to Kemarre’s home, to ‘sorry cry’ with Mercia for her deceased husband. Crying in a family group like this was the best way to cope with the grief of lost loved ones. And that was the Arrernte way. The place was full of people, perhaps thirty or more. Bertie Neil, who occasionally visited Whitegate, stood with some of the Turner men at the back door. We touched palms then he led me down the hall to where Mercia sat crowded with her sisters in a bedroom that was all curtained up in respect. The only noise, wailing and whimpering, came from this bedroom. My fevered brain gelled with the delirium in the room. Bertie fell to his knees, put his arms around his sister and cried. I was surprised to find myself falling to my knees as Bertie rose, and crying against Mercia’s neck. I went back to the car to drop some of the family members at Whitegate. Big Bertie stumbled from the house, heaved himself through the back door and shook the car with his weeping. Gregory and Janet were still crying. Bertie made a point of the profundity of his grief. ‘I been up all night cryin’. I been too much cryin’.’ On and on he went with his competitive crying. As the car stopped, he groped his way to sit with other family already in ‘sorry camp’. Twenty or more Johnsons, Hayes, Webbs and Ryders gathered around the Neil 113



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humpy. There was little movement. Few people looked anywhere but at the ground. And save a cry now and then, there was silence. Joseph’s death bludgeoned me in a way I didn’t expect, collapsing the statistics of early Aboriginal mortality into emotional reality. Mercia didn’t handle her husband’s passing well. She was seen escorted around town in a car. It was deemed bad form to move about before the funeral. She should have been sitting, mourning. Second, the car hadn’t been smoked, as all personal effects should be, to help free the spirit of the deceased. In response, at the Santa Teresa funeral the coffin was deliberately placed in the ground the wrong way round and some people turned up disrespectfully drunk. This event spooked Mercia into continual restlessness and nervous fidgeting. Within eighteen months she died from an illness.

I spotted Jude in the middle of Â�Undoolya Road attempting to flag down cars. I pulled in slowly to the kerb. He seemed in a daze and took a few minutes to recognise me. He was distressed. ‘You wanna jump in and come home?’ He hesitated. ‘Leg weak from sorry cut. Yesterday I been cut ’im. Too much thinking old Joseph and other old people.’ Some kids from Whitegate wandered past. I heard the taunts of three white kids. ‘Chocko frogs. Chocko frogs,’ they sang. The black kids quickly retorted, ‘Vanilla milkshakes.’ Minutes later, a police wagon pulled alongside and two officers came over. Ignoring me, they asked Jude if he had been walking on the road. We both lied that he hadn’t. The police were annoyed at me butting in, asked who I was and what I was doing talking to this blackfella. They insisted that he was drunk, that someone had reported him. They said that N ot l o n g af t e r t h e f u n er a l

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they had better things to do than argue with him or me, and were taking him to the Drugs and Alcohol Services Association complex, known as the DASA shelter, behind Anzac Hill. I was incensed. Jude was unjustly being detained. I arrived at the shelter half an hour later. The bookwork had been completed and the police had gone. What did I need to do to reclaim Jude? He was free to walk away anytime, the manager said. He went to find him, but Jude had fallen asleep. Hours passed and at suppertime he turned up at our home. Xavier and Petrina arrived minutes later and told Jude to shove off. ‘Rod is my whitefella. I been find him first.’ I insisted that Jude stay and we spread the food around more thinly so as to feed everyone. Jude rarely ate more than a thimbleful anyway. Elaine and I felt protective of him. His lack of assertiveness was the direct opposite of Xavier’s temperament. We enjoyed Xavier’s humour, but he exasperated us when he teased Ronja to tears. We would implore him to cool it or piss off. Now, with Xavier more subdued, I read them The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen and The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde. The English was simple, not ‘big English’, as Petrina put it, but they were stories I grew up with and could read with feeling. Xavier appreciated our efforts and carefully cleaned the spilled food from the table with a sponge. As we sat chatting around the table, Xavier kept cutting Jude out of the conversation. I got so frustrated with his rudeness, I asked him to put his plate in the sink and to go. I walked him and Petrina to the door. Instead of welcoming the space that I had created for him, Jude took this as a sign to be on his way as well. He stood and exited quietly from the opposite door, across the lounge room.

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A f e w m o n t h s l at e r ,

Elaine broke news of her decision to separate. She confessed that she was having an affair with Ruben. Throughout our marriage she had insisted that their relationship was platonic and ridiculed me for raising suspicion. Now the truth of the duration of their acquainÂ� tance was revealed to me as pre-dating our marriage, which also shed light on Ruben’s visit to Alice a year earlier. Although he was also married with children, Elaine felt that her feelings for him impaired her involvement with me. At Elaine’s request I moved out. Then, two weeks later, I decided to move back and she subsequently moved to a nearby granny flat with Ronja. It was a disturbing and painful process, a cooling-off time in which we were counselled not to form new relationships. On the two occasions when I responded to invitations to supper from women friends offering a sympathetic ear (both of whom had partners who were also friends of mine), Elaine was frantically onto me the next day. I became confused about her position of favouring polygamy, which I now understood only applied to herself. By late November we decided to give it another go. Elaine urged for another child the moment we reunited, which I felt was too hasty, especially since she’d admitted she was still grieving for Ruben. But I endured the tide and the unreconciled issues in our relationship. I was fighting to keep my relationship with Ronja as healthy as possible and to nurture a family environment. I had so much to lose. I didn’t want to be a background father. And yes, I was still hopeful that Elaine and I would come to share the same focus and enrich one another’s lives. A week prior to leaving for the annual southern exodus to Â�Melbourne, Ronja contracted whooping cough. We tossed up whether or not to go, but decided that the cooler climate might be easier on Ronja. By the first night, camping in Port Augusta, we realised this would not be the case for any of us. We shared several weeks of broken nights, constantly whacking Ronja’s back to keep her breathing. It was a Christmas, replete with car ailments, I’d rather forget. 116



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By the new year, Ronja was over the worst of her illness. The day we left Melbourne Elaine looked up Ruben. He had remained a presence in her imaginings. Soon after this, Elaine resumed therapy and was buoyed when told by our counsellor that some of her projections had diminished, to the extent that she could recognise when she was projecting, though he estimated they remained at some four fifths. It seemed like a sophisticated game to me. Ronja turned two, and not long after I received news of Bernadette Turner’s death. She was in her early twenties when she died of an epileptic fit during the protest over Junction Waterhole. I never knew the details other than that she died being rushed from the protest camp to hospital. The Junction Waterhole, just north of Wigleys, accessed only by 4WD track, was a sacred women’s place for menstruation. Developers and government were bent on transforming it into a recreational holding dam for flood mitigation. In January 1991 the Territory government succeeded in desecrating the site, before the Federal Government’s Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Robert Tickner, overruled their decision.*

Apa r t fro m t r ip s to Li t t le W ell ,

Arranye took me on numerous one-day outings, east and south-east of town. When I first killed a perentie by whacking it on the back of the neck with his walking stick, he inspected it, pressing his fingers into its fatty hind legs. ‘You be proper desert line man now, my son.’ He was as pleased with me as I was with myself. Every time we

*â•… Tickner appointed Hal Wooten QC to conduct an inquiry and the outcome was that the sites around Junction Waterhole would be protected for twenty years, effectively preventing construction of the proposed dam.

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passed this spot on our way to his homeland in the Simpson Desert, he reminded me of the pleasure those fat legs and tail had given him. Our first weekend trip was to Bitter Springs Creek. He knew the place rock by rockâ•¯–â•¯the itinerary of their shadows and when they morphed into particular images. For me, the ranges appeared as an extensive spine of impassive minerals, changing colour entrancingly throughout the day. As we passed Emily and Jessie gaps, he mentioned that there were three caterpillar groups that contributed to Alice Springs’ stories, not just the ayepe-arenye, whose crinkled thorax formed the MacDonnell Ranges. ‘Two type come from west, my boy. Come through Honeymoon Gap. Another mob come from east, N’Dhala Gorge side. That Theresa Ryder’s country now. They cross over at Emily Gap. That painting you see at Jessie Gap is caterpillar one again.’ We forked north from the Ross River Highway, ten minutes along the Arltunga road where, high above the road, the mythological story of the headband Dreaming is scoured into the hill. The old man called the place irrkerteye. There were grey outcrops of limestone which created jags on the skyline. Sandstone and siltstone combined in the rounded profile of the headband. From Arranye’s perception, the form of the land was a result of events made by mythological ancestors. This shallow 10-metre depression was more saturated with richer reds, ochres and whites than anywhere in the vicinity, a spectacular spot inviting my attention. The water at Bitter Springs ran through you like Epsom salts, he said, because the women’s Dreaming there was about how the young girl had been ‘damaged’ by the rough sex of a man. The headband that the mythological man was wearing attracted attention to his rude, ‘flash’ behaviour. Arranye instructed me to climb up to see for myself, while he remained by the salt encrustation that gave the creek its name. When I came back down, I joined him where he was sitting comfortably in the creek bed. 118



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‘What you see there?’ The velvety treacle of stains close up were composed of hundreds of noduled, jutting clay fragments that were rough to touch. I thought the crenellated surface looked like the residue of some magnificent insect colony. These were in fact the mud nests of fairy martins. Had we visited at dawn or dusk we would have seen them hawking around the cliff. Arranye said that ceremonial paintings had the same kind of dotted texture, to communicate their connections to places like this. ‘The moon curve here like curve of creek. You paint this one, my sonny boy. I been thinking long time you photo this one in morning light. Old Afghan camel camp, this place. Big ngkwarle arwengalkere [sugarbag place] too. Honeybee do hard work. Sugarbag on top of tree. We be clear honey out and that be hard work too. Fill up billycan or bark and then take ’em back.’ We slowly returned to the car. ‘You got the picture, my son?’ I nodded politely, unsure of how the story continued north of where we were. I was hungry and thought of lunching at Ross River Homestead, only a further thirty minutes’ drive east. Once there, I ordered a couple of lusty hamburgers across the bar. While I waited, I flicked through an old coffee table book published in the early 1970s. I recognised Myra Hayes’s husband, Simon Toby, who featured on one of its pages. In still life he was about to hurl a boomerang for the tourists. This was one of his duties of employment, along with cooking damper and handling the trail rides. Boomerang throwing was still being demonstrated at the homestead, but the only Aboriginal presence at Ross River now was the photograph of Simon in the book. I returned to the car to eat with Arranye. He fumbled for a few minutes with the napkin folded around his hamburger. ‘My son, I too much grog sick for this one. Might be I keep it for suppertime.’ 119



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I recommended yoghurt for his sensitive stomach. Not that we could buy any from the homestead, but maybe he’d recall it for future reference. ‘Oh I know that one,’ he said. ‘We boil up that nanny goat milk. Mission time. Number one, that goat. More better than rich cow. Then we hang that milk in a tree, my son. That’s my good tucker you been tellin’ me.’ ‘Do you want a soft drink?’ ‘No. Can’t drink it when we drivin’. Might be stop and pee all time.’ We continued on and looked quickly at Ross River’s carpet snake Dreaming. Arranye pointed out the ‘porcupine’ place in N’Dhala Gorge, and then the perentie at Corroboree Rock. He said nothing about the places; he was tired and, perhaps, he sensed the limits of my capacity to absorb what he was saying. He slumped into sleep as I shielded my eyes from the sun, cruising to its evening appointment in the western ranges.

at rare altitudes. I felt elated as I studied them one night after supper. It was late October 1991 and Elaine had just told me that she was pregnant. We were both happy. I thought that an extra child would extinguish any remaining doubts about our relationship. I broke our news at Whitegate before proceeding to college the next day. The men were charging up again on the sweet Coolabah in the convivial blush of morning light. Dominic told me he’d ‘think up boy’. ‘Call it Eyeglass,’ he suggested, ‘after Gregory’s nickname.’ Eyeglass Moss, I thought. It had a certain resonance. But, no. ‘I don’t think so, Dom.’ Dominic was ambivalent about alcohol. ‘This whitefella poison. Bl o n d e t e n d ril s of c lo u d c ombed the sky

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Not blackfella. Belong it you mob.’ But he was happy enough to drink it regularly. Five women huddled around the breakfast fire, sharing wine from a large tin and exchanging baby stories. ‘Elaine be atnerte-atnerte now. Arrernte call pregnant woman “two stomach”. Two stomach she be got to feed.’ ‘Charmaine never been have Formula 26,’ said Jennifer Johnson. ‘Only this one,’ she added, propping her breasts with both hands. ‘This one, proper number one formula.’ ‘Theresa been keep me goin’ all night. I dry by mornin’. Formula real good,’ said Melita, pointing to the can’s label as the drink was passed to her. It was the very Formula 26 she was espousing.

and I visited Little Well. This was the first occasion on which Arranye taped his bush-tucker stories. His niece Theresa Ryder and two of her sons accompanied us. The premise of taping enabled us to use a Toyota from the Institute of Aboriginal Development (IAD). The Institute had some funding to help build its Aboriginal language library for educational and publishing programs. However, it was under-resourced for the quantity of recording and translating that might secure the local knowledge in literature. Our first stop was 15 kilometres east along the Numery track. We pulled into some shade and I got out the IAD tape deck. It had worked in the library, but the buttons wouldn’t depress now. Back we went the 50 kilometres to town. Another two hours of run-around. Then our second pausing, sitting under a desert oak by the kerb, with the Red Range rolled at our backs. Nearby was a patch of ashen ground from a recent fire, upon which a carpet of black cockies quaffed the sprouting burrs, their red tails flicking in the shadows.

S u m m e r h a d s e t in

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‘Irrarnte mob there, my son. Firestick, we call it, that one. Tail feather, you know it? Can take it with him to light up country. ‘This the main place for seed, early days. Kids liked to eat those seeds, not only kids. Men and women. Whole lot. And every seed, the acacia, and the artetye, they put them out to dry. When they get dry, they grind them and cook it in ashes. You know why they been do that? To get all the skin out. And they get atnyeme, or big wind might be come. Let all the skin blow away and clean it. ‘We be call it Ararlakerte, that place. Our countryside. Place belong it Ryder mob. Right up to Williams Well and N’Dhala Gorge. Seeds taste just like peanuts. Our perlaperle [father’s mothers], old nannies, they used to go and work on that one. All the young girl go get ’em own tucker. Work all the time. That why all the kid never get sick. ‘Aboriginal people you see today, they dying all the time. Why they dying? They die just because they drinking whitefella’s thing, you know, that poison spirit grog. We never been look around for grog all the time; we look around for sugarbag or ngkwarle athengarlperle [ironwood resin], arlepampwe [acacia], and atnyerrampwe [supplejack]. They soak them in water. Sweet now. Then eat it. Proper nice. Sugarbag never make old people sick or make ’em die. Just like medicine.’ He paused after this recitation and leant back on his elbow, swivelling his head to fix me with a glossy, black stare. ‘What you think now, my son? Good story I been tell you?’ ‘Good story, Arranye.’ ‘You can say that again and again, my boy.’ He grinned and looked down to his sockless feet, crossed before him in frayed sneakers. We replayed the tape to his satisfaction. He giggled at the sound of his recorded voice. ‘That old Arranye in there. Him know all that one.’ He stored his butt in the tobacco tin and groped for his shirt pocket. He made a catarrhal clearance and pelted a gob of phlegm on 122



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the sandy ground as he swung his frail frame back into the cabin. Arranye guided us through Todd River Station, past Possum Bore, Camel Flat Bore and on to Little Well, where Gregory was lodged. That first night Theresa’s son Shane made a direct hit with a lump of limestone on a perentie. We ate it with our damper. My first lizard, a bit like fish, but the bones were in different places. Isn’t that what we likened all unfamiliar flesh to, chicken or fish? I was exhausted and would have slung the swags down anywhere by the track. Arranye insisted we push on in the dark to a patch of gidgee, which grew in the softer red sands. The night was ant-interrupted. I finished in the utility tray. In the morning I asked the old man if the ants had bothered him. ‘No. Only time when you be move ’em to truck an’ break down that fence you been make ’em between sweet gidgee sap they been huntin’. Gidgee seed is proper poison one. Whitefella might be call ’em 1080. But sap, oh, really sweet one.’ The ravishing melody of the kwepalepale/bellbird directing the dawn chorus washed our ears. A wafer of gidgee smoke nestled languidly in the crowns of these low trees, giving a pleasant acrid scent. Gidgee provided shade, windbreak, and the supreme firewood. Its curlicueing limbs beckoned me. A glare in the previous night sky, directly below two bright stars, told Arranye we were in for a hot one. It was infernal. As we approached Wallaby Gap mid-morning, the cloud had cleared and we were getting full-bore sun. Arranye told me he was the owner of the native cat Dreaming in the cave we stopped at. A wire fence ran from the rocks clustered at the eastern base of the gap, marking the border between Todd River and Ringwood stations. Doolans owned this site, he said. The nearby coolibah tree formed part of the story. ‘Old half-caste bloke, Paddy Doolan know this place. Aggie 123



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Abbott know it too. That their storyline. Atyelpe an’ kangaroo rat camp here. Patrick Hayes can look it, but can’t be speak it.’ Over lunch at Camel Flat bore we taped again. The back of my neck grilled in the heat. Throughout, we were wooed by a pair of pied butcherbirds. Young Shane circumnavigated the tank and caught eight pigeons perched on its rim by hand. Some buffeted off nearby to safety and watched Shane stuff their companions in his t-shirt. He planned to sell them in town. They expired within ten minutes. It was preposterous to drive in the heat, so we napped. Another pair of smaller birds roused me, busily chirping around Arranye’s head. ‘What are these plains birds?’ I asked him, as he broke several butts to fill new papers. ‘I boss fella for this one. They akerntenye [pardalote], be come an’ talk it me. Pay respect to old Arranye. Want to tell me rain might be comin’. “Oh. That’s all right, my little friends”, I been tell ’em. ‘Olden times we been dig pencil yam, in the creeks. Old people got yalke [onions] and mash ’im to make soft for kids and old people with no teeth. Used to look after old men and woman really careful. Nowadays, they eat lolly and drink cool drink. In olden days they used to eat wild honey and aperaltye. They didn’t eat the whole lot. They save it for eating after meat. They never get sick in early days. ‘You see that food called alyeka merne with the prickles that pierce your foot? Well, the root is food, like potato. You get a lot and then take them back to cook. Over at Truckin’ Yard and Tangentyere side we been get them. In rain time we’d go to sand hills, over Amoonguna sand hill side, and get merne urrkennge [truffles]. And kangaroo they been get. Spear it. Get the guts an’ squash it with hands and all that water would flow. Lifesaver, that water. Keep old people alive.’ We got back in the Toyota and struggled over the heavy sands of the Todd River flood-out. The cream-crowned bloodwoods were in full blossom. Shane shot two kangaroos from the cabin just before the Little 124



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Well gate. Gregory greeted us affectionately after sunset. He broke from a dark clump of figures. His sunglasses flashed in the headlights. He wore them to conceal his glass eye. Lady, an improbable hybrid of great Dane and greyhound, vied at window level with Gregory’s welcoming grin. Had we brought meat, he wanted to know? Yes.

arrived with some other women from Santa Teresa in their women’s bus. Arranye sat next to me. He liked the idea of a gender-dedicated bus. ‘Men too rough with car,’ he said. The women made a round of plaintive wailing as Janey told of a relative killed by a crocodile in the Katherine River, a day’s drive north. The wailing lingered in the endless depth of the night. I slipped into my swag, easing my body from the long crouch over the wheel. Then singing began, each verse interspersed with giggling, explanation and confirmation of phrasing. These songs, summoned from Arranye’s prodigious memory, relieved their grief and wound their way rhythmically to the flicker of the long shadows cast by those propped around the fire. The singing got me out of my swag, and I joined the circle. On that warm night, so far from any place I had called home, I was immersed in the ethereal beauty of language formed from the very country I was lying on. I lacked such historic reach. This was the Johnsons’ centre. My musical heritage centred on the mid-1960s with Bob Dylan and The Band. Both had fossicked around folkloric traditions. Dylan sang about family breakdown, about distrust of the corporate world and the duplicity of political systems. He introduced a sense of the epic into pop culture. Whether tender, angry or bitter, his pastiche of Beat phrasings and the Blues expanded my feeling of the world through his imperfect tone. It was this novel tone of empathy and vulnerability that seduced me. An h o u r l at e r Ja n e y Ab b ott

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His political allusions mostly flew above my head until I experienced the disenfranchised state of Indigenous peoples in Central Australia. His songs became my anthems. That night, I sang a few of his ballads to the appreciative Johnsons beneath the diamond-studded sky. In the morning Gregory got me to drive half an hour south, to a low hill crusted with amethyst. ‘Might be make it lot of monies, Rod. Might be millions dollar. What you think?’ Nearby, David had apparently also discovered a reef of semi-Â�precious stones, black ones which they intended to sell. These were clustered on a ridge by a fenceâ•¯–â•¯easy surface pickings. Someone Gregory had met inside the Gem Cave shop in the mall had shown interest in them. It was pocket money, really. Not the folding stuff. Nearer midday, Arranye asked us to move from the others to continue taping. ‘Too much think ’bout woman if we be camp close that mob.’ Each time I asked if he wanted a rest he said, ‘What you think we come here for? You want to rest yourself? Come on, my good boy, let’s tell another lie.’ ‘Should we continue now?’ I asked throughout, concerned about the heat. He mocked the indecisiveness of an old drover boss. ‘Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. That how he talk. Anyway, time we make it talk now, my good boy.’ We lay side by side in the latticed shade of a corkwood, shifting with its movement every fifteen to twenty minutes. Even with the protection of my hat, I could feel my face burning from the sun reflecting off the quartz-strewn ground. At one point during the recording, lulled by the old man’s lilting voice, I nodded off, letting the microphone wilt to my waist. Arranye seized it in a flash. ‘Not until that track be laid.’ 126



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We replayed it. I glanced at the swarms of budgerigars and thought of the proliferation of dots in my paintings, likening their slowly accumulated marks to the softly landing flocks of finches. At lunch, Arranye joked about me, telling the women about the mike going limp like an old penis, and how he had stroked it back straight. I retold the story of the young boy who told his mother he had an erection. ‘“What will I do?” the boy asked his mother. “Go and sit next to your father and I’ll run out and fetch the jumper leads,” she said.’ The women sniggered and Arranye nudged me gently in the side. He was keen to get on with the recording. ‘Young mob should be listen old people. Should be go school and learn it too. Read and write ’em. Not jus’ run round make it trouble for parents, run round town shop. Should be listen. What right? What wrong? Make it own mind. When I young fella, might be play with Ian Lovegrove, Sergeant Jack Lovegrove’s son. Father Lovegrove might say it. “Boys, clean up that yard. Stack ’em soft drink bottle, then you can pick it, grapefruit or orange.”â•›’ On this trip I sensed the urgency, the tension underlying the old man’s project. He was clear his material was going to be retained somehow for people who would follow. I couldn’t understand why he chose me as a collaborator. There were professionals, much better equipped anthropologists and linguists. I wondered where the queues of people were who would have revelled in his company. The tarry campfire smoke, that blue waft of mulga vapour, these resins stained my lungs and clothes. The fires and gossip made for intimacy against the scale of the unimpeded night sky. His confiding in me made me feel less inconsequential. Apart from having kids, it was the greatest privilege. At sunrise, as I frosted some Weet-Bix with milk powder, David broke the news of our vehicle’s tyres. They must have punctured as we scoured the flood-out and slowly leaked during the night. The IAD 127



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maintenance mechanic hadn’t done the routine check of the car we had borrowed. There was no pump and no jack, essentials for remote area driving. Arranye said Kevin Pick would help us and lent me a bicycle. It turned out to be useless in the heavy sand and I abandoned it within ten minutes. I walked two hours for help. I could sense the ends of my fingers going numb as I became dehydrated. My pulse throbbed in my lips. The backs of my eyes burned. Birds had stopped singing. Hopefully, I’d chosen the correct track. I was the only thing moving besides the flies at my ears, eyes, nose and lips. They queued at each opening for sustenance. By ten, it would have been well over 45°C. I was swigging the last drop of water from my bottle, when Kevin’s windmill came into view. I trudged past the calcined architecture of horse ribs that had not made it to the troughs. Kevin sat on the caravan steps, waiting. He’d seen me in the distance. He looked older, less poised without his Akubra to conceal his baldness. He pointed to the fridge and said to help myself to water. One of his vehicles had a compatible spare. There was a repair kit in the glove box. The jack was under the seat. I was in good hands, spades of hands that swallowed the steering wheel on the drive back to Little Well. Hands that had sunk bores, twisted fencing wire, and felled trees for joisting and hanging gates, hands that would brandish the .303 at bull camels. I clasped my uncallused pair between my thighs. Kevin was more garrulous when he discovered I had nothing to do with the Central Land Council. He fixed the tyres, gave Arranye a cursory hello and returned to his caravan. We packed for town and made several stops along the way. Theresa wanted to gather some pituri leaves for her mother, Nancy, who was Arranye’s older sister. I’m not sure why they made a custom of gathering the plant at Pinjee/Ringwood gate. Arranye, though a user of the stimulant, never used leaves gathered here, and I assumed they were especially cherished by his sister.

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so we opted to stay in town over Christmas. The stress we endured in Melbourne the year before had not been erased. On Christmas Eve, Xavier arrived again with mud-coated locks of ‘business hair’ and reminded me that if I learnt more ‘lingo’, I too could have this knowledge about business. Ushering me into the bedroom, he whispered in my ear that a little razor cut would do the job. Again he unbuttoned to show he had been cut twice, circumcised and sub-incised. Edward Neil, Jude and he would sing me, he confided. They would cut my inner arm for blood. I wondered if I wanted to learn more language. ‘If you have little boy, we can teach him.’ That point made, we returned to the lounge room where he joked with Ronja. She laughed at his high-jinks, and he insisted her responsiveness was due to her grasp of Arrernte. We all bedded down early for celebrations the next day. The following morning I drove him into camp. There was a lot of spirit at Whitegate, spirits feeding the spirit. Casks and cans. Arranye sat outside his humpy and blubbered his season’s greetings to Ronja and me. He wanted me to take him shopping but I explained that we had to get back for family Christmas preparations, and anyway, it was unlikely that any shops would be open. Old Lesley Driffin detained my arm. He was visiting Arranye and sat on the ground by his brother-in-law’s fire. I stood to return to the car. ‘You been got it, Jesus?’ he blurted. He wondered at my presence in camp. Whitefellas at Whitegate either worked for Aboriginal councils, the health services or the church. It was hard for anyone at Whitegate to think I didn’t believe in some form of church business. ‘I don’t think about Jesus. I don’t follow the Bible line,’ I told him. ‘I been got him,’ he added. ‘Him be inside this one.’ He pointed to the two cloth-bound hymn books he fondled El ain e h a r b o u r e d f e a r s o f a m iscarr iage

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between his legs. They were written in Western Arrernte, probably by old Carl Strehlow, the Ingkarte, or Father/teacher, from Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission early in the twentieth century. Before this time, there had been no Arrernte orthography. ‘I know it, God in heaven. Not lizard God. God in heaven.’ He stabbed the air above his right ear with his finger. ‘God love poor people like Aboriginal mob. He not love rich people same way. No one cry when rich people finish, like Aboriginal people cry. Money don’t cry for them.’ Gregory had come from Little Well for the Christmas celebrations. He moved in front of Lesley and told me that the strawberry birthmark on Ronja’s neck was the copperhead snake’s Dreaming. The pattern was the scaly one of a carpet snake’s skin. Her mark verified her connection to Little Well. The snake had apparently risen from the well and kissed her on the neck on her initial visit when she was six months old. Every child, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, born in Alice Springs was part of the caterÂ� pillar story and placed in its power. To this Ronja added her consort with the snake.

of their Dreaming, the Arrernte have also taken on board the Christian teachings of the missionaries. The Lutherans arrived in 1877; they were the first in Central Australia, and their mission was some 130 kilometres west of Alice Springs, which wasn’t even a concept at that time. And the Catholic mission at Santa Teresa, already an influence prior to World War 2, was established in its present location in 1952. Though the institutions have now withdrawn from active control at both Hermannsburg and Santa Teresa, their influence remains. Arrernte Catholics practised their faith alongside and interwoven with their inherited traditions. ‘Goodnight and God bless you’ remains a common expression of friends when I drop them in camp at night.

W h il e s u c h b e lie f s we r e part and parcel

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Ceremonies usually occurred during summer. The nights were balmy and the hot days in camp were best spent in siesta anyway. The ceremonial finale consisted of three to four all-night vigils. I was excited about my family participating in one of Whitegate’s celebratory events in the not-too-distant future.

On e a f t e rn o o n a f t e r wo rk ,

Elaine, Ronja and I went out to the final night of Trevor Johnson and Michael Drover’s initiation. I stood with the young men who flanked the eastern and western perimeters of the Â�circle and joined in the rhythmic chanting, which supported the older men’s song verses and the dancing of women and kids. An older woman in the front row of women held a red hot burning stick, which Dominic told me represented the tortured penises of the newly made young men. Throughout I asked several young men what we were doing. The unanimous reply was, ‘This law, Rod.’ To them, it was self-explanatory. Flickering flame separated bodies and faces from the night. Their shunting, driving bodies drummed the earth. The ceremony presented another dimension of Arrernte life that to date I hadn’t seen. It was nothing like the demonstration dance snippets I’d seen at schools or art galleries put on for whitefella audiences. This was for and by the Whitegate mob and I felt very invigorated. Later that night, when the high energy part of the proceedings ceased, Elaine and Ronja went home. At dawn all was quiet. Some women were standing in formation, though they looked asleep. Children were waking. The younger boys had gone to sleep. All the old men were huddled together and awake, facing the direction of the imminent sun, rising through Emily Gap’s caterpillar Dreaming. Their dogs stirred and re-Â� settled in the fine dust. Gregory rustled up the younger men and directed them to sit, 131



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knees tucked under their bodies, three or four to a column. They remained like this, silent and introspective for twenty minutes or so until the sun raked long pale shadows behind them. Then Gregory went to the women and instructed them to disperse. The men then rose and filed after them for breakfast. Arranye asked me to look for his sunglasses, which had been lost during the night. I returned to the nearby ceremonial ground and found them, snapped with a lens missing. As I passed the plastic pieces to the old man, Gregory joined the fire. He held my hand. ‘Rod, you still got that old green Bible at your camp? Old Mr Spencer Gillen’s turnout? Same way we do it here. Same way here today as in that picture. That old Spencer. That my grandfather. He know law. Law is footprint for us mob to follow.’ Later in the day I had to return to camp to tell Arranye that IAD’s language program was not able to give him any further help to tape his Â�stories. I had a cheap pair of shades from the petrol station for him, together with the bread he’d asked for. He was not perturbed by IAD’s lack of support. ‘That all right, my son. We find it. Nother track be somewhere.’ Betterboy rose weakly from the shade of the humpy and tossed his mandatory bark at me. Scungy atolls of fur clung to the pleats of his polished carcass. He swung me an apologetic eye and rejoined his brood. All the men remained blood-smeared and bare-chested, either sleeping or propped around Arranye’s campfire. Jude asked about the Iraqi war. ‘That Saddam might be Satan, I suppose,’ he said. Arranye castigated him for taking his mind away from the ‘business’. The conversation turned around to old times, how things used to be. Ceremony made the old man reflective. The family genealogy kept expanding in my head. I jumped in the car, disturbing the kids who had promptly commandeered it. Betterboy and his currish cousins had sprayed the tyres, laying claim to my ‘little white taxi’. 132


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THE BOY CHILD 133


NEIGHBOURS

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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ R aff I and Patrick at Mt U ndoolya outstation

As E l ain e ’s p r e g n a n c y s ta rted to show ,

Ronja excitedly told us she also ‘had a baby in her leg’. She was tugging her rubber boots carefully over her calves one afternoon as it started to rain. Like many Alice Springs kids, Ronja adored rain. It was a novel event and she romped around in it whether it was hot or cold, her little naked body drinking it in. I too was excited about the little lump starting to push out Elaine’s front. Ronja and I biked down to take a dip at the waterhole on the confluence of Charles Creek and Todd River, the sacred site of Tyurretye. Summer rains had flushed fresh water through the waterways. While I rested the bike against a tree and we slipped into our bathers, a commotion from seven or eight Aboriginal women erupted in the centre of the riverbed where the water was a mere trickle. Two women were exchanging blows and verbals, as hot as the day. Both were bleeding from scalp wounds inflicted by river stones. They removed their t-shirts and convulsed along the river course 40 metres before dissembling. We skirted the argument to 134



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reach the pool and waded in, leaving our towels on the shaded grass knoll, where a comatose couple sprawled. Young Indigenous kids were swimming, using the inflated foil bladders of empty wine casks as ‘floaties’. The kids rollicked with Ronja and nibbled at her toes, pretending to be crocodiles. She was in water heaven. Across the joining creek, half a dozen young men were teasing a mate who was dressed ‘proper flash’. They wrestled off his cowboy boots and hat, then dispatched them to the murky water. He broke free and promptly jumped after his gear while his mirthful mates applauded. The women from the fight ambled past, except for the protagonist, who lagged behind to pick up and replace her bra. She studied the remains of her blouse, cursing them in English, stopping before us to wash the gash on her head. The blood skeined across the warm pool. She stood up and swore to put her foe in hospital. In the opposite shallows another man, his left arm bandaged at the elbow, swung his strong arm at a bigger woman identically bandaged. Inebriated in thigh-deep water, they choreographed a pathetic comedy of mishits, too feeble to result in further injury. We biked back home, refreshed from our swim, and having seen far more than we’d bargained for.

to partake in a yoga retreat in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, and took Ronja with her. During her stay she went into premature labour and was admitted into hospital in Camperdown, Sydney, for the next four and a half months. Her stability was maintained with a regime of Ventolin. She only got out of bed for the toilet. Any more activity than that brought on contractions. I went to retrieve Ronja and had arranged two weeks off from college so that we could be together as a family in Sydney. We knew two couples who lived there as well as Royden. Ronja was rotated between the

Ea r ly in M a r ch , El ain e d ec ided

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households until I arrived. Thankfully, the friends all lived within easy walking distance of the hospital. Ronja and I familiarised ourselves with the playground equipment of Newtown, Redfern and Camperdown. We traipsed the parks, which brought us toe-to-toe with unprecedented quantities of dog poo. Sydney’s dog Dreaming was forever stuck to our shoes. Almost as soon as we got home, Ronja developed pneumonia and was placed in the children’s ward in Alice Springs hospital. The nursery had only one cot into which she was promptly bundled. All other bedding was in the next room, which was overflowing with Indigenous kids evacuated from Yuendumu, all suffering from an enteritis epidemic. It hurt me to see her attached to machinery, and the fear in her eyes. I slept next to her cot on the floor while cockroaches ran errands on crumbs from her leftover supper sandwich. When the masked nurses woke Ronja to take a swab of mucus from her nostril, I had to hold her stillâ•¯–â•¯an unwilling accomplice to the terror she experienced. As she recovered I contracted flu and became too weak to care for her. I was as helpless as she had been, able only to crawl to the toilet. I stayed an extra day in hospital, relying on the excellent nursing staff to tend to Ronja. As I was full-time at work, I made day care arrangements for Ronja with a neighbour. I held my breath before I made each Sydney phone call, hoping that the baby was still inside Elaine. Royden, true to form, had been attentive and nurturing. He ran daily errands from Balmain to Camperdown. He’d introduced Elaine to his doctor, Sue Henckle, and she and Elaine formed a friendship that lasted until Elaine returned to Alice. I was so grateful to them.

the old man and me to Little Well. On the curving road we saw that recent rain had promoted the growth of

Du rin g May, Ro nja a c c o m pa nied

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the native grasses. Two months earlier, the absence of follow-up rain presented a forlorn feeding prospect for the horses that Kevin Pick grazed in this marginal, dust-hazed country. We sighted two flocks of bush turkey with their chicks. Only their heads were visible cruising the crest of the dry grasses. Though they presented easy targets, we had no gun. With the rain had come the flies, of course, and they bred on us, every aperture a wound into which they hived. We travelled south-east of Phillipson’s Pound, a massive hybrid of russet bony sandstone mountains in the hub of Eastern Arrernte country. Arranye motioned me to stop whenever we came to topographies he wanted to talk about. This journey never failed to move me. But in Arranye’s company, his country was augmented with stories and, on privileged occasions, the travelling songs of the animals that populated it. We lit fires when we sat to talk, merely to choke off the flies. He said the flies were like this after rain. More rain was imminent, but the breeze would have to turn from the north. Could I see the small green parrot, he asked, that ushered in the rain? I could hear only the cello-noted surprise of the rock pigeons. They fluttered and riffed above us, warning their fellows to scarper away to higher perches. On the old Andado road, he sensed the lull in the fourth hour of our drive and wound into the native cat song. He had been speaking about the cat moving in the low sand ridge west of the road. Now he became the cat or quoll, clawing the air, scratching, sniffing, barely containable in the seatbelt. It was his acoustic calling card and so ruffled my nerves, the vehicle revved in response, accelerating on the sandy road. Ronja was deep in slumber, her head resting on my thigh. This was the kind of singing of the country he reckoned wasn’t done enough in places where I’d noted degeneration. ‘You love it too much?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Some time I dance it you.’ 137



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The native cat Dreaming was crucial to sub-incision procedures. I thought of Ted Strehlow, Carl Strehlow’s son, who had recorded these cat stories while serving as a field officer and native protector in Central Australia. Arranye had met Ted Strehlow when they attended ceremonies along the Hale, Ross and Todd rivers in the 1930s and 1940s. Arranye inhabited these stories. The traditional stories of the country and the stories of his biography were indivisible. And, as Strehlow commanded respect as an authority on Arrernte culture, so Arranye had earned mine. ‘Arranye,’ I asked, ‘is there anything you need to ask an older person about this cat?’ ‘No. I know it right through. Backwards and forwards. All of it for my country. And I know Luritja [south] and Kaytetye [north].’ The story bisected the continent from Port Augusta to Darwin. Not obviously like the sealed Stuart Highway, which had determined my reading of the country. Bitumen spoke about speed and precise timetables. Roadhouses were planned on fuel tank capacity and driver fatigue, just as the telegraph repeater stations were constructed at intervals that bespoke the limitations of available technology a hundred years before. Sinuous tracks like the one we were on, which skirted the toes of the Arookaba Range, were sometimes erased only to emerge elsewhere nearby. These dirt roads belonged to curiosity, the need to be detained, to fossick. We wound in and out of cherished places that provided local food and water. These tracks brought us close up to extraordinary landforms. Arranye showed me aringe, the frogmouth owl’s Dreaming rock. There were several 50-metre high cones of red gravel. Boomerang Hill and Black Hill were composed of small pitch-coloured tektites; the old man pointed out flints and spearheads, thousands of them. There were meteorite craters, and caves, some with rudimentary ochre paintings on their walls. A low saddle of red sandstone conglomerates, the very image of scaly armour in the lizard story of the site, flanked Atherrete Bore. As we passed Camel Flat Bore, Arranye convulsed in laughter at the sight of its priapic shape. 138



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There were moths, small ones, everywhere. Some weeks back these were caterpillars, a ground tribe on the move, devouring hundreds of square kilometres of bogan-flea burr. No one had seen this ‘caterpillar mob’ at Little Well for at least ten years. On the flood-out east of the Â�Collins Range we entered ‘proper snake country’, close to the mythological snake site at Little Well. A quivering froth of yellow and white flowers consumed the space between grass and tree. They radiated against the red sand, gaudy as badges. ‘Like scramble egg, you think, my boy?’ Arranye said, nudging me in the side. ‘Pretty one right now, you might be thinkin’.’ We wove amid the glaucous shrub, the stands of boxwood and gidgee. Arranye’s knowledge of all that moved, sang or rustled in the country could quickly reduce me to inadequacy. His knowledge gave him confidence. Gregory loped towards us as the car slowed down. He would have heard us grinding through the flood-out, fifteen to twenty minutes distant. His gorgeous smile peeled around dentures ground smooth by years of grit-imbued foods. We regrouped by Gregory’s fire. A flock of small, innocent clouds huddled protectively on the north-western horizon, mimicking the shape of the range. They flared briefly, a rufous red, as the sun fell. We sank our mouths into large enamelled pannikins of tea, limned with the residual slick of soups and stews. We soaked bread and thick crackers in the brew, appeasing our hunger before the meat grilled up. I should have been prepared for anything by now. Still I was surprised to find Gregory had set up a video player under some gidgee. The dulcet purr of a small generator tethered a short distance from the TV’s flickering eye suddenly shrunk the infinite space around us. The stars kept sparkling. But our eyes were drilled to the receiver. The moths flirted with the monocle, hypnotised like the rest of us. Gregory had chosen the televersion of the Jonestown saga of 1978. The names had been changed to 139



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protect someone, though it could not be the innocent or naive. Over nine hundred people died with cult leader Reverend Jones. Perversely, the film’s name had been changed to Johnson Town, which was the reason Â�Gregory had chosen it. During the night Arranye was disturbed and sat up for twenty minutes repeating questions in English. ‘Where they come from? Where their grandfathers come from? Where their grandmothers come from? German, I suppose. Nobody can win. Where is his country? I know my country. I must ask my good mate.’ Who was he referring to? I nestled into my pillow and dwelled on his curious assumption. Germans had an illustrious history in the Centre from Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission days until the presentâ•¯–â•¯the explorer Leichhardt; Mueller, the first master of the Telegraph Station and warden of the Arltunga goldfields in the 1890s. Really, Strehlow would have been the prominent German in Arranye’s experience. In the morning Arranye couldn’t recall his dream-addled monologue, but admitted the movie had stirred haunting memories of his early days, when so many of his playmates and relatives died at Arltunga Mission from contaminated water. He pledged to take me to the site of the many unmarked graves. Arranye had developed a chest cold. I had one myself. Ronja and I went with Gregory to gather the lime green leaf of a small bush on the banks of Angkerrknge Creek. ‘Might be we call that one Vicks VapoRub tree,’ rasped Arranye on his early morning smoke. The leaves were boiled down and mixed with animal fat, then rehoused in a Log Cabin tobacco tin. Arranye was concerned for me and beckoned me to lie on his blanket and remove my shirt. Having sung over the tin, he rubbed fat onto my chest, intermittently blowing softly. He sang again, his touch a susurration across my chest. He asked if I had eaten. 140



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‘Oh, mwerre [good],’ he said, when I told him that I’d had breakfast. ‘Irretye [wedgetail eagle] might be give it you, cold. He bring that cold air close up your head. You can’t see it. But he’s got it. Fly low over you. Paint it shadow on you.’ I turned on my belly and he touched my back briefly, and continued singing. I put my shirt back on. He flounced my hair, combing his fingers through it several times, shaking them free of accumulated static after each passage. ‘Go sit in sun, my boy. That proper medicine for cold.’ By now the gidgee embers were right for shovelling into the recessed cooking pit. A kangaroo had been singed and thrown in to make for lunch. I noticed a fat-headed skink impaled on a twig among the wood pile. Knowing it was a casualty of our wood handling, I terminated its misery by throwing it on the coals. A wick of fat flared and was snuffled in the ashes. Gregory berated me. ‘Not there. That for kere. Chuck ’im over there.’ It was my first awareness of the special regard that Arrernte held for cooking fire. Certainly it was not a place to dump waste. We sipped at our tea while the roo baked. Arranye declined the offer of powdered milk for his tea. ‘Make me too much larrikin for woman.’ He paused, waiting for my attention again. ‘Might be I suck on woman’s titty if she be give it me,’ he taunted, digging me in the ribs. Near seventy, he might well pass up the milk. The tea boiled in an old flour drum and would simmer all day. The talk, like their names, was a tangle of droving, mining and Catholic lingo. I leant into his stories, sniffing for crumbs as he related them. I wondered about his impression of my story-telling medium, painting. What did he think of them, I asked him. ‘Young fella, my good mate, you know a true story? Not Dreaming story. Young blackfella be gutting bull with white boss. Boss said, “This 141



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knife no good. Go get ’im pocket knife from wife missus in kitchen.” He go off to kitchen. He not know this thing, puckit niff. He say it over an’ over to ’imself, “Puckit. Puckit.” A perentie cross ’is track, ’is word get lost that way. It follow perentie. When he get to homestead, he see boss missus ’an say, “Boss want me fuckit you.” So they do jig-a-jig an’ he go back to boss. “Me fuckit boss missus like you ask.” That boss, he just tell ’im to keep cleanin’ out that rib an’ make sure he keep plenty kerosene on ’imself keep ’em flies away. Tell ’im to jump inside them ribcage. Boss put match on him and burnt it whole lot. What you think that might mean? That mean you got to be listen proper and learn it own story from what you hear it.’ True to Arranye’s forecast, several cloud zeppelins trundled south across the sky followed by a fleet of darker, menacing company. The trees close to the tin sheds scratched arcs into their red oxide coating. Rain was coming. The sky was now uniformly grey. Then it unclotted into large charcoal sheets which moved at greater speed. Rain followed the blunt claps of thunder. I shivered. A ferrous perfume rose from the washed earth. Arranye suggested I head back to town. I jumped into the truck, somewhat nervous. I’d be alone with Ronja for the return trip. Traffic on the Numery track was scarce. Before me were seven gates. Each time I got out to open and shut the gates I checked the tyres. The Ross River also crossed the Numery road. The track was glazed and hard to hold. With the windows down, the heavy Petra Chlor seized my nostrils, sweet and rich. When the windows were shut, my car carried the lingering odours of Arrernte bodies and the fires they sat around, of the scent of meat which they perspired. I made Allua Bore and Loves Creek without getting a flat or running off the road and paused, somewhat relieved. From the creek’s northern bank, Ronja and I watched the creek water rally, a rare sight in the desert. Coral-coloured clays plaited with the limestone run-off, pushing a filthy foam like brewer’s yeast before it. Huffs of wind lacerated the dolomite 142



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cliffs, coifing eucalyptus limbs. Leaves, stewed with sand, squalled into the creviced rockwall. In half an hour the creek gusted its banks, roiling midpoint, ripping into the ribcage of the cliff. I noticed the rear of the vehicle was totally covered in a coat of red as I returned to the cabin and gunned the engine.

T wo w e e k s b e f o r e El ain e was f ull-term ,

I flew to Sydney with Ronja to attend the birth. Royden picked us up from the airport and drove us directly to the hospital. The moon sat a little above the city. Reflections in the towering windows threw off moon chips. Ronja thought the whole city ‘look like party’, her absolute endorsement for the good and the beautiful. Rain thrashed against the large window in Elaine’s ward. Down below, a thousand cars nudged each other along asphalt estuaries, pods of glistening dolphins in playful columns. We made immediate arrangements for Elaine to check out and drove with Royden to his subterranean flat in Balmain. A fortnight later, on 6 July, Elaine went into labour. We had the plush birthing suite and access to its pool, should we opt for a water birth. We lolled around in the warm water for a few hours. Labour progressed and Elaine retired to the bedroom. Raphael arrived sweet and bacon smelling at 2.19 p.m. A magnificent boy child. The amazing relaxation after delivery, erasing months of furrows from my body, turned me to putty. Two love children. After four and a half months, Elaine was breaking her neck to quit Sydney. We flew home days after the birth. ‘We call that one city slicker,’ said Raphael Turner, his namesake, soon after we had arrived home. ‘Not country like marle akweke Ronja.’ Xavier wept when he heard we had called our boy Raphael, after Kemarre’s oldest son. He took off his shirt, picked Raphael up and rubbed his body against him, saying ‘this Aboriginal way’. 143



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He was glad we hadn’t named him Xavier. ‘I soon be dead,’ he said. When Jude came to see Raphael he was pleased we had a boy and delighted with the name. But neither he nor others subsequently fussed over him as they had over Ronja. Was this because he was born away from the place, I wondered. Raphael was dubbed ‘Raffi’ for short. His Buddha-like presence was immediately evident, strikingly peaceful and self-contained. He had rolls of fat and a wrestler’s buttocks. Even new mothers in the street would stop to admire him. He was sensational. A little chocolate-eyed blondie. One morning there was a soft rap at the door. Gregory was there with his wife and her sisters in tow. He wanted help with shifting their swags from Whitegate into the saltbush behind the Federals Sports Club. The women fluttered around the ‘new’ baby. Their abode was Little Well, but when in town they had always stopped at Whitegate. Since the deaths of Graeme and Alphonse Hayes, Whitegate was off limits and inappropriate. Jamesy Johnson had been cursed with a song by the Hayes as retribution for his culpable driving. Now there were tensions with the Johnsons, who were forced into constant and precarious itinerancy at numerous camping spots around town. Patrick Hayes, who’d lived with the deceased at the Hayes outstation, was culturally obliged to vacate and demolish the shelters to allow the spirits to be liberated; subsequently he had asserted himself at Whitegate. We did a run to transport the bedding, pots and pans, and boxes of groceries among other things in the recently acquired ’81 Commodore station wagon. The back was so congested with stuff that the swags went on the roof rack. I didn’t have any ropes and lost the load as the car jogged over the cattlegrid into suburbia. Strollers walking their well-groomed dogs at dusk gazed in wonderment at the sprawl of bedding on the road. We restacked it and wended our way through the saltbush to whereÂ� GregÂ�ory had gathered some dry sticks for a fire. The scrub here was generously littered with plastic carry bags and Gregory ignited the fire with a 144



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couple of nearby ones. The saccharine, poisonous dioxin fumes hung in a thin cloud just above the saltbush. Gregory had slept in the wood-box at the Catholic Church during the previous three wet nights and was ‘sick of it’. He slipped the canvas off his swag and strung it between two bushes in case it rained again. He needn’t have worried. It was a crystalline evening. Elaine and I took Dominic, Adrian, Gwenda and some kids to Honeymoon Gap for a concert by the Melbourne-based, booming black star Archie Roach and his wife, Ruby Hunter. Tangentyere had organised the affair and it was well patronised by blacks, who easily outnumbered the whites, although Archie was a huge hit with the latter. The ‘authentic’ voice of Indigenous Australia was on offer. The local support acts included the Desert Tigers and Frankie Yamma. Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter were on form, but the black audience had little rapport with them, and most filed out the gates after their local heroes had finished. I had hoped to hear more of Yamma, a prodigious, raw talent. He was not a big man, but his chunky frame housed a cretaceous growl that described space, gravel, dust, animals and insects with oppression and longing. I was ambushed by its weight, with a force that gripped my abdomen. If ever the Blues needed a local proponent, it was Frankie Yamma.

for the .308, we could enjoy a good day hunting. Where was the bolt if it wasn’t in camp? We looked for it at his Aunty Myra’s place. It wasn’t stuck in her chicken wire ceiling with the bits of meat and other goods too valuable for scavenging dogs. Myra suggested older brother Patrick had it. He might be at Charles Creek camp, at the hospital, or Trucking Yards camp. We tried each in turn, encouraged by confident informants until we found him

Ad r ia n r e c ko n e d if h e g ot the bolt back

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at Amoonguna. He was bent under the bonnet of his car in front of his daughter’s house, spanner in hand. The car wasn’t roadworthy for town, but he used it to commute the 20 kilometres between Amoonguna and the Hayes outstation. Patrick said he didn’t have the bolt. The chances of a day’s hunting were fast receding. Adrian kept on hassling, unable to accept that we’d come this far without securing it. We followed an incensed Patrick into the house. He dragged his suitcase of clothes before his car, cursing loudly and claiming ignorance of the bolt’s whereabouts. He was totally stirred as he tipped all his clothes out. He raked his cowboy boots through them, ensuring through his conspicuous gestures and yelling that neighbours would testify to his innocence. Then he undressed down to his boots and cowboy hat. ‘See for yourself. I got nothing!’ He stood naked in the road. Adrian was silenced. We drove back to town, Patrick’s vivid rebuttal having displaced further hunting thoughts. Adrian told me the following weekend that the bolt had circulated to the Hayes outstation. That Sunday was 40°C plus. I borrowed a friend’s Toyota pickup. Arranye had talked up an excursion to Uyitye/Wyeecha, an important rainmaking site. He wanted to show it to me and younger family who had not been before. It took two hours to navigate town, picking up family members who wanted to make the trip. We needed ice, bullets and drinks. A brute wind whirled upon the crosscut saw of the Eastern Ranges. Mt Undoolya’s great wing shimmered. Its pink gravel veiled down to the plain on which our track wended towards Todd River Station. Ten minutes down the Numery track there was thumping on the cabin roof. Dominic was remonstrating with Lizzie, demanding that we return to town. No way was I returning after exhausting my patience during the delays in the camps. He asked to stop. He jumped from the tray, gun tucked under his arm, stalked 20 metres back, then retraced and 146



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climbed back in amid a barrage of blows from Lizzie and her pannikin. The ten people in the tray remained silent, as did the two old men, Davey Patywenge Hayes and Arranye who sat up front. Ronja sat between the old men and me, cramped over the transmission. She accompanied me on nearly all such trips and dominated the airwaves with her non-stop singing. They all loved it. She persisted in putting her boots on the wrong feet. It seemed wilful. Arranye claimed he did that too. ‘Good job I blind,’ he laughed. We left the dirt track through a gate half an hour south of Todd River Homestead, then ventured through some abandoned cattle yards up scrubby Uyitye Creek. Rocks in the lower creek were the height of the hubs. Adrian got out to engage the 4WD. No one said a thing. If I was willing to drive, then drive I would. Furious winds sucked up the pound, grinding its pomegranate walls, virulent and unsettling. The incubating heat enfolded us in the stubble of our bodies. Ronja got jumpy. I was trying not to panic in front of her and the calm old men. When we got stuck, she got out and walked with Gwenda and Lizzie. I was left with Arranye and Dominic’s advice to back up and charge the sandbank at a variety of speeds and angles. We made it out of the creek. With his machete, Davey cut a trail another 20 metres, but a wall of roof-high boulders defeated us. It had taken two hours to do less than a kilometre. It was too hot for the old men to proceed. The women and kids settled there, lighting small fires for tea. I lugged Ronja behind Dominic and Adrian, half an hour up a walking trail. The rocks flanking us were stained like latrines; lichens and calcites lent them a skin of rust and talc. The fig pods had split and were heavy with ants. The site was blessedly cooler, in shade and water-fronted. Pardalotes and rock pigeons fed here. Honey eaters of three types. And the crested pigeons, which cooeed and curtsied recklessly close to us. The overhanging gallery was loaded with paintings of awele-awele/bush tomato. Repeated 147



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concentric circles were linked with parallel lines of red ochre. Their magnitude was impressive, their code on the ceiling patiently re-fingered over the centuries. I felt like I was standing beneath a circuit board inside a giant skull. There were few such galleries in Arrernte country and I was excluded from the syntax or symbols of the work. The men were not in a position to speak for them, which I regretted. Designated custodians had the responsibility of speaking for sites and for protecting them. Though the basic story might be communal property, only these people could transmit at the level they deemed appropriate. Adrian threw a stone into the water and muttered some words of gratitude. Then we men cooled off, fully clothed, in the spring, which was frilled with a green caul of algae. Ronja refused the inviting water and sat in the shade as native wasps darted about her. Martins, all air and grace, ducked in and out of mud nests daubed in the overhang. They scrolled against the sky, pursuing insects that hummed in ascending gyres above the water. The surrounding trees bent towards the pool as if in prayer. It was at the very peak of the valley, a revelation that so much water was trapped at this elevation. We ambled back to the women and children. As we tugged at our damper and tinned meat, Arranye spoke of the rain-making ceremonies that used to take place here. As if by theatrical appointment in the blasting blue sky, two cumuli drifted over the mountain shoulder to amplify the old man’s story. ‘Is it going to rain?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know. Clouds don’t talk to me,’ Adrian answered. Arranye spoke of the Wakaya ‘foot soldiers’ invading from the north long ago, when his father was a boy, and trying to steal the stories pertaining to Uyitye. ‘â•›“You got water Dreamin’?” they asked. “We want it.”â•›’ Without the story they would be denied the controlling powers of the site. The Arrernte resisted. Women and children were bashed to death; 148



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the babies were used as clubs. In spite of their aggression, they failed. I couldn’t get a picture of how long this invasion endured, weeks or months. It may well have been that the mining activities at Hatches Creek, or a drought, had forced them south-west.

Ba c k in t h e v e h ic l e , the

descent was easier. We gained the cattle yard. Adrian yelled from the back something in Arrernte. ‘Not that way,’ Arranye flared as I motioned towards our recent tracks. ‘Young men want kere [meat]. Might get ’im on grass after their sleep finish.’ Kangaroos would be moving from the shade of the trees out on the plain now. The temperature had slackened, but it remained hot. A hallucinatory heat. The wind dropped. We left the old men, women and kids under a stand of gidgee by a creek bank and drove on across the scrubby plains. The vindictive light lasered the sandy track before the vehicle. As we approached within a kilometre of the bore, the road became slippery with cow shit. The surrounds were bereft of vegetation. The dust thickened where it had been churned over by hooves. Close to the water where their many approaches concurred, it became a great circle of manured mud, darkened by the mire of mating flies. Fifty or sixty cows lapped at the brimming troughs filled by the uncapped flow from the vast artesian basin. Millions of litres a day had seeped out since the bores had been sunk, many over a century ago, to propagate the herds of the early pastoralists. We passed the bore and turned east. Then, on the cusp of surrender, Dominic tapped the cabin roof. Having spotted roo, I had to avoid ditches, ruts and trees, and ensure that guns were kept on the quarry side of the cabin. Despite vigilance on the shrubby plain, I still ran into creases which jagged the wheel and wrenched my spine. My left knee, unused to so much clutch work, burned with pain. 149



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The power pack of the bullet on the open plain caromed against distant ridges. The vapour of scorched gun oil filled the cabin. In the rear vision mirror I could see the young men coated in dust. They shot three female adults, who tossed their progeny from their pouches as they fled. The deaths weren’t quick, clean shots. The roos were hit more than once. They teetered, jerked and swayed to die beyond the Toyota’s reach in heavy scrub. They were easily chased then clubbed. Unless it hit them in the head, the .22 proved inept. ‘It only for rabbit,’ confided Edward Neil. Young Malcolm gathered two joeys and befriended them. A pink embryo parched to death was kept for the dogs. Three-year-old Ronja, as witness to this hunt, made a vegetarian pledge. As we returned to camp, Edward spotted two arleye/emus ambling through the ironwood and raised his hand for me to stop. He asked Â�Malcolm for his yellow t-shirt and slowly waved it against the passenger door. The lead bird lifted its head and cocked it at various angles, assessing the curious, moving mustard swatch. It wandered so close that Edward shot it with his first round. Despite the false clickings from Edward’s gun, the animals gazed nervelessly at us, awaiting their fate. Dominic jumped down, broke its neck and tossed it amid the tangle of roos in the tray. He caught me frowning at the ancient .308. ‘That not for roo. That for man. Make ’im mince. He don’t come home an’ smile at his family after gettin’ this one,’ he said, almost apologetically. The bolt of the .308 kept falling off. Like Edward’s .22, it required two or three squeezes of the trigger. The .22 was heavily bandaged with insulation tape to hold the barrel to the butt. These guns had been sung over and empowered. Dilapidated, ‘customised’, they were valued for their collective memory, their stains, sweat and scratches. Cooking the roo was more elaborate than I had understood. The gidgee was uprooted, providing a ready-made ground oven in the red sand. It was the premium ember, slow-burning and holding heat. The meat 150



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was laid on a bed of gidgee leaves to avoid sand contamination. Edward adjusted the embers in the pit throughout the two-hour cook. He initially singed the fur and pan-fried the entrails as entree, of which everyone partook. The tails were rubbed with the half-digested, worm-riddled belly grass for hunting luck. The warm blood broth, cut from the groin, was passed around the group. The butchery was incisive. Each activity was undertaken with the ritualistic, wordless dignity that accompanies sensible habits. Gwenda helped Ronja to drink from the pannikin. ‘Big daddy be drink, marle akweke. You be drink it too. Make it healthy and strong girl,’ said Gwenda. It was dark by the time we’d eaten and got back into the Toyota. We drove home on the rim of sleep, bodies slumped against each other’s, aching from the heat that had polished us all day. At home, my left knee was painful to straighten and just as painful bent. Ronja rattled through the highlights for Elaine. ‘Daddy got lost and broken on a bumpy road. I cried because Mummy and baby was home, and because little kangaroo is dead. We drank blood which make us healthy and wrong. When Daddy get bigger, he will have a gun in back of the car too.’ I doubted that.

had come and with them a dramatic drop in temperature. The wet had flushed insects from their hiding. A cacophony of birds, usually dawn warblers, drilled the air all day. Shoals of grey, curly leaf litter eddied into nests beneath the witchetty scrub, freckling the low hills. Lizzie Johnson was back in hospital, needing nursing throughout the night. She had lost control of her bowels, had an inactive thyroid gland and muscular atrophy. One night she managed to get a taxi and stood at

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our door in her hospital pyjamas. I nursed her to sleep, promising to locate her husband, Dominic, whom she had tried to find since that morning. She breathed deeply like a candle sucking air from the lounge. She woke me to assist her to the toilet. Dominic was at Whitegate when I drove her to camp after breakfast. I left them together. She was angry that he had ‘spoilt her hundred dollars’ on the taxi. I had heard Whitegate residents complain of exorbitant taxi fares and of drivers not tending change on large bills. But no. Lizzie was ropeable about spending a portion of her pension in pointless pursuit of her partner. Early the next Sunday there was a rap on the door. I dragged a towel about my waist and answered it. Noelly Johnson put his hand on my shoulder and spoke quickly. ‘My sister, and your sister, that old man’s daughter, been pass away. Domo, got no wife.’ A file of people followed him: Patrick and Eva Hayes, Joe Cleary, Rosita Ryder, Raphael Turner and some kids. We all touched hands. After they departed, Elaine consoled me. Given her condition, she said, Lizzie’s death was a blessing. I drove over to Whitegate to grieve with Arranye, who was sitting in the old men’s quarters with Harold Wheelchair Ross and Edward Neil. I stroked his back, saying sorry. He conjectured that they would move camp to Pepperill Creek. Myra was stunned. She felt it was too cold at Pepperill Creek. Edward suggested we grab my trailer and collect wood, which we did. As I eased the Commodore near a copse of struggling ironwood, the resident galahs launched off, a galaxy of pink and grey above the remonstrating limbs. My thoughts were heavy as I dragged the wood to the trailer. I was infused with thoughts of Lizzie, lost and inert. Edward scolded me for not noticing a nest in one of the branches I had tossed in the tray. That night I felt meaningless and terrified, wishing to be otherwise, anything else. The moon had been hooked off stage. Would the night’s 152



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slow, sucking tongue make me big and solid again? I wandered around the back yard. I felt the pressure of my relationships, the fragility and brevity of life. I was caught in the endless night’s suffocating slick. Gregory and his crew were camping at Mt Swan, near the intersection of Larapinta and Lovegrove drives, still waiting for Lizzie’s funeral. It was not uncommon for the deceased to remain frozen in the morgue for more than a month. It was contingent upon relatives chipping in to pay for the service. It could also take weeks for the families to agree on location, a very sensitive issue. The cost of a funeral in town was about twice that at Santa Teresa (where most of the family’s bones lay). I drove with Raffi to Gregory’s camp. Half a dozen improvised shelters were spread on the flatter platforms of quartzite sand stepped between the scrubby hill. Dominic and David were smoking together in the storm drain at the base of Mt Swan. They squatted in silence around a small fire beneath the bridge. Raffi’s baby talk created a trickle of laughter from the women. It was perceived as telling Janet to get away from him, alaye, in Arrernte. Dominic strolled over. When the laughing subsided, he remarked that their camp was situated close to the path of the dog Dreaming. He pointed to the nearby puppy dog, a large sandstone rock sitting on a slight rise next to Larapinta Drive. ‘Winter light make country good-looking,’ he remarked. Sunrise and sunset were particularly propitious for Dreaming stories. After sundown, the dark made the shapes and outlines swell with myth and assume their spiritual presences. ‘Story come out in half light,’ Dominic added. As I fastened Raffi into his car restrainer, Dominic hovered behind me. He was nursing a baby kangaroo inside his shirt and believed he could get money for it. He’d heard of a whitefella who lived near the Cultural Precinct that had paid for two. Could I help him sell it? Though I didn’t doubt his story, I wasn’t aware of any roo trade in town. I only knew of 153



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joeys being voluntarily adopted by foster families, then released back into the wild when strong enough. Coincidentally on my way across town to Mt Swan that morning, I had seen five or six women loitering on the town council lawns. I slowed down to absorb the scene. In bizarre convention, they carried slings with protruding muzzles, tails and topsy-turvy legs. They were the foster parents of orphaned roos. I suggested to Dominic that we take the joey to the council lawns. A uniformed woman, her sleepy marsupial eyes magnified by thick lenses, backed away from us. Before we could tell her of Dominic’s intent, she blurted out her tale of rearing orphans and releasing them at Simpsons Gap, only to hear that the local blackfellas had killed them. ‘What a waste,’ she concluded, avoiding eye contact with Dominic and clutching her ‘baby’ to her generous bosom. She hadn’t noticed the roo crammed inside his shirt. He sensed a rebuttal and turned to the car. ‘Take me Whitegate. I want to see that old man, Arranye.’ We drove to camp. The kids gathered around the joey. I asked Arranye about a big buff-coloured roo I’d seen in the hills close to our house. Its great size and pale colour distinguished it from the euros. ‘Oh, that one belong it Dreaming.’ He was absolutely sure from my description. ‘Can’t kill it, that one, you know. He always there. His place.’ For days after, the Whitegate kids looked after the orphan joey. Then it became prey for the hungry camp dogs. Over the years health workers had tried to reduce camp dog numbers. Sample cases indicated that health in the camps improved after dog eradication programs. Surely, I thought, a needle to make the dogs impotent would help ease the burden. I would think about this as I watched flearidden beasts snorkelling around their turds for sustenance. The scabies, the lice, the malnutritionâ•¯–â•¯if noticed at Whitegate, it wasn’t being treated. Most of the dogs had drolly apt names. A miserable little black and white pup absolutely riddled with fleas, more fleas than fur, was called Flea. One with a stuttering yodel was called Flat Battery. Eric Neil had a 154



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grey-flecked thing that seemed to limp on every leg, a doozey of a dog, which he called ‘It’ll do’. And there was Betterboy, a hairless brute with a broken baritone. These canines provided a sentry of sorts, rushing my car as a horde, then promptly slouching back to the shadows.

was visiting Whitegate, Jennifer Johnson pleaded with me to take Eric to hospital. He suffered acute alcoholism and the associated physical deterioration. He got in the car to avoid further nagging from his wife, who stayed at camp. When I pulled up at the ambulance depot, Eric refused to budge, saying it was not his idea to admit himself. The orderlies, in spite of Eric’s bleeding ears, backed off apologeticÂ� ally, saying they were unable to help without his consent. A few weeks later, Robbie Hayes arrived at the door and asked if I would run Eric to hospital. I was told that he had collapsed while on the way to our place. I drove around the corner and spotted him lying crumpled and bleeding on the footpath, next to Jennifer. She ordered him into the car. He meekly complied when I got him to his feet. He was shaking badly and bleeding from the mouth. ‘This time at Little Well,’ Jennifer said, ‘he been have pictures in ’is head. He been shaken and fittin’.’ Food had apparently been scarce during his detoxifying week there. When we pulled up in the drive of the hospital, I opened my door on a nugget of phlegm that would have filled half a shoe. Eric’s blood-spattered shirt spoke for him at casualty and he was promoted in the queue where he lay on the bench beneath an aquarium, with one of Raffi’s nappies tucked under his neck. I left him on his back gazing at the glass-eyed goldfish mouthing their mantras. Soon he was back in camp, a fez of bandages encircling his face. He said he felt better. Better than what? On e a f t e rn o o n w h e n I

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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ A ggie A bbott and A rranye at S t A nthonys Rockhole

the number of Aboriginal people entering my life increased. The Johnsons were now only occasional visitors to Whitegate, except for Arranye, who continued to make it his base. And as our relationship strengthened during his final years, my interactions with Xavier and the other Johnsons continued, but with less frequency. Several times Arranye and I ventured the 110 kilometres east to Arltunga with tape recorder and camera. The road climbed out of the Â�Bitter Springs valley, up a rise to where we stopped at Ayambale Rockhole. We continued on to where we met a flat expanse of grass called Paddy’s Plain, just inside the Loves Creek Station–Gardens Station boundary. Arranye told me that Gardens Station once had a market garden that supplied vegetables to the Arltunga miners. Later research led me to discover that in its heyday, the fields supported between 300 and 600 people. There was a depression in the range, west of Arltunga, known as the ‘wallaby footprint’. We stopped in the sand and boulders of a rockhole

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which the Arrernte called Arrerre-ntyenge/stinky water. Gold was prospected in the region in 1887. Miners Europeanised its name to ‘Arltunga’ when establishing the town, and the water source was named Paddy’s Rockhole. During this period, Arltunga, Winnecke’s Depot and Harts Range each supported a population far greater than Stuart (later renamed Alice Springs). The region was composed of metamorphic rocks, mostly amphibolite and quartz-mica, weathered into rugged hummocky surfaces. We walked among the few remnants of the old township. The humble police station stood out, having been reconstructed in the 1980s. Arranye rattled off some history of the place as told to him by his elders. Constable Charles Johnson had been the first officer stationed on the fields in 1899 until 1902. This was the whitefella from whom Arranye’s family derived their name. Paddy was the butcher. Arranye’s father had done chores around the station. His uncle worked as a yardman for the hotel and as a tracker assisting the constable. This same uncle was later recruited by the police for further tracking duties near Melbourne. The mine closed in 1916. His father, Ted, and grandfather Charlie Johnson were Arrernte. His mother, Magdaline, was a Luritja woman from Tempe Downs way. After the decline of Arltunga, Arranye’s parents re-settled in Alice Springs, where Arranye was subsequently born. We proceeded to the old cemetery. Arranye spoke about the roadmaking he and other Arrernte men participated in. With just picks and shovels they had forged a better road between Bitter Springs and Arltunga. The Catholic brothers would truck the men back and forth daily from the mission to the work site. Meagre rations were only given to them if they worked on the road and bore construction. ‘Oh the mission mob been work the shit out of us, Arltunga way. Then Santa Teresa after that again,’ said Arranye. This was part of the program of their enforced shift to Arltunga 159


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from the Little Flower Mission in Alice, during World War 2.* The concrete slabs of the old dormitories were visible from the road, as were those of the church and convent. The mission was abandoned in the early 1950s due to what Arranye referred to as cyanide poisoningâ•¯–â•¯contaminated water from the gold battery. He showed me the sixty or so unmarked graves of his kinfolk, a few kilometres south of the ghost town. The government’s official account declared them casualties of typhoid and TB. ‘Typhoid belong gold time. Not mission time,’ insisted Arranye. Arltunga was subsequently abandoned and re-established to the south as the Santa Teresa Mission. A large number of Arrernte shepherded the goats, camels and donkeys to the site of the ‘promised land’. The remaining Arrernte were trucked in the mission lorry. We drove a short distance to Akura-ala/Willy William’s soakage and Arranye talked about the arawe-irrentye ceremonial dances that once occurred at this site. ‘That in Strehlow time, my boy. I only young fella then. He seen all that turnout.’

*â•… Father Maloney and a dedicated lay Catholic, Frank McGarry, established Little Flower Mission between 1937 and 1942. The town residents pressured the mission to move their black constituency. The army was concerned about sexual congress between its men and Aboriginal women. Officials feared sexually transmitted disease would spread to the troops. So 186 Arrernte, three-quarters of whom regarded Alice Springs as their tribal home, were moved in army lorries. Re-settlement was left to the church. During peak occupation of the Arltunga chapter of Little Flower Mission, in the years 1943 to 1944, the population was 400. A mere two dozen Arrernte actually originated from there. Alice Springs was a staging post for the defence of the northern coast and up to 8000 troops camped in the fledgling town. Up to fifty-six trains per week serviced the troops. The road to Darwin had been sealed by the army. War permanently refaced the town with population, commodity wealth and new technologies. Arrernte and other Indigenous groups Australia-wide were recruited to the forces. Around 150 were enlisted in Alice Springs alone. Some received cash for their labour for the first time – a huge departure from ration economy. Until then they had received flour, tea, sugar, blankets and some meat for their labour.

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Still in the region, he showed me Atnape, the place of his initiation into manhood. ‘People come and go. Story stays on. Foundation of culture. I might be only little time. Carry it on. Story more bigger than me. Got to be have it, that story,’ said Arranye. I hoped I was not the only one who was hearing this material. He rehearsed it in Aboriginal English, and then spoke in Arrernte on the tape.

along Mt Benstead Creek in search of the Rainbow Serpent painted on a rock in Gardens Station. Robbie Hayes, Arranye’s nephew, was aboard. As we wound up the valley, Arranye told us the story of the two snakes ‘that been split that woman’. ‘Story begin at Junction Bore, Hale River way, old Willy William’s place. Two tree there are them snakes. This hill here,’ he said, pointing to a break in the ranges, ‘it have a bit of headband story. Woman jus’ seen them two snakes and put all those kids on her head, keep ’em safe.’ We left the creek and found a track heading north-west through Gardens Station. According to Arranye, Akiltje Atwerreme, the small pyramidal hill on the bank, contained the cut-up pieces of snake. After rain its blood would flow. The red ochred sand would wash between the rocks. We found the pool where the snake painting was, but unfortunately it was submerged under metres of sand. Arranye apologised and suggested another trip ‘after rain time’, when the sand might wash away and expose the painting. It was a long and arduous haul in the 4WD through heavy sand to come to this realisation, but the journey was made rich by Arranye. He called halts several times to expound on the snake’s story as we wended our way up the creek. Sometimes we merely paused the vehicle for him to remark. At others he insisted on cutting the motor, getting out and waving his right arm after the shape of the On a n ot h e r t r ip , w e c u t north

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country, elaborating more fully, the feel of the event and how it formed the topography. We pulled into Whitegate at dusk. Gregory was standing around Arranye’s fire, waiting for the tea to boil. ‘Rod, that painting you be make of us mob walkin’ in the street. You sell it?’ ‘Centrelink is going to buy that one, Eyeglass,’ I replied. Then Gregory leant on me for ten dollars and asked for a lift back to Little Well. He thought the sale would cover the petrol, but the thought of an eight-hour return drive prohibited my spontaneous assent.

was staged at Blatherskite Park, south of Heavitree Gap. Elaine and I took Jude and Michael Stewart with us for the day. July could be relied upon for cold weather in Alice Springs, and show days featured early in the month. Every remnant of clothing was trotted out of the wardrobe. A pewter vault gusted overhead. ‘Arrarrkwe [Seven Sisters, Pleiades] make it proper cold. You see them set like that at night an’ you know it be perishin’ cold,’ said Jude. As we drove through the Gap, I asked if they would be riding in the rodeo sponsored by Tangentyere, which was being held later in the month at the same venue. ‘You blokes get on those rough horses?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said Jude. He looked out the window and continued by joking with Michael. ‘We only be ride casks.’ Most of Alice Springs was there, one of the rare occasions when it was possible to be jostled in a crowd and luxuriate in anonymity. A stadium faced the horse ring. Behind it were several halls housing craft exhibits and stalls advertising the town’s small businesses. The paucity of vegetable produce reflected the changed economy of Alice Springs.

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With the arrival of the mega food chains in the 1970s, the home gardens declined. In fact, the prison farm won the judge’s plaudits in all divisions, uncontested. There was a members’ bar in a pavilion where the member whiteÂ� fellas purchased beer in plastic cups. A beer tent next to a toilet block on the western fence was crowded with blackfellas. The tent and nearby toilets were a likely venue for paybacks on neutral ground. Jude said he always protected himself at the show with ‘a company line’. He then produced a sheafed knife, which had been stuck in his boot and hidden by his trousers, before neatly replacing it. As Elaine and the kids herded along sideshow alley towards the ferris wheel, I noticed the men eyeing the nearby pie stand. I told Elaine that the men wanted to eat. Jude and Michael cracked up, mutely floating a grin to each other. They found my reference to them as ‘men’ amusing. ‘We not men yet. Not be enough teaching.’ While they had undergone initiation about ten years ago, the realisation of full manhood was something only acquired through successive ceremonial experience. We left them at the shooting gallery where they mingled with other Arrernte, several of whom lugged their shooting prizes, large afrostyled dolls. All day the light sauntered through its gamut of greys. The chilly wind whooshed the big wheel, giving its riders an even more tenuous grip on the planet. If you weren’t giddy from the congested gush of people that trundled the pavilions and sideshows, the Graviton and the ferris wheel would do the trick. I took a plunge on the Zipper, the gyrations of which parted me from my small change and brought me close to vomiting. That was enough involuntary movement for me. But not for the kids. Raffi, three years old now and already showing his enthusiasm for wheeled transport, chugged around on the ghost train. Ronja rejoiced on the arthritic carousel. Propelled by blasts of 1960s Motown pop, she 163


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mounted a chipped palomino and bobbed along with the frozen herd of chestnuts and black beauties. I noticed two Whitegate kids at a prize stall. On the table behind the attendant, some watches were perched on blocks. The boys were disputing with the attendant, arguing that they had successfully tossed a brass ring around a block. He insisted that they had knocked the whole thing over. While they argued, another Whitegate kid slipped through the back corner of the tent, grabbed a few watches and dissolved into the crowd. We retreated to the poultry hall, where I approved of somebody’s puckish humour. Amid the wire pens of beribboned entrants that clucked and squawked was a Kentucky Fried Chicken box with a clutch of gnawed bones, decked with a first prize sash. We met up with Jude and Michael at the arena and followed them towards a pen of massive Brahman crossbred bulls, mammoths of flesh and testes. It was a spectacle to see the station people and their beasts. Up until the 1960s, I guess, when the beef industry still thrived, it would have been common to see station hands in town. Now they were the exotics. A policeman of comparable appearance admired the bulls with his offsider. The two Aborigines who sauntered by the cattle pen presented an opportunity for the policemen to do a bit of flexing. We straggled behind with the pram. As we joined the foursome, the police, who had fronted Jude and Michael with chests puffed, drifted on as if nothing had happened. It took less than a minute, but it was a persuasive assertion of power. I later heard of the large Aboriginal brawl that had flourished behind the boxing tent.

was working with some Arrernte women recording their healing songs for the Institute. Jenny had lived in the IAD l in g u is t J e n n y Gr e en

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Centre since the early 1970s and enjoyed enduring relationships with Alyawarr and Arrernte families.* Through these associations, it was inevitable that occasionally Jenny’s path would cross mine. We both knew some of the same prominent Arrernte personalities such as Aggie Abbott, the old man, and his niece Kemarre Turner. I was keen to join Arranye on a field recording at St Anthonys Rockhole, close to Santa Teresa. He had been asked for his input on this occasion, as he was the only one living who knew the words to the ‘healing wasp song’, despite it being a woman’s song. Kemarre Turner, the key contact on the project, gave me permission to tag along. This trip coincided with a graduation ceremony at Santa Â�Teresa for a handful of students who had finished their teacher-training course through Batchelor College. There would be celebratory dancing. At Kemarre’s request, when she came to pick me up, Jenny parked the IAD Toyota on the opposite side of the road to our house. Kemarre felt that parking on the near kerb was an affront to the spirit of her deceased daughter who had sat in our lounge while I relieved the pain in her foot with a massage in the months preceding the 1991 dam protest. Something of her presence would have lingered and, with the appropriate people, I had yet to smoke the dwelling with native fuchsia. I dragged my swag across the road and joined Arranye and Kemarre in the vehicle.

*â•… Jenny was amongst the 1970s urban intellectual diaspora, seeking to redefine itself in Aboriginal Central Australia. Conservatives disparagingly regarded them as White Aborigines. The linguists, lawyers, health workers, teachers and art advisers were mostly aligned to the sense of social conscience and justice articulated by the Whitlam Labor government (though some of Labor’s policies had been foreshadowed by the previous Liberal coalitions). The new idealists formed the ranks of the Alice Springs Peace Group that demonstrated about the role of the Pine Gap defence surveillance station and helped shape land conservation awareness. Without their continued presence and experience in Central Australia, I doubt my position at the college would have been created or that I would have endured here. By the early 1990s, white women were commonplace in Alice Springs and remote communities.

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The 80-kilometre stretch to Santa Teresa was broad and encouraged speed, but in places it was dangerously cambered. Dust on the dry July track powdered our hair and lashes. Once at Santa Teresa, Arranye and I camped with Charlie Hayes. Jenny went over to the women’s area. Charlie brewed us tea on the fire he had made on his concrete verandah, the billycan resting on an old freon fridge coil. Old Jack Â�Cavanagh, whose totem was arlpatye, the green-necked parrot, lived in a shed adjacent to Charlie’s verandah. We could hear him inside cooking on his fire. He poked his head out once to mutter something to his dog. Though Jack’s shed was only 4 metres from the verandah, he declined to look our way. I wondered why he and Arranye, surely contemporaries, failed to acknowledge each other. We retired to our swags soon after dark, as the ilpentye/love song dancing was cancelled due to the cold. Arranye admitted he was sorry not to be looking at those young girls’ legs. But he said he was pleased to have been well fed and to be leaving the blare of the budding rock session of the younger men. As we lay there, we chatted about our hospital experiences, father–son conflicts and how initiation shifted the teenager out of direct relationship with the father. After a while, the moths flirting on the light bulb above us bothered Arranye. He asked Charlie to turn it off, and demanded he roll out his swag, make him tea, and so on, berating him throughout for remaining dumb. ‘Him won’t talk it. Can’t talk it back to old Arranye. Why that? I don’t know. Always he been like this, this one,’ he said in front of him, perhaps to shame him into speech. It didn’t work. ‘What you gonna do when I die? Look down at your feet? You gotta look people in the eye!’ Charlie, about thirty, didn’t argue with Arranye. With the lights off and a further half hour of talk, Arranye finally 166



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said, ‘One thing I don’t like it. This butterfly still been falling on my akaperte [head].’ During the night, Jack’s dogs answered the howls of their canine neighbours. When the south-easterly dropped, the mossies homed in on my ears. I wished I’d had some cottonwool to plug them. At one juncture, as my toes were being licked by Bitumen, the puppy that had dragged off my socks, I was dreaming of walking in a pebbly creek. In the morning I rescued my tattered socks and coaxed the fire for tea, big pannikins dowsed with powdered milk. I fried up eggs and toast for the two of us. Arranye mused that Kemarre and Jenny should have been lying with us rather than in the women’s quarters. ‘Good to have woman keep our fronts warm.’ To our dismay, Jenny told us the dancing happened late when the southerly subsided. I asked Arranye about the table-topped mountain in front of us, the one photographed to feature in my painting Funeral at Santa Teresa. He mentioned Utyerrke akerle/the wild fig, which grew on the hill, and then moved into song about it. Jack responded from his shed. They proceeded into song about the beefwood trees, reconnecting their links to the place. It was a great moment. Jack’s voice echoed in his tin chamber providing a springboard for Arranye’s scratchy tenor. We doddered over to Agnes’s house to pick up the women to take out to St Anthonys Rockhole. Agnes provided the picnic foodâ•¯–â•¯rib bones, lettuce, tomato and bread. Arranye’s tuckerbox, a 4-gallon flour drum, included tea, flour, powdered milk, an old damper and two bags of sugar, forbidden now that he had diabetes. I loaded this along with a jerry can, also kwementyaye, as a relative called Gerry had just passed away. Arranye had no money and asked his mother, Magdaline, for ten dollars to get lemonade at the community store. He told her he had given up grog and party now that he was diabetic. She passed him a blue note but heckled him for neglecting her. 167


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The Santa Teresa store was better stocked and presented than in most communities. The boutique prices for elemental produce packaged in cans or cardboard were a challenge to its impoverished clients, and an insult to the palates of the small bands of urban sophisticates who held brief administrative posts in the community. Some communities had taken ownership of their stores, although they still depended on white employees. Despite extensive credit adjusted to the fortnightly pensions, the stores generated hefty profits through massive mark-ups. I queued behind an old lady with her granddaughter who clarified the complications of the transaction and insisted on an icy-pole reward. There were often embarrassing confrontations across the checkout counters in Alice Springs where less patience was extended than in stores like this one. Ignorance of the value of specific bills or of how much change might be expected made for humiliating experiences for many Aboriginal shoppers. The company of a numerate twelve-or-so-year-old was a sensible solution. We arrived at St Anthonys Rockhole after a twenty-minute drive. A fire was started. The taping began. Arranye sang a few lines, then paused to dig out a small plastic hospital dispenser containing lanolin from his overcoat. He sang over it and smudged the paste on our palms. We rubbed it up our arms as he indicated. Rubbing in the other direction, he said, would weaken us, make us thin and drain off our power. Asmin, Kemarre’s eleven-year-old grandson, sat on a log several metres away and shaved the icing from a biscuit. Arranye was right into it, thrusting his arm into the air, enacting the wasp. Asmin mimicked Arranye, smearing the icing up a bough of gidgee bark. Such was the archaic Arrernte language that the song comprised, the women present did not readily understand its meaning. Arranye translated particular parts to them. The song was replayed. Arranye was pleased and boasted of his encyclopaedic memory, not just of Arrernte songs but those of Alyawarr, Warlpiri and Luritja. 168



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‘When I be listen with one ear, story never travel out other ear like some other mob. I be hold it, all time. That song I been have it long time.’ Other senior men and women would not record healing songs. Indeed, some had expressed anger or resentment about collaborators such as Arranye. Singing into a tape for whitefellas was not deemed appropriate. But Arranye wanted to have the songs kept by any means and regretted the lack of interest by his younger relatives. Later, he gave me a translation of the song. When the yellow-Â� bottomed wasp, arntinye, came to the rockhole to suck water out of the mud, it relieved infections swollen with pus. It absorbed the sweet sickness and let the power penetrate, like wind making the leaves of the fig tree stand up and then pass into the ground. Singing the sickness made a person into wasp pupae, reborn. The sickness was then broadcast like the swirling leaves of the fig tree whistling in front of the nearby mountain. Hunger set in and I was asked to butcher the rib bones against a nearby stump with a tomahawk. The tea was stirred and bread wrapped around the lettuce and tomato. On the return to Santa Teresa we looked at the citrus orchards. The fruit trees once supplied both the community and Alice Springs prior to the population surge of the 1970s and 1980s. There was a recently converted building to house the Keringke/kangaroo footprint Women’s Art Centre. Keringke was set up under the aegis of a white art adviser in the 1980s to trade art products with Alice Springs souvenir shops. Artefacts, clothing, bags and paintings were decorated in their distinctive symmetrical patterns with bright, minute dots. The Cavanagh men made belts and hatbands in a dim leatherwork room next to the centre. Old Jack was passing on his skills to his sons. Arranye was interested to see the room. It had once been the town bakery where as a younger man he was master cook. Each Christmas he would speak of making one of his famous puddings and recall winning prizes at the Royal Melbourne Show. He taught his trade in other central desert 169


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communities, and it was this shifting around the communities that had exposed him to ceremonies that widened and deepened his song repertoire.

to Alkerreyelpe Rockhole gave added impetus to one trip to Little Well. Our first hour was circuitous, as David had topped himself with a six-pack. He and brother Peter, Joe Cleary and Leena Hayes lay in the back among the swags and food, and swilled the beer before it warmed. They were lagered to the gills. Consequently, David misdirected us around the fence lines of Todd River Station during sunset hour. We reversed and plunged back into the plumes of our own red dust. David thumped the cabin roof whenever he recognised a track. We came back on the Numery road near Bastard Bore, appropriately named, given my anger, instead of heading down past Uyitye Creek and Utnerrengarltenge/Wallaby Gap. At Little Well we were greeted by Gregory and Janet. We supped on roo provided by Aggie Abbott, who had come in on the Santa Teresa side. Arranye’s house had yet to be smoked since his daughter’s death, so we men trooped off to the single men’s shed on the eastern edge. I was thankful Arranye lent me a foam mattress. David and the others had sat on mine in the tray and it got drenched from the casks of Coolabah they had tapped after the beer was finished. Peter stayed up and partied with Gregory, but the rest of us hit the sack. Some hours later Peter came stumbling in, lighting matches, looking for a place to sleep. He lunged between Arranye and me, blanketless and in need of bodily warmth. I fell back to sleep to the gentle oscillations of his sour breath. Gregory, primed on the piss, stayed up and stirred the women throughout the night. In the morning, David accompanied me to the flood-out for gidgee firewood. He motioned that the wood pigeon’s song meant the proximity of kangaroos.

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‘That must be useful,’ I said. ‘No. Him tellin’ aherre [roo] us mob here, same time, he said to put me straight. See artityerrityerre [willy wagtail] there.’ A small bird flitted and fanned the turf before us. ‘That be winter thipe. Old people tell us not to kill that bird when he come with cold weather. Might make it all freeze up.’ During the weekend we tried to make Alkerreyelpe, meaning the red ochre water reflecting a narrow strip of sky. Trapped in a deep cleft of the red rocks, it was the only reliable water in the Arookaba Ranges and part of Arranye’s mother’s country, in the sense of being its traditional owner. The bone weed was so verdant we overshot the turnoffs at several junctions. Gregory leant forward from the back seat to advise me about driving over dunes. ‘Try for that creek,’ he motioned with his chin, simultaneously training his eyes above his sunglasses so that he seemed to be looking at the roof. Then turn up creek to Alkerreyelpe. You gotta go straight up sand hill, Rod, very steady. An’ watch for root stickin’ up.’ We quilled a tyre several sand hills shy of the site. I discovered the jack behind the back seat but when I turned to share my relief, saw the last of the party disappearing over a nearby dune. I was left to change the tyre as the others hunted anteater. Air still hissed from the tyre. I heard the rumble of a southbound jet as I placed a length of four-by-two wood on the warm red sand beneath the jack. Where was that silver speck in the endless cobalt? Within the hour, the spare was on and an anteater had been caught. Since we had no more spares I decided to turn back without discussion. Though hungry, we deferred eating the anteater until we were on the Todd side of the range, under the plentiful shade of the river redgums. It was supplemented with cream grubs, or ingwenenge, that Janet and I hooked from their holes in redgum trunks with stems of grass. Unlike the grubs we snared from the roots around Emily Gap, these 171


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grubs were hooped with light magenta. Aggie’s young niece confessed her love of them. ‘I love it too much that one. I so greedy for it I be eatin’ face of grub and all.’ While the anteater baked, Aggie joked about a Sydney tourist who, when looking at an anteater retracting its tongue, had thought that it was eating a snake. Peter chipped in with a droving incident when he was paired with a young white guy. They’d been pushing horses from Limbla towards the yards at Loves Creek Station. During the afternoon he’d dismounted to take a pee beside his horse. His whitefella offsider ogled his dick with unusual interest. After supper and a shower, the ‘guy’ let her hair down from under her hat. ‘It be properly shamin’ me,’ said Peter. Shaming seemed to be a controlling feature among the families. I often heard the expression. Any behaviour that drew too much attention to one’s self was a ‘shame job’. Arranye and David also spoke of ‘chick chockies’, who thought always of riding women. ‘Ride horses and ride women jus’ the same.’ I’d heard the expression ‘chick jockeys’ used by whitefellas and assumed they had misheard white drovers. ‘Chick chockie’, Arranye now explained, was the sound of the penis stirring the broth inside women. He lamented the lack of a woman on these cold nights. ‘Good to polish me balls on. Might be chick chockie meself.’ He spoke of man having three parts. He drew a stick figure in the sand. ‘Bottom part for dancing. Top part for singin’ and thinkin’. Â�Middle part for shakin’.’ I noticed Gregory had some beef left in his tin tuckerbox. He munched on it slowly. It was quite undercooked. ‘This be meat still eatin’ the grass,’ he said. 172



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That evening I slept in short chapters, each punctuated by the single-noted shrilling of crickets. The fierce dot of Venus floated alone at sunrise. David warned against looking long at the atengarrampeke/mornÂ� ing star. It might return and fix your facial expression. He scavenged for tiny sticks and ripped grog casks to ignite the breakfast fire. We studied the small struggling flames in silence. ‘You know that star, whitefella call Dog Star. An’ next to it those two milky star clouds?’ I was ignorant of the constellations and clusters. ‘Them two is eagle eyes. Big one is mother an’ little one her son. Dangerous when you got initiation. That mother got to try an’ stop the Â�little one from crashing down to earth an’ makin’ trouble. You don’t fry meat in oil pan during initiation, or little star might get past its mother, cause it bush fire, or something like that.’ After breakfast we refuelled our jerry cans at Kevin Pick’s and obtained a spare. We used our vehicle to pull-start his truck as its solenoid wasn’t working. Kevin slept in a caravan, a very minimal bachelor existence. He wanted to build a little house, but his uncertain tenure made him hesitant. He grumbled about the lawyers not wanting him at Pinjee. I tried to clarify Arranye’s intent for him to stay. Again I noticed the big thumbs tucked into his belt. Not long before, men from the Campbell family of Ilpeye Ilpeye had rocked up to try to push Kevin off his place. He’d cleaned the lot of them up with his fists and taken the .303 from the Toyota to warn them away. The Campbells referred to the ballistic impact of Kevin’s fists as that of a kicking horse. There had been no trouble from them since. Arranye reaffirmed to Kevin that he wasn’t going to be ousted. Kevin had misunderstood. It was fine for him to keep operating his horses from Pinjee Pound. It was a good arrangement, really, for the Johnsons. 173


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He was better resourced and the only neighbour in times of need. And he kept an eye on their sheds when they were absent. ‘He just hang there like alangkwe, poor bugger. Like it on vine ’round other tree,’ said Arranye as we were leaving. A sombre mood prevailed when we returned to Little Well. We spoke of the rapes and a recent stabbing of a young girl in town. Aggie cited the kids on the streets in the early hours of the morning, young night-time drunks. Peter, Gregory and David slugged, in turn, at a bottle of Mylanta, a magnesium concoction, to quell their gut aches. On the final morning, I climbed the range above the houses, said to be the writhing snake. Though it was chilly, the rapid ascent darkened the declivity in my singlet with an island of sweat. Several hundred metres above the flood plain, I stood shin-deep amid the ptilotus lanterns and heard the thump of roo tails swatting the ground in transit. There was a shuffle in the scrub way below on the valley floor as three beasts bounded away. On this terrace, all phenomena were bequeathed acoustic equality. The clank of cups by the campfire below to the west, the cawing hawk a few metres above my head and the jumping roos clamoured at my ears simultaneously. Distance could not be reliably assessed out here in the desert. I snapped a ptilotus and carried it between my teeth down the hill. I needed both hands for balancing in the loose gravel, and curled my toes inside my boots to clutch the shifting surface. ‘What do you call this one, Arranye?’ The old man dipped a Weet-Bix in his tea. ‘That one is urreye-urreye. Boys an’ girls tease each other with that one. Cheeky one, that grass. Sometimes dance it with that one. Young uninitiated boy.’ I could see the flower head’s phallic shape. David and Peter stayed on to do some fencing for Kevin. Before we set off, Gregory came to lean through the window to remind us to contact 174



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the Ingkerreke Outstation Service, so he and the women would not be forgotten.

On ly h o u r s a f t e r r e t u r n ing ,

I was recuperating when Xavier rapped at the door. He was dizzy from a head wound caused by his brother Edward, who had beaten him with a shovel. I drove him to the Little Red Store to get some kangaroo tails from the freezer. In the car, he swore to take legal action against Edward and sue him for four thousand dollars in damages. How he’d fixed on this amount I had no idea. Nor did Xavier, when I asked him. He wanted Petrina as a witness, but she had been drunk. When I dropped him at Whitegate he produced a paper bag containing a bottle of wine. He held it before my eyes like a trophy. ‘Doctor been warn me not to drink Coolabah. Now I’m drinking Yalumba.’ He wasn’t joking around. Did he really think he had just bought immunity by switching brands? I saw Edward two days later. His head was scarfed up to cover the rock wound Xavier had inflicted during a second round of fighting. Xavier had come off second best and was now in hospital. Did I need reminding that the most fearful rivalries were family ones? I tried to imagine how disfigured Xavier would be after tangling with the formidable Edward. Then a few nights later he knocked on the door, with Petrina a few metres behind him in the dark. He had a limp and his lips and eyelids were swollen. It was very late. He asked for a lift. When we got to the car, I asked where they wanted to go. When Xavier said ‘Whitegate’, Petrina began yelling. Without a word, he shoved her into the back seat, slammed the door and jumped in the front. Halfway there, Petrina started screeching while wrenching his hair with all her might. Xavier did not wince, did not speak, nor did he protect his head 175


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from her. She was protesting about returning to where certain fighting would occur. ‘I be fighting man. I be die fighting,’ Xavier said as he got out of the car when we pulled up at their humpy. The endless liquid hex of family brewed again. Malcolm Hayes and Valentine Palmer, both young teenagers, visited one afternoon and asked if they could sleep over. They’d stunned a kingfisher with a sling earlier in the day, and Ronja wanted to revive and nurse it. They insisted it had to be taken and killed in the nearby hills. If not, according to Malcolm, the bird would turn into an inentye man. The boys showed Raffi how to make slingshots and gave him one of theirs. They had scrounged the piles of rubbish chucked in the nearby bush. Old boot tongues provided the leather for shrapnel pouches. Copper wire from dumped cars bound the rubber bands to the forks. The ground around the sandpit puffed with dust motes as the boys practised their shots. Our mulberry trees wearied under their abundant fruit, and the boys sweetened up on them. Before long, they smeared their bodies with the juices, feigning sorry cuts. ‘Look me. Look me. We jus’ been in fight, Rod,’ said Malcolm. Eyes, noses and lips oozed mulberry. Raffi followed suit. Yellowthroated miners were hastened from the trees with rounds of cedar berry fire. The white pigeons, chequered crimson from mulberry fire, now perched in the upper branches. I dropped Malcolm and Valentine back to Whitegate the following day. At camp, Robbie Hayes wanted a lift to get his Community Development Project cheque from Ingkerreke Outstation Service. Adrian Hayes sat in the back with Ronja. He asked for ten dollars. When I replied I had none, he pulled a twenty from his shirt pocket and handed it to me. I slowed the vehicle at the place where the rollover that killed his uncle, Alphonse, had occurred. Though several years had elapsed, Adrian 176



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said quietly that we should still show respect in this manner. Robbie pointed to the scar on his wrist and spoke of rolling three times in that crash. He had lost consciousness. ‘Then I wake up an’ try to walk to Amoonguna while I bleeding to death. Then a Jesus cloud come low and stop that blood.’ The Catholic influences still tripped me up. Marlene Hayes had told me her son had grown quickly because he never touched himself. Surely this reflected the Church’s repression of masturbation. Could the weakening connected to hair cutting around initiation time be traced back to Samson’s loss of strength too?

L at e t h at N ov em b e r El aine ,

the kids and I camped at Little Well with Arranye. It was mid-afternoon when we arrived and the heat had knocked Arranye around. He remained in the shade of the eastern verandah, too weak even to eat his sausage until the sun had set. Raffi toyed with the puppies, while Ronja romped with two older girls making small fires and damper. In the late afternoon, at Ronja’s insistence, we dug around the acacia bushes hoping to get some witchetty grubs. There were no promising signs of disrupted soil around the roots. Metallic-green beetles were everywhere. When crushed underfoot they emitted a noisome odour. They were part of the vast traffic of beetles, ants and grasshoppers seething on the ground between the buildings in a commotion of harvesting and consumption. Summer showers had sifted over the flood-out. The mulgas flowered. Their yellow flowers fell. This mulga lint was hauled by ants and draped as floreat collars around the throats of their holes. With the onset of the substantial rain the spiky iwepe/procession caterpillars had evacuated their nests, which were spectacular, football-sized, white silky things, spun up in the beefwoods and gumtrees. Arranye told us that the old people had 177


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used the nests as dressings, particularly for burns and weeping cuts. The residual caterpillar spikes, which caused inflammation and intense itchiness, helped stimulate circulation for healing. He turned from the kids to quietly add that the spikes had sometimes been used to effect undetected killings by payback men. The victim would have his mouth forced open and a handful of spikes thrust into his throat. The inflammation caused suffocation. The swelling soon subsided and the spikes were too small to be seen. When the sun fell behind the near hill, Arranye rummaged in his swag for gifts he had acquired from the Santa Teresa women artists. There were two carved pigeons, one with a straight and sturdy body for Ronja, and a more delicate, curved-neck one for Raffi. He pulled a tin of pituri ashes from his coat, sprinkled some on the tobacco and chewed slowly, propping the tumorous mix on his lower lip. He turned to Sebastian Webb, about Ronja’s age, whose swollen right temple he began to massage. He paused to tell Elaine and me that he was a possum licking its wounded young. He sang the possum awelye/Â�medicine song, pausing at intervals to translate. He had witnessed his ancestors’ fingerÂ�nails being removed prior to participating in possum altyerre ceremony. The song released the sickness just like the possum scraped the juice out of the bloodwood flower. When the sickness ‘fell to the ground’, he stomped on it. He was not at all confused, as I first thought, between his identity and that of a possum. He meant that the creative power ascribed through the possum was joined to him. After sunset, the men crowded into the Toyota and went hunting. The kids, Raffi and Ronja included, stayed back with Elaine, the other women and Arranye. We got two kangaroos. The night was muggy and our sleep ruined by mosquitoes. The sun still simmered below the horizon as the bird-shrieking trees whelmed with galah gibber. Pigeons paraded in perpetual promiscuity, puffing and preening between our swags. Their activity terminated my final attempt to sleep. 178



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As w e r e t u r n e d t h ro u g h town , Arranye grumbled that David didn’t

listen to his advice enough and threatened to sing the soakage dry unless he did. He wanted David to ask him more about the country. Would he advance this knowledge when Arranye passed away, I wondered. On and off as Arranye weakened, David approached me to ask if I would take over Little Well. But it was way beyond my desires and capabilities. I challenged him with Arranye’s assertions, which he admitted hearing, but said he knew all he needed to know. Also in the back seat that day was Ricky Ryder, now a teenager, who had joined us for the trip back to town. I dropped him near the railway crossing where he saw some of his mates. Almost immediately a couple of CIB officers pulled up next to us, identified Ricky, reminded him he wasn’t supposed to be in town until the following month and shoved him in their unmarked vehicle. I tried to explain to the officers how Ricky was illiterate and innumerate, and unable to read the dates on his court notice. If anything, I had the impression he was returning with the understanding that his court date fell during the coming week. My words fell on deaf ears. I felt useless and that I’d betrayed Ricky, who was being taken as a consequence of breaking and entering shop premises. He had been ordered to remain at Little Well for a set period, otherwise he would be imprisoned until the date of his court hearing. There were no remand facilities in Alice Springs for teenage offenders. Until the late eighties, a place endearingly dubbed ‘Little House’ had acted as a low security detention centre for young offenders. But it had been under-resourced and was now closed. Ricky was subsequently convicted in court and sent to Berrimah prison, south of Darwin, as the new Alice Springs jail was still under construction and would not open until 1996. A large police force, disproportionate to the size of the town’s population, was needed to service Alice Springs. The cops dealt with overt violence, vandalism, thefts from shops and homes, and car thefts. Men who wanted to return to their distant desert communities would steal a 179


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car as immediate transport. There were numerous traffic and public drinking offences. The police were omnipresent in Indigenous lives. On court days, the seats in the foyer were filled. The steps outside and the lawns oppositeâ•¯–â•¯ironically set between the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission offices and the courtâ•¯–â•¯were full of blackfellas. Of the dozens of Aboriginal offenders I knew, few disputed any miscarriage of justice. Xavier and others knew that, once apprehended, they’d be paying for crimes defined as such by white law. This is not to say they favoured the police. They found the court jargon and protocols confusing, alienating and far from transparent. Some time later, in March 1997, the Territory government adopted mandatory sentencing for offenders such as Ricky aged between fifteen and seventeen. Incarceration was being used as a first, rather than last, resort and effectively targeted young Indigenous males. It made for the systemic ‘prisonisation’ of significantly large numbers of blackfella youths. Statistical evidence compiled three years after its implementation gave no support for mandatory sentencing as a useful deterrent to crime, and it debased the discretionary powers of the judiciary to fit punishment to crime. Moreover, the numbers of first-time offenders still grew at an alarming rate. Unlawful entry offences and property damage in Alice Springs had both risen by 21 per cent. Indigenous people made up 77 per cent of the Territory’s prison population. I didn’t feel too compassionate about the continued theft of both Raffi’s and my bikes. Nor did our insurance company. But stealing two cartons of eggs, receiving a bottle of spring water and taking a pizza from the fridge of an ex-partner to feed one of your five hungry kids were real examples of some of the convicted offences under the rubric ‘you do the crime, you do the time’. The timing of the legislation came just as Aboriginal customary law was being recognised as part of a package for addressing young offenders in the communities.

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T h e s h e d s at t h e H ay es outstation ,

Antulye, had been smoked after Alphonse’s and Graeme’s deaths, then skittled and rebuilt in different positions. Patrick Hayes had pumpkins growing from the roof run-off. The place was being more consistently used for the first time since the car tragedy. A new house was being planned for the site. Quite a grand place for the family. Lawrence Hayes drew its plan in the sand. There would be an accompanying bore and tank with laundry and shower. Two blacklipped dogs, their ears pinned protectively along their scalps, looked on fretfully and glanced up when Lawrence stopped scratching the ground, as if their complicity was required. Ronja and I stood warming ourselves by the fire in front of the verandah. Eva, Julie and Gwenda were tending embers, reheating roo leftovers in oily pans. Peter sat at some distance from us in the abject, bitter easterly. He looked catatonic perched on a plastic chair with a hospital ID bracelet on his wrist and wearing the pale blue hospital pyjama top. Â�Lawrence said Peter had absented himself some weeks earlier, and reckoned he should have stayed in hospital. I hadn’t seen Peter for months. He was almost unrecognisable. He looked pathetic, deep in the clutches of alcoholic dementia. Weeks later when I returned to photograph the newly completed building he was in the same chair. The men mentioned that they had started drinking at dawn. Peter stared in my direction, then stood and leant on my shoulder. He had pissed his pants. He didn’t want to stay there and asked to camp at my place. His condition worried me, but I declined to take him on as he needed full-time care. Then a sudden tide of clouds swept over us. The drop in temperature sent a chill up my spine. The gathering anvil darkened the range, then rushed over the ground towards us. I motioned to Dominic that I wanted to go. I felt impatient and helpless and was frustrated by Peter’s immediate family sitting around him, just looking on. He’d absconded from hospital and no one was suggesting he return there. 181


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Dominic came closer and cupped his hands over my left ear. ‘I want you to help me with my car, brother,’ he whispered through nicotine-stained teeth. We’d passed it on the way inâ•¯–â•¯a red Ford sedan at the front gate. Dominic had starter leads but the insulation rubbers were missing and slight shocking unavoidable. I got out and studied Dominic’s terminals. Both loose. And not a spanner between us. ‘Dominic. I can’t help here. Others are waiting. I have to go,’ I huffed. ‘No, my brother. You just come behind. Give it bump. Look. I got wheel there.’ Sure enough, he’d removed the lock and through its housing attached the spare tyre with fencing wire. He was well prepared for such starts. ‘Bump start, brother,’ he persisted. ‘No way am I going to ram your car, Domo. Anyway, I’d only get bogged in the heavy sand,’ I said and made haste to my car.

I’d been chasing fifty bucks that Bernard Neil owed me. He had recommended I find him the next pension day. This meant interrupting a huge card game in the middle of the Todd riverbed. There were eight players and twice that many spectators. Kinfolk had borrowing rights on the takings and sat or stood close to their respective relatives. Breaking his concentration was not easy. Robbie Hayes stood outside the circle. ‘Bernard be in trance. He be thinkin’ card numbers.’ It was a winning trance. I called his name repeatedly. Â�Others chimed in. He slowly turned. Without speaking, he felt in his shirt pocket, then passed a fifty from a crumpled cluster. Walking back to the car, I F o r se v e r a l w e e k s

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passed an older woman who asked if Bernard had given me anything. I waved the fifty before her. ‘I might be sleep with him tonight and get some of that card money meself,’ she said confidently.

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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ Ronja held by P etrina

around the sun. There were photos of it in the local newspaper. Twice this happened that week and only a few times ever in his memory. Each occasion had signalled serious rain. One afternoon Lawrence Hayes was sitting with him and beckoned me closer to ask in a whisper if I could see the Rainbow Snake in the sky. The dark edge of the rain cloud scrolled against the lighter clouds in a menacing pleat. Lawrence had his own hailstorm Dreaming, he added. And his older brother, Jack, had lightning Dreaming and kept his long sleeves rolled to the cuffs to conceal his arms. During storms the veins on his inner arms went bright blue. ‘If he hit you then you be unconscious. No worries.’ ‘That cloud make it big rain,’ chimed Arranye. ‘Proper sit-down rain, that one. You see black circle on edge of rainbow? That snake eat its own tail. Big rain been come. Lhere Mpwarnte [Todd River] be flood time.’

Ar r a n y e h a d s e e n a b l a c k circl e

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As usual, we’d had many months without a hint of rain, then came several deluges. Gneiss, stacked in loose compact with quartz sands, proved an echo chamber for the gurgling run-off. Even the birds were underscored by the liquid chatter of these unseen rivulets. The claypans around town were lakes. They stewed in the emerging heat. The air was muggy and choked with flies. A muzzle of emerald grass surged over the usually barren slopes of Mt Gillen’s snout. Mud massed on the shores of the claypans. Fairy martins flitted between the water and their overhangs, 500 metres distant, serenely perforating the sandstone cliff with their beaks. Occasionally they grouped and brazenly approached Raffi and me as a whoosh of white confetti about our heads. Between the water and us, the mud was pocked with scores of cattle hooves. We peered into the nearest holes and caught the glint of spider webs capping each depressionâ•¯–â•¯a vast silver weaving. Flies squatted silently inside each depression, stupefied by cow shit. My cuffs were freckled with ginger spiders. Shell-backed shrimps also flourished and we took a handful in a jar of slurry to show Arranye, who hadn’t seen them for years. He only knew their Southern Arrernte name. I invited him to supper. He was in great form, yapping on the verandah while I cut his hair before we ate. He insisted I place a plastic carry bag under his chin to catch the kwarte anye/lice eggs. He slowly rolled a smoke and struck several matches before igniting it. Drifts of ash fell on his trousers, peppering them with several small holes. As I cut, he recounted a marvellous story for Raffi and Ronja, which he sang to kids at Whitegate, about a young girl and boy who were abandoned when their parents were killed by gumulunya, the devil man. I shaved off his beard which rejuvenated his spirits. ‘People at Amoonguna be laugh at me I so young. I be go all way through. Not like some younger mob who build big fire. Big fire be burn down. Aren’t there to cook with in morning-time like small fire. I been got small fire, be gettin’ younger all time.’ 187


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He produced a specimen bottle from his carry bag. ‘Is that eye medicine you got there, Arranye?’ I asked. ‘No. Can’t be chuck this one ’til soil all wet. Might jump back on me eye like that little beetle.’ Suspended in the solution were his cataracts. He was keeping the tiny gobs of skin until it next rained. Trachoma and cataracts are major health issues among desert Aboriginal people. Twice I’d taken Arranye to Aboriginal Congress Health to get his eyes checked. He had scanned the eye charts; the letters meant nothing to him. I explained to the doctor that he was merely affirming the location of the chart on the wall. Whatever, he got his drops and a prescription for glasses. The doctor told us that Arranye would have to wait until his eye was completely covered by the cataract before it could be scraped. Then, with little warning, he was admitted to hospital for eye surgery. The army’s medical team had come to town. Swank army tents were erected on the hospital lawns to deliver the service to several dozen Aborigines. A surgeon removed the brumous blue film on both his eyes. Now Arranye recalled the Warlpiri man from Willowra in the next bed. ‘That old fella more older than me. He got it young promised wife. Been run away with ’nother young fella. That old blind one, proper tangled up. Can’t do nothing ’cos he be blind both eyes. Come in eye tent on two stick. Then he get good eye. Chuck away stick. He say, “Might be I get that young mob with spear now.” They still deadly at seventy paces, them old people. Good turnout they got there for eye, I reckon.’ He was yet to obtain glasses which took us weeks of visits to opticians, clinics and funding bodies.

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to Alice from the yearly Christmas holiday in 1994/5, I was taken by Robbie and Aloitious Hayes to sit with Arranye. They were singing ceremonial songs for the final night of Derek Johnson’s initiation. Bernard Neil, separated from Arranye by a guest from Uluru, interpreted for me at the conclusion of each verse. The Pitjantjatjara guest, in his fifties, lifted his hand at these junctures. He made a bird-like trilling with his tongue, and repeated several times in English, that he was ‘Mr Law’. Then he made a faint mosquito song by flattening the base of his throat and pressing his exhalations over the remaining space in his larynx. He projected this towards me, some 10 metres away, swirling it around my head, so that at first I thought I was being lassoed by insects. He noticed me swerving my head, then smiled and ceased singing. Bernard asked me how I thought this man knew about their ceremony taking place. ‘You might be think it telepathy?’ I looked expectantly at him. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘No. He be stranger and see it, us mob with ochre in hair at Yeperenye shop. He been follow us in taxi when we go to taxi rank.’ Unperturbed, the old men were pressed together around their small fire. Their intermittent conference determined the process. The fine powder scuffed up by the dancers throughout the previous night settled over their hair, clothes and skin rendering them in dun, statuesque solidity. In addition to being circumcised, Derek had been receiving instruction over the preceding three weeks in the fundamental story lines of his ancestors. Each time during the final night, when Derek was paraded around, escorted by Jude, the women cried. Each time Bernard berated him in a mocking tone. ‘Fuck off, back bush. You don’t belong here. You still myall [know nothing]!’ Derek was brought in for the final time just before sunrise. Arranye turned to face the eastern side of the circle for the final verses. Derek sat Wi th in t wo h o u r s o f r e t urn ing

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covered by a blanket, unable to see, facing the singing men, his back to the women. The blanket was then smoked on the small fire next to him. The women came in turn and ran their fingers down his back, again crying. These women were lamenting the cessation of their role in his childhood. Hereafter there would be cultural restrictions between them. Jude then led Derek to a freshly formed line of senior men. He introduced them, getting the initiate to sit on each of their laps in turn, east to west, telling of the responsibilities each of these four ‘fathers’ now held. If he wanted more law, he should consult them. Then he was led back to bush camp. Jude added that Derek would have to stay in the area until he had killed a kangaroo. This would enact payment to the senior men who had orchestrated the event. Then he was free to go. He mentioned that these four senior men used a broken beer bottle when a razor blade was not at hand. Arranye knew that Derek would be the last Johnson that he would be responsible for bringing into manhood. Xavier seized the opportunity to remind me that I had not been through yet. When I visited camp days later, Jude joked about Derek’s failure to get a roo on his first initiated day. ‘He come back to camp carryin’ only his own cock.’ But Derek got his kangaroo the next day. Then only days later he rolled a car near Hidden Valley. ‘I get out of that car with one half cask an’ one full cask and chuck match on it,’ he said, arrogantly dismissing the event as if it were part of his arrival into manhood.

our place late one afternoon as I returned from college. He was looking for a lift to Whitegate. He was unhappy about another initiation for one of the Rabuntjas so close to the

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last. Apart from the demands of tending the young man in the bush camp, it siphoned off the specialty of the occasion. ‘Spoil it, too much business, I suppose,’ he said. When I dropped him off, Mervyn Rabuntja rushed to the car. I had never seen Mervyn at Whitegate before, as he resided at Mt Nancy camp. ‘Time for my son go through business. Gotta be get my father, Wenton, to bush camp. Him sittin’ at Mt Nancy.’ On the trip across to Mt Nancy camp, Mervyn declared that rock’n’roll was not culture. ‘Bush camp proper culture. Powerful one, that one. Snake be catch it you if you wrong way for it. You might be go to Melbourne, or might be in plane to United States. Snake still travel in that plane an’ get you.’ Wenton was out the front of his house with several children surrounding him. When Mervyn approached him, he remained sitting on the ground dotting a painting with a thin brush. Mervyn wanted his father’s authority at the initiation. But there was no sense that he shared Mervyn’s urgency. The youth was being pushed through because Mervyn felt that manhood would curtail his drinking and trouble making. Mervyn assured his father that the ceremonial ground had been prepared; firewood and food were fully arranged, grog would stop at five o’clock. Sombre, sober Wenton chucked the paintbrush into a paint tin, then retrieved it and continued painting. Mervyn gave up on him and pushed other family members to my car. ‘Free lift this one. Hurry you mob.’ A few women and children crammed into the Commodore. As we drove to Whitegate, Mervyn said Wenton had given him custodial responsibilities for the country of central Alice Springs. As we passed through the gate I could see his son being led away from the bough shelter into the bush. Mervyn asked us not to look. The women jammed down behind the seat as we rolled in, pressing their kids’ faces to their 191


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breasts. It was twilight as Mervyn opened the car doors and stood blocking the women’s view of his retreating son, then ushered them to a huddle of women relatives. He thanked me and hurried off into the bush. Xavier came to the window and asked me to be one of the four ‘fathers’ who cradled the newly emerged men. This completely threw me. Did I have the status? I said I had to go. Then he asked me to wait. He came back to the car and rubbed red ochre over my face. The handful of people sitting by the fire were painted the same way. He said to come back. I told him the family was committed to a friend’s farewell party, and I was already running behind schedule. Somewhat sadly I removed the mud at home. I felt very honoured by Xavier’s gesture. At the party a whitefella droned on his didgeridoo while a mate belted out tribal rhythms on his African drums. The arid Centre proÂ� cessed whitefellas; it attracted them, gave them something and then after three to five years spat them back to the coastal cities. That was the duration of the romance with the place. You could live in sophisticated modern comfort, surrounded by breathtaking nature and have a sense of a profoundly different culture simultaneouslyâ•¯–â•¯a sublime form of tourism. Those who stayed, as a friend said, ‘had been sung’. But there were many farewells for friends. They were little deaths, as frequent as the actual deaths of Arrernte.

were funerals. By 2009, I had been to about sixty funerals of Aboriginal friends, considerably more than had I remained in Melbourne. I’d never been to a service at a burial ground before coming to the Centre. My introduction to funerals was at Santa Teresa with Lizzie Johnson, though other Johnsons followed her quite regularly. The stark reality is that all these funerals were for friends who, in the main, were under the age of fifty. Alcohol abuse and extremely

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poor diet promoted these early deaths, manifesting in various disorders and chronic diseases.* As part of this tireless orchestra of deaths, Gregory’s demise struck a deeper chord in me. I’d shared greater intimacy with him than with the other deceased Johnsons. During the recent initiations, Gregory/Eyeglass had a walking stick. One drunken night he lost his glass eye in the Todd River. The sand was sifted over the weeks to no avail. Now, at the age of fifty, he could no longer see through his remaining eye. Noelly Johnson joked that Eyeglass could only see when he was drunk. I visited him in hospital. He seemed to rally despite complaining of painful lumps near his kidneys. By late autumn, he was readmitted with bleeding from the rear left of his brain. Clouds severed into long cocoons that hugged the Eastern Range and brought a spiky rain. Gouts of ochre water twisted through the many-throated gullies. I ran daily reports into camp to save people the 10-kilometre walking trip. The east wind had a ticket straight through camp where Arranye, Myra, Jude and others sat glumly glued to the reedy vapours of their small fires.

*â•… Renal dysfunction, diabetes and alcohol-induced dementia were endemic among the Arrernte. Sixty Aboriginal people of the 7000 residents in town used the dialysis machine. None of the 20,000 non-Aboriginal residents required it. Aboriginal people were ten times more likely to have kidney ailments. These figures had alarmingly escalated over the past twenty-five years, suggesting massive changes to ways of living underpinned by an economy of sit-down money as being the catalysts. Some people suggested that nitrate preservatives in tinned meat, now a dietary feature, contributed to kidney troubles. Others said that white flour played its part. The enterprising Lutheran pastor Friedrich Albrecht experimented during the 1930s and ’40s at Hermannsburg, and incorporated grist flour from Laura, South Australia, and later brown rice into the mission diet. The vivid health improvements failed to convert to popular taste, and the Arrernte later reverted to the highly processed products. A rash of popular fast food franchises have opened in Alice Springs since the mid-1980s; the fried chicken outlets are particularly favoured by Aborigines, and with the same cholesterol and obesity results as in the nonIndigenous sector.

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Gregory was propped in a chair by pillows on one visit, barely aware of his surrounds. Two physios had helped him walk the ward and the nurse reported that he had eaten some oats. But really there was no improvement. I urged relatives to visit to help pull him through. Some didn’t want to risk being blamed for his illness and had minimal contact, including his wife, Janet. Kangaroo meat was slipped to him, concealed in shopping bags. It had been chanted over with a healing song. His few Arrernte visitors came to accept the skeins of tubes taped to his wrists and nostrils, the bladder bag with tannined fluid, the tags and clipboards. That was whitefella way. But in Arrernte thinking, if he had kidney stones, someone had put them there. Peter was back in Ward 1 where all manner of mental disease was monitored. Away from the grog, he was looking healthier, though he grinned abstractly at everything. David had said he had been mad since being hit on the head with a rock in the Todd River. He walked all night randomly. ‘His brakes don’t work,’ added David. After a week Gregory was on the floor next to his hospital bed, fumbling with his pyjama cord, mumbling in Arrernte. His lips were swollen and bleeding. I picked him up and put him on the chair. All I understood was that he wanted to go to the river. I was so pleased at this articulation that I was emboldened to reply that I would escort him there when he could stand on his own feet. It was pleasure feeding hope. Peter had just returned to camp from Ward 1 when David confided that his brothers were ‘all fucked’. He had pressed the words out quickly, disdainfully, as if to be rid of them. Peter had been tracked and relocated from a night ramble near Emily Gap in the early morning, when the sun cast long shadows. His footprints were easy to see in the sandy creek beds among the drag of roo tails and the delicate suturations of mice and lizards. He held his ‘company line’, his cassette, addictively to his ear. Relatives debated tethering him at night or locking him in one of the 194



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sheds. But no one wanted to treat him like a dog. So, many days were spent looking for him. Gregory relapsed and went from Ward 7 to Intensive Care. When the nurse told me of this shift, I bit my lip and felt the heat welling behind my eyes. ‘What’s happening to him, so I can tell his family?’ ‘His poor old body has really just packed in. It’s tired. He’s given it a bit of a hammering,’ said the nurse. I proceeded to camp with Ronja and Raffi. I arranged to take David the next morning to sit with his older brother. The kids and I drove out of camp to nearby Snoggers Hill to light a twig and absorb the panorama of the silhouetted town. Old Magdaline and her daughter Joany McCormack’s wailing trailed us. Other women’s grieving soon amplified their ululating. The ground dust stilled with tears. Below us the town dozed naively in its neon geometry. In the morning I collected David and, as we entered Intensive Care, we caught Gregory’s last breath. His chest flattened and his head moved fractionally to the right. It was all too brief. We placed our hands amid the tangle of tubes attached to his torso and arms, and savoured his waning warmth. David’s face crumpled in pain. Janet and Eileen, who were already there, shrieked and laid their heads against his chest. I cried and put my arms around David. He immediately wanted to go and tell old mother Magdaline back in camp. ‘You tell ’im. She believe it you tell ’im. See you there, brother,’ he called over his shoulder as I retreated along the scuffed linoleum corridor to the elevator. I made my way to Whitegate. Two kites pounced on a plastic carry bag that fluttered along the connector road. The dry fingers of the coolibah trees ached into greyness. I wiped tears with my sleeve as drizzle fell. The dogs seemed to respond to the collective melancholy, slumped among the blankets and flour drums, for once uninterested in my arrival. Peter 195


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cradled my hand, inspecting it as if discovering a relic. He gripped a chop in his other hand, looking goggle-eyed and glum. I walked over to Myra and Simon. Next door, Arranye was still in bed in the single men’s quarters. ‘He’s gone.’ Arranye called me by my nickname, ‘Snake. Apmwe, I feelin’ terrible sorry.’ We hugged against his pillow. ‘Do you need something?’ I asked. ‘Cup of tea,’ he whispered. Simon took one of his pannikins from the wash-up bench and dipped it in the simmering drum. Over the following days, I grieved with the Johnsons and Hayes in camp, embracing and crying afresh as relatives arrived to convey condolences. A week past, I sat alone. On my lap was a photograph of the families at Little Well taken when Ronja was six months. It had been hidden on the upper bookshelves, prone in respect to Christine Johnson for the seven years since her death. The photo bandaged shards of story that had entered my skin. I noticed Gregory’s mouth: a glint of white where it parted to tell his nightly campfire stories. How I luxuriated in that smiling face, with its marvellous, even teeth. It was hard to discern him in the photo as Christine blocked him, near right. My stomach bit before it. There were eight people, dark and dust compacted, except for the baby on Petrina’s lap. Their leaden presences lumped together to form a unified protection against the ambush of the rock-riddled spaces beyond. They languished in the foreground, suspended in personal reveries. Memories lingered as nightly I watched the immortal procession of stars. For many days, I seemed to be peering from inside twilight, glimpsing Gregory’s gait, the way he canted forward slightly, favouring his one eye, his gliding momentum so distinct from Janet’s stride 5 metres at his rear. 196



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My nights were drenched, dreaming past days. I’d be walking over groins of rugged gully in the Arookaba Range near Gregory’s abode, as David guided me along. In one dream, closer to town, Bernard extracted a needle from my cheek, liberating my sinuses from the congestion of a lifetime. I dreamt I heard birds, then recognised that David was singing me. I panicked. I was being absorbed into his body and kept waking from this repeating dream, as I tried to maintain my individuality. In another dream David came to the house and embraced me, allowing both of us to cry more. I woke in tears. A couple of weeks passed and I ambled up Undoolya Road to camp. It was chilly. Jude Johnson wavered towards me, arms flailing about for balance, furling and unfurling. His halting English made his pronouncements profound and quaint. He was quitting the sorry camp. ‘Too much cutting,’ he said. He paused and moved closer. ‘Dangerous cutting.’ He laboured as he spoke, inhaling deeply, as if the air would join his thought to his tongue, searching for inspiration. ‘They’ll be makin’ long cuts soon.’ Silence wafted off him with an intimation of pain. Old Magdaline, Joany and Janet cut their hair. When visitors came to touch hands with them, they erupted in a redoubled moaning referred to as arlwerre, arlwerre. Thighs, biceps and chests had been cut with razors, knives, tin lids or glass. Men and women made cuts. Some people would get infected wounds and lose enough blood to need hospital attention. At Little Well, Gregory’s effects would have to be destroyed. The dwelling area would be off limits for a few years until his spirit quit. But first it would be smoked with arrethe, the native fuchsia. Arranye switched to menthol cigarettes, the ‘cleansing smoke’, in deference to the passing of his younger brother. There was a neuralgic air of waiting for the families to gather again for the funeral. The week of the funeral brought raging icy winds that surfed the 197


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nights and briefly lulled before sunset. Only the bigger birds busily knitted the rinsed air. David, Joseph junior and I drove to Hidden Valley after dark to pick up Peter and return him to camp. David told me that Janet would get a bashing for not visiting hospital enough. I was angry and frustrated with all these Johnson men the same age as me dying. As the men sat silently with the additional, impassive Peter, I vented my sorrow and distress. ‘Aboriginal way,’ offered Joseph from the passenger seat. Such a blithe acceptance of the haemorrhaging present, far from whitefella obituaries that lauded the deceased’s achievements. For Gregory there would be a suppression of all details of his existence, a quickening to dust and air. The regular death knells in camp didn’t allow family lingering over particular losses. But the appalling mortality rate of Aboriginal people was no arid statistic for me.

T h e f u n e r a l wa s at S a n ta T eresa .

I arranged for David to pick me up from college mid-morning. We went to Coles for flowers and St Vincent de Paul’s to get some black slacks and white shirts. The frequent deaths provided a brisk turnover of this formal attire. I chauffeured the crew in a Tangentyere Toyota. At Santa Teresa, the men changed in the community hall. Did I come here only for funerals? The place with its three hundred or so Arrernte living in cinder block houses was becoming stigmatised as such. The squat mission church, with its whitewashed exterior and blazing cobalt-glassed chapel, seemed an aggressive venue for holy work. Its arched facade gave a Hollywood Western ambience to the place. The unhurried men in big cowboy hats and braided belts, holding to the few trees surrounding the church, augmented the feel. The women whispered together in groups. The kids, with little 198



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sense of the occasion, somersaulted on the splices of lawn in front of the building, where we waited for the cortege to arrive with the coffin. Six young men lifted it from the utility tray of the truck and carried it across the threshold. The dogs, heads bowed, traipsed into the darkened space with us. As we entered, the men removed their hats. Some of the men my age still had some rock’n’roll in the combs they produced to lick up their duck’s tails and kiss curls. Without their baseball caps, the younger guys’ crew-cuts, earrings and pigtails were prominent. I sat between David and Eric. The church was full except the seat in front of us under which two dogs lay. Small kids ran amok during the ‘Our Fathers’. Petrina Johnson threw herself on the coffin and Paul ‘Pinkie’ Hayes, who arrived mid-service, quite dramatically laid flowers on it and burst into tears. As he was about to sit, he glanced at Bernard, who moved to join his weeping. On Bernard’s right shoulder, Kemarre wept continuously. David cried against me. When we moved apart I could feel his tears cooling on my shirt. We sang solemn hymns, though ‘Amazing Grace’ was the only familiar tune. This lustreless singing was sustained by the scant missionary voices. The biblical language flew past me. It was difficult to get used to how much the funeral procedures had been given over to the Brothers. I regarded it as too definitive a moment to have its Aboriginal core removed. It seemed impersonal, indifferent. This individual’s life collared by Catholic gloss. Was this our Gregory, still here, inside the box? The tone and choice of words couldn’t reach into his life. Outside, I assisted the blind and infirm into the Toyota and joined the procession to the edge of the township. The chain of cars and community buses cruised slowly to the cemetery set on the plain at the base of Santa Teresa. The dogs, sensing the moment, stood in an honorary guard either side of the bitumen strip and howled at the congestion of passing traffic. A terrible whine raised above them, which drew my eyes to the last house on the street. It was a dog, stretching on the verandah, though it 199


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sounded human. Save for a tuft of fur running the length of its spine, it was livid pink. Even its tail was hairless. We waited by the cemetery gates for the coffin to be placed beside the grave. Then weeping again, of even greater magnitude. We all threw handfuls of dirt on the coffin as it was lowered. As I returned the old ones to their homes, we passed the grader, humming away at a respectful half kilometre, waiting for us to finish before filling the grave. Gregory had died amid alien chattels without a single loved image his eye might caress. Even his nickname would follow him to the grave. Arranye, following kwementyaye/custom, now referred to his eyeglasses as his ‘look looks’. Any paintings featuring Gregory would now have to be taken from public display. The one at Centrelink would have a template cut to silhouette his face. The photo was returned to the bookshelf face down.

to Whitegate to sit with the old man and see how he was coping with the loss of yet another brother. Xavier joined me at Arranye’s fire and told me Petrina had run off with his bank book. He gave me time to absorb this news and then asked for ten dollars. I offered five. ‘Elaine’s going to England,’ I explained to him. ‘I’ve hardly got any cash. Apwerte arrangkwe.’ ‘Petrina goin’ to Hong Kong,’ he said. This outrageous notion cracked me up. As quickly as Xavier created tensions, he could dispel them. Elaine’s trip to England, via South Africa, was without the kids. In Cape Town she intended to look up Ruben. He’d returned to South Africa after his marriage and business had failed. Elaine was keeping me on hold while she tested the possibility of the other relationship, now that he T h e n ext S at ur day I w e n t

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was no longer wedded. I kept hoping, blindly, that our family unit would endure her deviation. Eight weeks later Elaine returned high from her travels, but reticent with me. Though hurt that Ruben wanted nothing to do with her, she’d met a teacher at a Steiner school conference a day after arriving in Cape Town. So, within hours of arriving home she said she was going to Sydney to spend a fortnight with Bernard, her new South African friend. Which she did, again leaving the kids in my care. Before she left, she made a heartfelt pledge that there was nothing between them, and that she was intent on showing him around the east coast. Apparently he wanted to investigate how Steiner schools operated in Australia. She returned from Sydney accompanied by Bernard. He came to enquire about employment with the fledgling Steiner school in Alice Springs. Soon after he returned to South Africa, she announced that they were deeply involved with each other, and that his anticipated return and Steiner employment signalled a light for her and more attuned relating. A few days later she moved out to a house half a kilometre around the block. Ronja’s small voice was on the phone. She asked if she could come over. The pain of even having to ask. The faces we kiss, the hands we hold, the debris of our lives. Arranye gave me a rock from his place at Ruby Gap to console me. ‘It be have lotta Dreamin’ I wish be show you. Country make it you strong, my son.’ He cupped his hands to make a mini Larapinta Valley, proffering them as a chalice. ‘Mpwarntwe [country around Alice Springs] like this. It welcome you. It holdin’ you. You fall. Not far to fall, my son. Same for marle akweke [Ronja] and urreye akweke [Raffi]. It be give it both hands.’ If the country was a safety net for me, it was also there for Raffi, who had just turned four, and for Ronja, now seven. The metronomic mornings, with their regular beat of birdcalls and barking. How I revelled, 201


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at least, in my children’s breaths during the amber dawn. They lay beside me half the week to watch these dawns. Raffi was invariably first to slink in beneath my doona. Ronja kept her swag outside. She moved underneath her favourite tree. We lit breakfast fires for our jaffles. I had tears in my eyes, glazed and heavy all day, as I signed the property split. The lava of the business. We didn’t sort out the contents. Elaine seemed well prepared to take what she wanted and I didn’t contest as the stuff seemed dead. The family home seemed weirdly vacant, irrelevant. I felt desolate and dazed. Elaine convinced me to sign documentation giving her full custody of the kids, stating that it was needed to give her the financial security of the sole parenting pension. She assured me that it was only on paper and that we would continue to share them half and half. One night I dreamt that Elaine had removed the flower box from the kitchen window. I couldn’t believe she also wanted to claim this box. Then a bird’s shadow appeared. I recognised her presence in the shadow. The bird appeared, squatting on the box. Its wings were lined with the libretto of a comic opera. I placed the bird on my wrist and watched it take off. As it beat its wings ever faster, a shrill soprano sang in time and more sadly. I woke with tears in my eyes and laughed at my absurdity. Outside it was raining after a long dry spell. Within the week the valley was deep in acacia blossom, long cadmium skeins covering the black scabby trunks. The borers loved it. After brief residencies, polyps of sap festered and boiled down their limbs. Babblers scratched the bark litter, gossiping incessantly. The regenerative energy was all out there. Internally, I was mute.

increasing emaciation. He had been a strapping guy in his mid-twenties when we met. Now in his early thirties, his knees were locked in pain and he could hardly walk. He looked

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worse than his father, Joseph, had before he died. I took him to Aboriginal Congress Health where he was referred to hospital. But he never showed much interest in himself. David repeated that there was nothing that could be done. Jamesy had been cursed through song for his irresponsibility in the fatal car crash. No one could see the point of getting Jamesy to Congress, the hospital or any form of healing. He was in a one-way street as far as the Johnsons and Hayes were concerned. Meanwhile, Arranye needed a new walking stick. Someone had fallen on it during a fight and broken it. I said I would get one from the pharmacy. As I was going to town, David asked for a lift. First, he reminded me that I wanted to see a bowerbird’s set-up. I had been asking for months if he’d seen one. He guided me to a valley, heavily thicketed in ti-tree near Emily Gap, where he’d seen a bower while tracking Peter the previous day. ‘That a proper clever bird make it all that set-up for wife,’ said David. ‘He can make it any song. Cat. Or dog. Same bird.’ The bonking shack was empty, but at the U-shaped mouth of the bower, at both ends, were spectacular assortments of green glass and plastic ring tops from cans, green bush tomatoes and bush bananas. The collector sat a few trees away, irritating the air with complaints. I donated an old green key ring for his turn out and wished him luck. I returned with Ronja after a few weeks and rejoiced to see the male in full courtship. He screeched his song and bobbed from end to end of his bower. He had engaged a female’s interest by producing one of his bottle tops and bleached bones. Another male arrived and tried to rowdily usurp the owner by stealing some of the chattels and tugging at the bower. He was chased off. After his triumph the male’s lilac comb flashed across his scalp. He presented the female with a feather from his beak and escorted her to a nearby fig tree to mate.

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J u s t a s t h e Ch ris t m a s h o lidays loomed ,

Elaine’s money from the property settlement came through and she decided to put half the continent between the kids and me. She had promised not to leave the Territory until the kids were much older and had adjusted to the family split. The South African beau had been dumped in favour of the new guy sharing her rented property. She decided to roam the eastern seaboard with him and the kids until they found a place to settle. I was angry and terrified about being estranged from my kids. I had built my life around being there for them and revelled in their sensuality. Soon after I had to run Arranye from Whitegate back to where he was now camping at Charles Creek. The news of my separation from the kids was met with much support and concern. As I was about to leave, David came to the car door and leant on it. He told me he loved me, and cradled my head into his shoulder. He wept for Raffi and Ronja. ‘Too hard,’ David said. ‘Marle and kwemen agwerke too far away from their country.’ After buying a caravan and driving up the eastern seaboard from Melbourne to Brisbane, Elaine and her new partner decided to settle in Bega, on the southern New South Wales coast. But Raffi’s objection to Elaine’s new partner and the unstable accommodation of beachside caravan parks manifested in his ruckus behaviour and caused Elaine to rethink her plans. When the kids flew home at Easter, Raffi stayed on with me. I rejoiced.

that Peter had still not returned from one of his nightly rambles. He was worried for him. Myra added that neither Big Rosey Johnson nor David looked out for their brother properly. Weeks passed. The police got my name and address from the families and dropped by to get photographs that would be useful for identifying

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Peter at Port Augusta, Mt Isa and the Pitjantjatjara homelands. There were relatives in all these places. But Jude said a woman in Tennant Creek definitely had seen Peter. ‘Have you heard anything about Peter?’ I asked David. ‘Only dingo and eagle know him now. His guts all rip open, I reckon.’ I picked up Raffi from school and we went to Charles Creek camp to see how Arranye had re-settled. David had said ‘my father’ had been calling for me. Someone’s foot had crushed his latest dentures. He kept them wrapped in toilet paper in the pocket of his jacket, which often lay on the ground by his mattress. Arranye produced the tissue with the two plastic fragments. I thought of superglue and home repairs. I thought of the number of trips and weeks involved. I drew breath and said we’d get another set. Without teeth, he was living on mashed potatoes and Weet-Bix. To complicate matters, Arranye had recently received a massive government questionnaire on the euthanasia debate, fifteen big questions about death. He dug around his little army bag for the A4 manila envelope. ‘What all this government book? Better read it me, my son,’ he insisted. His boldly typed name solicited attention. I guessed the sample was randomly chosen from the electoral roll. If he were known to be Â�Aboriginal, surely an interpreter service would have been made available. How else could an accurate assessment of Aboriginal responses to the proposal that euthanasia be made legal prevail? ‘What all this mean? I don’t want to be die in hospital. Old people just walk away with family. Then stay behind tree. Might be they sing themself with Dreamin’ an’ die by tree. Family come back an’ bury. Or maybe like Tennant Creek mob. Put ’em in tree. Hey, what you think, that one?’ ‘I don’t think I’d like to be stuck in a tree, Arranye. I’d rather worms eat me than eagles.’ 205


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‘Might be frighten people, you think?’ he smiled. ‘My son, I don’t want to die in hospital from man in white coat. That not proper way. That’s the one make me frighten.’ David stood nearby on the verandah, listening to our conversation. ‘You believe it, Jesus, young fella?’ ‘I believe he existed,’ I started to struggle. ‘But I’m not a churchman. I never put faith in Jesus. All the dying in camps, who’s that for? Do you think Jesus or God cares or helps us?’ David looked abstractly over my shoulder. ‘What about reincarnation?’ I asked. ‘Do you believe in that, David? Like Jesus was resurrected after he died on the Cross, do you think you might get another chance at life?’ ‘No. We just be like dirt in the ground. Until the end of the world. Then we come back.’ ‘When’s that likely?’ I queried. ‘Anytime. Could be today. Could be twenty year. Or one million. But you know one thing like the Last Supper. I can eat with you at your place, anytime. You know, Last Supper mean sharing it no worries. I can’t eat it any place, like with rich people. Rich people be hunt it away poor man like me.’ Norleen cut into our conversation. ‘Jesus is all bullshit, I reckon. All that miracle he been do. Like walk on water. You think he did that?’ ‘Maybe he was standing on a claypan, Norleen,’ I answered. ‘Or maybe the Bible story isn’t meant like he actually walked on water, but that Jesus was talking in riddles about something else.’ I wasn’t sure where all this was going and was pleased when Arranye suggested we head to the clinic. Once more we started the rounds. After our last appointment, Arranye wrapped his ‘meat machine’ in his hanky and shuffled along the corridors and through the ‘magic’ sliding doors. I steadied him by the elbow until we reached the car. We drove to Tangentyere for what he called his ‘tucker line’ cash. Having 206



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stocked up on bread, meat and powdered milk, we drove back to Charles Creek. ‘My son, you got trailer?’ he asked. I left him sitting at Charles Creek and drove up Undoolya Road to collect some branches from the plains. I stopped by a pile of mulga and ironwood. A perentie slunk on a log. I picked up a stick and hit nearby logs to caution it. It didn’t move an inch, assured of its camouflage. Only the flicking, cream tail tip gave it away. I thought of pleasing the old man and took aim, one thwack across its neck and blood trickled from its nostrils and mouth. I ducked in home and grabbed some basil and sage. ‘That make me very happy, my son. You’re a good boy. Can’t kill this one when rain be comin’. He be sing for rain on log, looking ready to jump in sky. Help make it. If you kill him when he singin’, lightning might be come an’ finish you, my son.’ Lucky there were no clouds this day. Old Magdaline called me to her blanket where she sat with the other old blind women. ‘Grandson, Peter Yungi Johnson been too long gone. Go police station, ask it, for my son. I been worry too much that one.’ A copy of my photo of Peter, enlarged, blurred and bleached of colour, was displayed with five other missing persons on the wall beside the information desk. The officer on duty said nothing had turned up on him. No news was bad news, for Magdaline. Peter’s grin under furrowed brows was the last image I had of him. David heard a few months later that a body had been found up near the ‘sixteen mile’ under a tree. The news-bearer reckoned it was Peter. The description of the clothes sounded like his. There was a full bottle of cordial by the corpse. I offered to drive David to check out the body. He declined. Though it rankled him, he wouldn’t go to the police. I heard no more about it.

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at home when Arranye finally got his new ‘eating machine’. He got spruced up for the occasion and tested the new dentures on another round of lamb chops on the front verandah. He joked with Raffi, asking if he could recognise him with his re-formed jaw. I asked him if he had any ideas about how long the Arrernte had been in Central Australia. I’d recently heard that the Arrernte might have been later arrivals than the other language groups, a paltry ten thousand years ago. He had no numeral to put to the question, only the expression ‘olden times’. This covered the era before whitefellas, the time of his great grandfather, and before people existed. He stated that until the crater at Gosse Bluff was formed, all Aboriginal people spoke one language. ‘Then crater split it up. People go every way. Then all them mobs come back. Build up sides of that place with different lingos.’

W e p l a n n e d a lit t l e pa r t y

On 2 Ma r c h 1 9 9 6 , F e d e r a l Elect ion Day ,

after dropping Raffi off at his buddy’s place, I went with Arranye to the polling booth. He was always keen to vote at elections and didn’t want to be passive in whitefella business. Like many elections before, he asked me to help him identify his name on the electoral roll and to fill in his form. The difficulties presented for illiterate Aboriginal voters seemed wilfully obstructive. Entitlement to assistance is part of the democratic process. He was about to scrawl his usual shaky ‘X’ when a scrutineer rushed us and ordered me out of the building. I protested about Arranye’s blindness and illiteracy as I was escorted through the doors. It was all to no avail. Arranye, a staunch Labor voter, cast his paper into the ballot box, though there was no knowing if it was valid. We left the voting booth, got some carrot cake from the cake stall and returned home for a cup of tea. A bowerbird was stirring up other birds and mimicking them. Its energetic behaviour thrilled me. 208



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‘Not much on town side, you know. But that mob been spread all over desert line,’ quipped Arranye. The neighbour’s Siamese cat also liked the birds and stealthily passed us, keeping to the fence line. Arranye had never seen a Siamese cat. But he recounted how he had once found and befriended a camel-coloured cat in a cave. It had beheaded a king brown snake and left it on his pillow. The white stockman he was working with had insisted on killing the snake but Arranye pointed to its missing head. His reference to snakes made me think of Ronja’s snake Dreaming, the pattern of her birthmark. And then I recalled that my father, too, had a similar birthmark on his leg. ‘Arranye, did you know that snake pattern on Ronja’s neck is the same as my father’s?’ ‘Of course. That where you been get your snake line, my boy.’ Since schooldays I had been called ‘Snake’. I was said to have moved like a snake across the field during football matches. My stature was long, thin and agile. Arranye too had dubbed me ‘Snake’ within a few months of knowing me. My nickname had travelled across the cultures. ‘Snakes never worry old Arranye. Grandfather protect me from snake, any kind, when I only boy, little bit walkin’.’ He said his grandfather had caught one once and boiled off its fat. When the fat cooled, it was pasted all over his body. ‘One time king brown been crawl inside me swag and sleep whole night with me. Not know it ’til morning time. He crawl back out and slip away. Never been worry me, that cheeky one, because of that fat. Nother time too. Oh, plenty time, poison snake been close up, but never tangle with old Arranye.’ I glanced at his callused feet and offered to trim his nails. They had worn holes through his sneakers. He reckoned it was a good time for cutting them. Later we went to the Eastside shop to get the usual chops, bread 209


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and tobacco. He produced a thin wad of notes from his pension envelope and held them close to his right eye. ‘This one enough?’ he asked, pressing a twenty into my palm. ‘Yeah.’ ‘You might be hold this other ones. Card game today. My happy day. But don’t want to lose whole lot.’ We then stopped at Kmart to get him a new pair of sneakers. We passed by Jenny Green’s on the way to Whitegate and picked up project money for the healing songs at St Anthonys Rockhole. ‘My money tongue been working for me all right,’ said Arranye. When we got to camp I helped him to his feet. ‘You looking proper solid again, my son. You ready for new woman. Man gotta be have it woman, you know. Good one. Look after each other. You been too much anturrknge [sad] in your guts.’ I left him dunking Weet-Bix in his tea at Myra’s.

returned to Alice Springs and stayed in a rental property. Elaine said she worried that she would lose Raffi to me. After a few months, she seemed confident about Raffi’s situation with me and returned to New South Wales with Ronja. She reassured Raffi that he would be all right and that she would see him at Christmas. ‘Going too soon,’ five-year-old Raffi cried. He didn’t want her to go. He stayed with me in the family home, unable to cope with the unpredictability in New South Wales, while Ronja thrived in her mother’s shifting scene. By early evenings my darling was buoyant enough to hop to the bathroom, a little quirk I loved. We’d lie in bed together. He’d be asleep within minutes and I’d be left to scan the patterns of knotted ply on the ceiling, as he so often did. I worried over the kids’ growth and the toll of At m id - y e a r El ain e a n d Ro nja

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their respective loss of a parent figure. The young citrus Elaine had planted scratched against the masonry, mocking my pain. Me. Dumb as a beetle. Anxious as an ant.

Ar r a n y e h a d m e n t io n ed Ooram inna Rockhole ,

45 kilometres south of town, many times. He said it was an important watering place on the stock and camel routes to Arltunga and Alice Springs. The traditional owner of the rockhole was Silas Turner. Arranye had his permission to guide Raffi and me, but not to elaborate. The spring sun was warm, the most athletic of days. You could stretch out, and glare back at it. We left the main dirt track and drove on a scrubby route over creek beds in the general direction of the sandstone ridge. The old man was confident we’d find a passage. We revved through a phalanx of white rocks, which Arranye called the ‘butterfly women’. But Arranye’s sight was too weak to sort one ridge from the other. Just as we’d decided to retreat, we bogged on a subterranean redgum root in a creek. I considered walking to Santa Teresa track for a lift or to Ooraminna Homestead. Both prospects were unappealing. Arranye sat in the shade, told me never to walk away, and coached us out. Could I see any ironwood, the one with thick bark, close to us? Yes. I quarried and placed lengths of the stuff exactly where he pointed. ‘Build ’em road like bitumen. Pack it sand. Now put it bark. Not that side, my son. Back wheel first.’ My back and the muscle in his head, as he put it, got us out within an hour. Nothing really compared to bogs he had experienced as a young man when working for Kurt Johannsen. In 1915 Johannsen had been born at Deep Well Station, now occupied by whitefella Hayes. He was ownerdriver of self-converted, steam-driven trucks, all called the ‘Mulga Express’. 211


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Numerous breakdowns and bogs were recounted in Kurt’s autobiography, Son of the Red Centre, which I had read aloud to Arranye in camp. He delighted in the passages where he recognised the events. Moving again, Arranye told more stories of the native cat running through the region. He spoke of the brew made from the nectar of the corkwood flower. Phonetically, the ‘Oora’ had been corrupted from ure/ fire, and ‘minna’, from merne/seed. ‘Good drink that one. Only for men.’ Mostly, the crusty corkwoods gave no hint of productivity. Sparse needled foliage, burled bark and skewed stances, they were the archetypal dark veterans of mean seasons. The silverish seed pods glinted like ancient helmetry. In a generous spring they sprouted a fabulous pale cream fluorescence. These cob-sized constellations of buds were rich in nectar and fussed over by bees. Soaking them in warm water made a mildly intoxicating drink. When we arrived at the site, Arranye directed Raffi and me to the paintings on the rock overhang but was unable, given his unsteady feet, to accompany us. ‘Only men see that painting,’ he reminded us as he swung into the front seat, laying his two-headed ‘walkin’ snake’ stick along the door. As we rocked back over the track, I wondered if I could smell a wire shorting under the dash. Arranye had wet himself. The scent of his tobacco thronged with his urinous pants. Clouds had sprouted. ‘This not blow away cloud. That cloud bag might be open up. Could be rain time. Can’t speak it too much or might be chase it off.’ I pointed out a red sandstone eminence, standing free of the nearby range. From its kangaroo shape I assumed it would be ascribed with a kangaroo Dreaming story. Did Arranye know anything about that rock? ‘No. That not kangaroo! That achilpe. Native cat stand up there 212



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like man and walk north. Walk north and spread out from this place. All the way to salt water country, he been travel.’ Thunder groaned in the distance as we rolled through town. Raffi thought he could smell rain. The Whitegate mob was quick to suss out his innate qualities. Not a water-loving baby like Ronja, they reckoned. ‘Him rainbow boy, that one. He know rain,’ said the old man. Fifteen minutes of sudden thrashing wind followed, dispensing a few huge drops. Then it burst forth. Hot wires of lightning quaked highvoltage sparks across the silhouetted trees and buildings. The hydrophobic soil initially repelled the rain, pooling it in small beads, until the earth softened with replenishing seepage.

I h a d a c ro o k g u t ,

spasms of jabbing pain and vile flatulence, which I believed to be giardia. Meals rushed through me. I tried the standard treatments from a variety of doctors in town. Nothing worked. Arranye suggested stewing up a bath of leaves from the native fuchsia and I immersed in this for half an hour. Later that day he sang his healing song over me. Out came the tobacco tin of fat. He then told me about the Â�little birds that sucked the moisture from insects they caught. This medicine would make my guts less moist. Arranye puffed over the fat then handed it to me. ‘Gotta be do it more homework on that, my son.’ There were no dramatic improvements. The cycle persisted. I complained to David of a terrific stomach cramp that had overcome me. He told me he could fix it. ‘It’s probably from infected water, David. Giardia, I reckon.’ He asked if I had been out in the season’s first hot north wind. ‘Yes.’ The north wind had rattled the pale pink gums, splitting their skin. 213


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Their bark had burst and buckled over the ground, a battalion of arched corpses. They stood glistening in their white shafts. The wind also caused the redgum leaves to drizzle their annual white, sugary flakes. Raffi had spent some of the morning harvesting handfuls of this aperaltye, padding the dandruff into balls of chewing gum. ‘I’m doctor for wind sickness,’ David said. ‘Already I mend it three people from Charles Creek since morning time.’ He asked me to remove my shirt. ‘Kwemen agwerke [Raffi],’ he said and motioned to him. ‘Bring glass from kitchen.’ He placed both hands firmly on my gut and wrenched anti-Â� clockwise several times, and spat blood into the glass, perhaps half a dozen times while making a clicking noise in his mouth. He wiped his hands on his stomach and repeated the process. I got up feeling completely comfortable. The sweating and shits didn’t bother me again for several months. Next time, David couldn’t be found so I went for a barberry and wormwood concoction from a herbalist that re-lined the cocoon of my timid stomach. I’m not suggesting that I’d surrendered standard medicine. The clientele at the hospital demonstrated that Arrernte resorted to it also. Debilitating illnesses, diseases, wounds and breakages were best dealt with by hospital staff. And there was the bonus of no kin to blame when the efficacy of the local man didn’t yield promising results.

we were ready for our annual vacation. Raffi and I stood mid-morning, watching tawny kites that parried and thrust in the still air. Behind migrating black thunderheads, distant lightning glowed mutely. We would join that parade and fly to Sydney where we’d part for him to be with Elaine and Ronja. I would continue on

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to Melbourne where both kids would later join me for a couple of weeks, then go back to Elaine for one term, before returning to Alice Springs. A dark vertebrae of cloud dissipated in a downpour before our plane journey. Leaves were shredded. Acacia blossoms were dashed on the driveway. Ice piled against the house. Raffi rollicked with a dozen mates in the gutters, first floating themselves and, as the water retreated, racing bark vessels. The national newspapers gave front page to the Rock. Forty degrees plus and fortuitous tourists were kodaking Uluru. It looked like festive fruitcake replete with almond icing. At Easter, Elaine came back with Raffi and Ronja. They looked so big, so full. They stormed me at the airport, Raffi almost battering me to the ground with his hug. Phone calls were no substitute for this affection. I was so rapt to have them back. Elaine rented a house a few streets away and we commenced sharing the kids equally again.

inhabitants of Alice Springs that ceremonial life remains a pivotal feature of Arrernte lives. I don’t know any mature-aged man who has not been initiated and, that is to add, circumcised. Sub-incision I am less sure about, though most men of my age have submitted to it. The onset of the summer business camp often dragged on interminably, factoring in the appropriate candidates, initiators, relatives, weather and competing interests. Local teenagers might be whisked to the bush camp, some kilometres from Whitegate, and wait for other initiates. Xavier urged me to join the business camp as an initiate. ‘Rod, you be go through. Then we can look after you. We can show you things. Make you belong country.’ He and Petrina taxied food for the boys in the bush camp from town to my front door. I then ferried the carry bags behind Whitegate,

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leaving them by the track where the camp attendants would walk them in. Ronja and Raffi joined in the ‘pow wow’ that night, the welcoming of the newly made men. Ronja danced hesitantly as Raffi fed sticks into the fires at either side of the younger men. There were three more nights of this. The final night, Arranye, charged with Coolabah, was hoisted into the arena on the shoulders of two sturdy younger men, to assume his responsibilities. He sang throughout: a royal sight in only his red football shorts and headband! Lawrence Hayes told me he had new razor blades and that Xavier mentioned I might want to be cut. ‘Oh. Has he now?’ ‘Round cut might take three weeks, but finish ’im up cut take less time. Like falling off a log. Like writing on paper. New blades better than broken bottle, Rod.’ ‘Good to know that, Lawrence.’ Ronja, now nine, and Raffi, six, were impressed by the men chanting, dressed in law mud of red ochre mixed in fat. The ‘whoo, whoo, whoo’ drumming the night ushered in their sleep. One elderly woman got up to dance at every fresh outbreak of song, staggering tipsily to join the other women and girls. Each time she finished on her back, which drew the disapproval of her sisters and sniggering from the kids. ‘She be too drunk,’ laughed young Sebastian. A week later, Dominic arrived at my house with Georgina, his new wife. Both were still smeared with ochre. Georgina wanted a bath before returning to Amoonguna. Dominic headed straight for the guitar and tweaked some country and western. Georgina said she loved me and flirtatiously winked behind Dominic’s back. He ignored her. When Â�Georgina was in the bathroom, Dominic paused. ‘She cheeky ’cos I got white woman friend.’ ‘Rod, you got towel for me?’ Georgina called from the bathroom. 216



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She lay in a red sea of mud as I threw one through the open door, attempting to ignore a second huge wink. The room looked like a charnel house, mud running down the white ceramic tiles as if there had been a shootout. She cleaned it on my request. And then she cleaned the kitchen, which didn’t need cleaning. All the way to Amoonguna she reminded me of her generosities. Dominic stalked off to his house while she lingered at the car window and surprised me by slapping her lips on mine. ‘Rod, I slack. Anytime I be kiss you.’ She winked and sallied off.

when I visited one afternoon. I wanted to show him photos I intended to use for a painting. Simon had fallen during the ceremony and bruised his ribs and shoulder, and upset his stomach, so Arranye suggested we gather medicine plants along the Ross River Highway near Amoonguna. Myra scrummaged around her shelves for plastic bags. Julie and Mareena Hayes accompanied us. We stuffed two bags with branches and returned to camp. Myra put them into an iron cauldron and boiled up an infusion. Myra told me about the recent scuffle between Benedict and Â�Robbie. Benedict, on the rum, had belted Robbie, who had retaliated with a metal chair. Myra had called an ambulance on her one-way radio that she’d acquired from the Aboriginal Night Patrol to alert them when trouble erupted. She was sick of the vicissitudes of grog and was off the following day to a women’s summit on the subject at Yuendumu. Her talk switched to the roosters I had recently given her. She said their rowdy morning calls were retribution for the sleeplessness caused by noisy drunks. And their down could be used at ceremony time when the men painted up. No need to bother the eagles these days. Myra had been a tremendous force for improving conditions at Ar r a n y e wa s s it t in g w it h Simon and Myra

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Whitegate. I was astonished over and over again as she carried various initiatives and lobbied Tangentyereâ•¯–â•¯such as for the bough shelters, the better tin sheds. And water was now hooked up with PVC piping, albeit unofficially, to the town supply via the rival camp over the hills at Ilpeye Ilpeye. She was aptly dubbed the Queen of Whitegate. The recent shower block and laundry were her ideas. So too were the two solar-powered lights and the radio to Night Patrol. Her own quarters were impeccable. She planted trees and kept a large poultry pen. The existence of the Ilpeye Ilpeye town camp was a contentious point for the Hayes. Myra insisted Ilpeye Ilpeye was located 3 kilometres east, towards Emily Gap. She thought the Campbells and Golders had no right to be dwelling in a place that had a nomenclature they seemed ignorant aboutâ•¯–â•¯the tar vine soakage, ayepe kwatje. As far as she was concerned, they had made claim to the estate and weren’t the real traditional owners. The ramifications caused continued rivalry between the two camps. As I got into the Commodore that day, another sedan pulled alongside. Aubrey Johnson, one of its many passengers, alighted so blearyeyed from grog that I was surprised he recognised me. He stumbled across to Simon who was sitting in a plastic chair. Aubrey stooped over the older man, placed both hands on his sturdy paunch and muttered some healing words. Never mind that Aubrey seemed more in need of steadying himself on Simon’s stomach than ministering to digestive woes. I closed my door and imagined how my confidence in my own doctor would be impaired if he greeted me on wobbly feet. Aubrey was done before I’d turned the key and had already squeezed back into the sedan to be chaperoned back to his camp.

were shedding their skins in the tall buffel grass around camp. Bernard, Kemarre’s brother and Xavier’s uncle, did a

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burn-off just before sunset when the breeze slackened, to make the place safer for the kids. ‘Look, Rod,’ he said, pointing to the dust at my feet. ‘That long grub or short grub you see crawlin’ along the ground there? Old people say if it long one, that first one you see, then it be a long winter follow up.’ He had been smoking the ganja that his son, Devon, had gifted him. Devon had been a late seventh addition to the recent initiations and repaid his father with one hundred dollars’ worth of plant. Payment, in any form, from initiates to senior men was obligatory, though kangaroo meat was the traditional form of payment. The light slackened. Our shadows paled into one. ‘Rod, which way you goin’?’ Bernard asked. ‘Just home. Gotta fix supper for the kids.’ ‘Take me Eastside shop. I want cask of that man in the boat.’ (The wine he preferred still advertised the good life of the Parisian bourgeoisie in the 1880s.) ‘Okay. Only one way though.’ ‘Aw, gee. This one make ’im face numb. An’ you!’ He looked to the other men standing around his fire. ‘Don’t be smoke all my mob when I Eastside.’ He unrolled his arm in the direction of the floor where ganja butts littered the dirt. Arranye decided to camp away from Bernard. ‘He cook, drink and smoke that one. He make ’imself mad. No good that one. Make me too sad. Too much he been take it,’ said Arranye. I saw Xavier the next day. ‘I been cryin’ lonely for Petrina. She be finish with me.’ We had been through this before. Did he want my advice or comfort? Arranye, and others also, had suggested that he and Petrina were not happy together. Though I doubted they could be apart. 219


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‘Might be I find other wife, Rod. You got one for me? I greedy for woman.’ While driving him to camp, he asked to stop just beyond the cattleÂ� grid. He walked off and reclaimed a plastic carry bag of sex magazines and blue movies from behind a rock. ‘Where did you get them?’ ‘Find them in Ross Park. You know. Near school. You want it, video? I got no machine.’ ‘No thanks. That stuff bores me, Xavier.’ Not long after, Petrina left Alice Springs to live with her sister for three years in Darwin. She returned for funerals now and then and finally settled back. She was jealous when Xavier eventually took another partner. Occasionally she would have a run-in with him. But it was clear that he’d come to terms with his new relationship and there was no way back for Petrina.

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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ A rranye and m e

L at e in N ov em b e r 1 9 9 7 ,

Adrian Hayes came to tell me my ‘father’ wanted to see me. He was back at Charles Creek. I went early the following morning with the kids, a Saturday, when I often ran his longer errands. The concrete slab houses had been recently painted by Tangentyere with vivid colours and their numbers scrawled in large freehand on the front walls. He lay in the dark confines of the front room of number one house. His rheumy vision was exacerbated by conjunctivitis. He never bothered to brush the flies from his lids and their crap infected them. Boils had formed around his ankles. His legs had pretty much packed up, and he had gone from using a walking stick to crutches. I cut his hair and beard while he lay, too uncomfortable to move. Whatever caused his boils I couldn’t say, but it would have done him good to wash more regularly at cuff and collar, and change his clothes more often. ‘Someone be eat my tucker line. You might be get it something for me. Meat and bread, my boy.’ 222



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He found his envelope of notes from the Tangentyere bank, and held them close to his eye. ‘This one might be it,’ he said, pressing a twenty-dollar note into my palm. ‘And might be get ’im papers, and tin tobaccy. Don’t forget it, my eye paste.’ We were silent for a few minutes before he mentioned a recent visit from some Kalahari Bushmen organised by the Central Land Council. ‘Arrernte and African mob been cook meat same way. You seen it. Tie guts up and chuck ’im on coal. Bury ’im. Good tucker, that one. Oh, but they shame us mob. We no longer be like them. Don’t make string from guts like olden times. Only shop one, I suppose. But hard country, Africa. Proper starvation country they got there, poor buggers. We in front of them. We got tap in every house at Charles Creek and them other camps. They still fightin’ for government bore. Only one bore they been got.’ Before leaving, I helped him into the sun. Despite his heavy suit coat and sweaters, he was cold. The sun was a reviver. He called to others for help to shift him throughout the day, following the sun’s arc. Over the ensuing fortnight, I laundered some of his shirts and strides until the boils subsided. One of the women at the house performed the necessary ablutions. When the boils erupted and formed scabs, I softened them and added corkwood ash to cauterise them. Within the month he agreed to a wheelchair, arranged through Flynn Drive medical service. I took some fresh linen to throw on Arranye’s swag. He said he wanted to take me to Pwelye Pwelye, Ruby Gap, Chambers Pillars, Rainbow Valley and Twin Cavesâ•¯–â•¯quite an agenda for his conspicuously deteriorating body. Despite his voracious appetite, he was paper frail.

and his wife, Bonita Oliver, came one night to the door and touched hands. They told me briefly that cousin

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Stephen Kernahan’s teenage son had hanged himself with hosing from the basketball hoop at Charles Creek. The police had cut him down. Then Bobby Palmer’s son tried to do the same thing a few days later; he was now in Intensive Care with possible brain damage. Arranye moved back to Whitegate to join the large sorry camp for the grieving families. All the Turners were there and many of the Stephens. Tangentyere had built a bough shelter behind the eastern tin sheds to accommodate the sorry business. I got the trailer and dragged in several loads of wood for cooking and warmth. For several days the men sat in three rows, silently, mostly bowed, facing east towards Emily Gap. Arranye looked awful sitting, legs out, on a groundsheet. His eyes were puffy and he leant limply sidewards, as if he were seeking the support of his shed, a metre away. His tale of old people sitting to die played in my head. Mary Hayes, Arranye’s sister, implored him to move to the Old Timers’ Home. He adamantly refused. Weeks later, Arranye grudgingly accepted to go with his niece, Theresa Ryder, to live at Santa Teresa. I found his teeth and medicine pouch in his bedding and packed some clothes. He anticipated that Theresa would pick him up that morning. I later checked to see if he’d departed as planned. I found him sitting in the fading light, leaning against his rolled swag, all his sweaters and coat on, still waiting. A day later he was rushed to hospital suffering pneumonia. Ronja, Raffi and I dropped in to see him when he returned to Whitegate. He’d lost his sheen. His side was in constant pain. He thought it was his appendix. His cataracts had reformed. ‘You got more “Tiger Club”, I might rub ’im?’ He had finished the first tub of Tiger balm I’d given him, which he’d put in his old army bag crammed with obsolete eye drops, unspecified capsules, Mylanta and tissues. He said he needed another pedicure. I preferred to take him home for this task where his feet could be thoroughly soaked in warm water. But he was too weak to move. We darted home to 224



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collect the clippers and returned to find his feet inside a plastic bag full of water. He had asked Bartholomew to fetch it. I scraped out the red ochre from beneath his nails and cut them as his legs dangled over the side of his bed. Wherever I encountered Johnsons through town I’d hear them say, ‘That ol’ man, Arranye, be fucked.’ I was disturbed. Unless I insisted that they get into my car, then drove them to and from his humpy, no brothers or sons would visit him. Whitegate was still a no-go zone for most of the Johnsons. Before the end of the month Arranye returned to hospital with asthma and was put on the ‘puff puff machine’. ‘Asthma not my family line. That Neil mob been have it. Not Johnson,’ he railed, disappointed in himself. Soon he was discharged. I found him back at Whitegate stretched out on his bed, rubbing fat on his legs, singing some snake song. ‘Dominic been come from Amoonguna an’ be give it me,’ he said, holding the tin of fat. He looked at his feet as if wondering what they were. They were dreadfully swollen, an indication of his ruined kidneys. The wheelchair had arrived but was too heavy to manipulate. The kids made plenty of use of it as a toy vehicle, and most of his male visitors would occupy it as it was usually left next to his bed. ‘Anything you might want me to get from the shop?’ I asked him as I was leaving. ‘Nothing, my son.’ I left him to his singing.

as I passed his humpy and requested a portrait of his kids. He had painted a map of Australia on a canvas, leaving

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me to work up the portraits within the shape of the continent. Then Julie dotted up the surround. Later Lawrence came to me with another one of his paintings and asked me to paint in a centrally positioned Mary Magdalene and, on the east coast of Australia, an image of Jesus, which he supplied. Again, Julie surrounded it, this time with bush foods. Lawrence mentioned that, on seeing these paintings, Santa Teresa relatives started trembling from their power. Reproductions of Mary Magdalene had recently circulated the Eastern Arrernte community. A religious fervour had gripped Santa Teresa after the discovery of healing water on the mountain behind the church. The white cross astride the mountain signalled the sanctity of activities in the valley below. If the township’s main road could bisect the church and run through its nave up the rocky escarpment, it would terminate at the foot of the cross. The symmetry was impressive: man and mountain somehow in league. But an auspicious story, one that outstripped any such architectural conjecture, had evolved over the preceding eighteen months. Apparently, a bedridden twenty-three-year-old man from Santa Teresa had a vision in which Mary Magdalene stood on top of some bushes on the hill behind the church, below a cave. To the left of her on some rocks were four purple stars in the shape of a cross. She indicated that if water could be found on the mountain, he should wash with it and drink it to be cured. He told his mother the next morning. With her two friends, the woman set off for the hill where they were embraced by a strong wind, which they took to be the Holy Spirit. To their surprise, they found a stream of water and traced it to the source of a little spring under the bushes. They knelt and said the rosary, then collected and took the water to the young man. The spring waters effected an immediate cure. People started drinking the miracle water, washing in it, spraying themselves and their bed sheets, sprinkling grains of wet sand between 226



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their blankets, or making compacts of the sand to apply to arthritic limbs. Even alcoholism was treated. A woman from Bathurst Island came and was cured of a tropical ulcer. A cancer disappeared. An old man’s sight was rejuvenated. A young teenage boy, who had ridiculed believers in the healing spring, entered his house and saw the image of Our Lady on the wall looking at him and crying real tears, causing him to fall to his knees and beg her forgiveness. There were many testimonies. Such an incredible momentum had been established that eight Santa Teresa women joined a small group of white Alice Springs pilgrims to visit the Holy Waters in Medjugorje, Bosnia. Later a whitefella working for the Central Land Council reported that the rusty pipe from the community water tank had been replaced and the holy spring disappeared. The families advised that insufficient prayer had caused the spring to dry up. As I exited Coles one morning Kemarre Turner was standing near the door with her shopping. I offered her a lift back to her house. She was one of the few women who unhesitatingly sat in the front seat alongside me. Even if men were present, she’d claim the coveted front seat. She asked me inside for a chat. I gazed, wide-eyed, at the sacred images adorning the walls. Numerous icons of the Virgin covered the lounge room wall. Frosty flesh on boneless limbs, heavily hooded eyes, each Madonna, whether sitting, standing, kneeling or floating, was unsoiled by domestic concerns or mortal desires. A large plaster cast of Jesus stood in the corner opposite the TV, which was blurting out an episode of The Simpsons. Sensing my interest, she asked if I could give her five hundred dollars to finance her pilgrimage to Bosnia. ‘Maybe you could give me the money for the airfare, Rod,’ she suggested. ‘I don’t have that kind of money, Kemarre.’ ‘But you’re a famous artist, Rod.’ ‘I don’t know about that and whatever fame I have hasn’t brought 227



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me much money. Look at my car!’ I laughed at her naivety and shrugged off her persistence.

At t h e s ta r t o f t h e N e w Year 1998 ,

Elaine went to New South Wales for the summer, taking the kids with her. She kept the lease on the house she was renting, and arranged with her co-tenants that she would return to re-occupy her part of the house in early April. After being down south for a few weeks, she changed her plans and said that she would resume living in Alice Springs at the advent of its pleasant winter. The summer rains had either evaporated or percolated into the sands of the Todd River. The grass shoots that had pierced the soil so eagerly were now weary and singed. Verdant circles survived within the radii of the council’s reticulating sprays. On these patches, several groups sat solemnly. I recognised some of them and slowed the car as Big Rose motioned me to her party. She whispered news of another Hayes youth who had committed suicide. I walked around the small groups touching hands. Nijas Ryder and Eric Neil jumped in the car. ‘Take us Whitegate to tell Arranye,’ said Nijas. Back at Arranye’s camp they shook hands with him and were busy consoling other family, as I assisted Arranye to the car. I hadn’t seen him since before Christmas, nor groomed him since mid-September. Emboldened with sufficient strength and irritated by nits, he asked for a trim and said he wanted to have a break from his camp. Aboriginal Congress Health had replaced his first set of wheels with a lighter model. I folded it into the back of the Commodore. ‘Only a little bit walking now, my boy,’ he said apologetically. ‘You got it rubbing oil for leg? My leg all dry.’ At home I left him on the verandah in the cane chair and went to the kitchen for some cooking oil. 228



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‘Got to give it oil like motor car engine,’ he grinned, as I splashed it over the scaly skin of his calves. ‘You sittin’ alone in house? You still got single man’s quarters there? Where my grandson?’ ‘With his mother and sister on the south coast of New South Wales.’ ‘Oh, when him an’ marle akweke come back home?’ ‘They might come for a few weeks at Easter.’ Just talking about the kids being so far away brought tears to my eyes. After the shearing we got some ice, bread and tinned meat. I slipped him a banana. He was looking far better than at any point in the previous twelve months. ‘One more year, I been got ’im, my son.’ He grinned matter-of-factly.

Xavier appeared with Lilla Miller, his new wife. He said that Ku Klux Klan activity made him too frightened to keep camping west of the river. He was staying at Whitegate for temporary refuge. ‘Anything happen today?’ I asked. ‘Man be find dead. Might be Ku Klux Klan again,’ said Xavier, referring to the young man’s body discovered north of Heavitree Gap. This was the first I’d heard of KKK activity, although talk escalated through the remainder of the year. Where the tag came from, I do not know. I doubted that an organised, racist group existed, and was almost certain that no affiliation with the notorious clansmen of the southern United States was involved. However, there had been a racist precedent further north in Katherine. In 1989, SPONGE (the Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything) was formed in response to the Jawoyn people gaining control of the Nitmiluk National Park and establishing a tourist venue in Katherine Gorge. There were reports of Rights

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for Whites marches, threats against blackfellas in the streets, gunfire over people’s heads, and people being thrown from the bridge. The whiteÂ�fellas resented what they perceived as funding inequalities and feared a land grab. Xavier told of black women being picked up and driven to Wongardi swamp and raped. One woman had two fingers amputated. He reported that a carload of hooded men ran into a lamp post outside CAAMA studios in pursuit of two young black women. The police attended the accident, but he’d heard they were only charged with reckless driving. Arrernte feared going to the police because they felt some of the junior officers were implicated in KKK activity. The following day I read a newspaper article about the young man found near Heavitree Gap. He was reported to have suicided, but his body had lain undiscovered for two days and had been properly cooked in the 45°C heat. The expanding fat had split the skin, giving it the appearance of bodily violence although it had been flayed by thermal aggression.

to exhibit for a third time at Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs, emphasising works from the preceding four years. This community arts venue incorporated the Strehlow Research Centre with a modest and attractive museum. It had several galleries and an excellent stage and cinema auditorium. The show was entitled Where Do You Come From, Brother Boy? This echoed Xavier’s question to me years before in my lounge room. The hearings on the land claims in Alice Springs were continuing at the same time as the opening. Jenny Green, an interpreter in the hearings, suggested that my imagery might support the claimants’ case for continuity of traditional ways of life. My depictions of the families showed that they belonged to networks of sites that made up their ‘familiar’ region.

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In Alice Springs, whitefellas speak of town and bush: a handy division made easy by the fence line and water drains. But for the blackfella families the bush and the cluster of shopping complexes and light industrial installations surrounded by suburbs were all ‘country’. The parents of the Whitegate kids made them aware of the sacred sites that dotted both town and the bush. I let Myra and Patrick know they might be required to walk around the paintings in my show with the judge. Lawyers, linguists and anthropologists made a cursory visit to the exhibition before the opening. But it was decided there was insufficient time to mount a case for the judge. On the second Saturday morning of the show I went to Whitegate to remind Arranye that a photographer from the Weekend Australian would be coming to photograph us late in the afternoon. The author Barry Hill was researching a story on my work and wanted some supporting visual material. ‘Rod apetyeye [come],’ said Lawrence, summoning me to where he sat. His leg was in plaster. A broken crutch bisected the group of puppies at his feet. He pointed to the images reproduced on his invitation to the show. I was surprised that he had an invitation, then remembered giving half a dozen to Myra fresh from the press in mid-December. ‘What happened to your leg that you need those sticks?’ I asked. ‘Them Warlpiri mob been beat me. I had two of them. But they pretty good in a group. My mouth was bleeding. And I fell back over one of them I been put on the ground. Others came an’ kicked me. One fella with those American boots, big ones, broke my leg above and under knee. Two place. And here. You see where my lip been stitched? And here.’ He lifted his t-shirt. ‘See where they knife me?’ A broad scar, still pink, ran from above his hip, around it, and careered into the right buttock. Its curve echoed the one on his knee. ‘But I’ll get ’em. I saw their families in the pub. I’m just waitin’ for my leg to be proper. I told them I got five son. And I got my old doctor 231



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here,’ he said, swinging around towards Arranye, who nodded from the blankets. I spoke with Arranye and hurried off to the exhibition.

a book that I’d just purchased. It was titled Dear Spencer. I was halfway through it. On its pages were the letters of Frank Gillen to Baldwin Spencer. Gillen, stationmaster of the Alice Springs Telegraph Station in the 1890s, was Spencer’s main collaborator and informant. Spencer launched his international reputation by publicising field observations about the family’s great-grandparents. Though Gillen shared with Spencer the authorship of several books in my house, he had nothing like Spencer’s stellar career. Now, for the first time, Gillen’s own story had been published. I sat at the gallery desk, baby-sitting the show. Remarkably, when I randomly opened it, the pages turned to one hundred years ago to the day, when Gillen’s disclosures were at their most intense. He seemed too excited to order his thoughts into paragraphs. He was desperately interested in and committed to recording the life and customs of the Arrernte. Given the social climate of his time, the discrimination and brutality of the frontier, his fellowship with the Arrernte was noble. Though he didn’t get adequate recognition in his lifetime, I smiled when I heard the old men refer to Gillen as their grandfather, ‘Mister Spencer Gillen’. Ceremonial life had been in Gillen’s back yard. More correctly, he’d been in the Arrernte yard, as the land claim hearings were making clear. The hearings contained testimonies of vast amounts of current knowledge deposited with educated Arrernte. Myra, who’d already helped Patrick secure the incision for the Hayes outstation, was a main speaker at the hearings. She won Native Title recognition for Whitegate. Little of the kind of knowledge Myra divulged was performed now in ceremonies. It seemed

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to me to be a sad and regrettable loss. Overwhelmingly the breakages and mutilations occurring in cycles of debilitating violence had nothing to do with ceremony, and much to do with its absence. I pondered these matters as I read Gillen’s letters. In 1984 the National Museum of Victoria published an elegant, coffee-table edition of Baldwin Spencer’s photos with most of the original text pruned to make for more accessible reading. It addressed the counter-culture, and silenced Spencer’s unfashionable, condescending tone. It was a book to fit those sympathetic times. By the mid-1990s the national public mood in regard to Aborigines had shifted from sympathy to cynicism. Gillen’s book reminded me that encounter and patient engagement were continuing antidotes to mounting public anger and cynicism over Aboriginal Land Rights. The shift saw non-Aboriginal Australians giving full blame to contemporary Indigenous Australians for the conditions they endured: the continuing poverty, the alleged misuse of taxpayers’ money and institutionalised welfare dependency.

to spend the Easter holidays in Alice Springs. Her rental arrangement at the house a few streets away still stood. Ronja and Raffi unpacked, played with the dog, then wanted to see ‘Grandpa’ and the Whitegate kids. They kissed Arranye and sat on his bed. He was bright but feeble. His frail grace. Everything he owned was under his pillow: his tobacco tin, dentures, sunglasses and cotton pouch of pain capsules. He belonged to his bed now. Bartholomew, stricken with kidney disease and too ill to move far from the shack, slept on the ground nearby and tended their fire. At Arranye’s request, we collected a trailer of mulga from the flats by Pepperill Creek and dumped the dead branches near his verandah. Xavier, who I hadn’t seen at Whitegate for months, was warming

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the backs of his calves by Arranye’s fire. He pointed to the clump of quartz growing on the hill in the middle of camp. Soon, he said, when Ronja played there, she would get her chest empowered. Soon she would be coming on woman. She would feel heat rising up her ribs. Arranye spoke of returning to Little Well, which had been appropriately relocated 3 kilometres east, due to Gregory’s death. Government funding had been allocated to build two new metal-clad, three-bedroom houses, which were elevated off the flood plain and had wrap-around verandahs. Later that day, Xavier and Lilla lobbed by. They supped on our meagre leftovers, a chicken rice dish with a pinch of curry. He crammed some crusts in his mouth, swamping the lot with a pannikin of tea. Lilla fumbled with a boiled egg, dropping splinters of shell to the floor. When he saw my disapproving expression, sober Xavier accepted responsibility for his drunk wife. ‘I’m sorry.’ When Xavier asked me to drive them to camp, I declined. He asked for matches, adding that he would camp on the nearby hill. He played on my pity. ‘I’ll be die soon, Rod.’ ‘Probably not before me, Xavier.’ But it was true he lived more full throttle than I, as just about all his relatives did, and he would more likely lose his life from misuse than from old age. On one of our wood runs, Raffi broke his leg. Instead of opening the door to exit the stationary car, he tried to jump out the rear window and managed to hook his leg. It was put in plaster. Arranye told me to collect the native fuchsia plant so that he could sing Raffi’s leg strong again. The day before the kids were due to return to New South Wales, we were at the hospital to see how the bone was knitting. Raffi was wheeled to the X-ray room and we were surprised to see Arranye at the end of the passage 234



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in a roller bed of his own. Their pillows almost touched through the steel safety rails. ‘How much break you been got ’em, my grandson?’ ‘Two breaks.’ ‘Then, two song I be give it,’ he said softly, nudging Raffi’s sheets with outstretched fingers. The singing would have to wait until Raffi returned mid-year. Arranye had been admitted that afternoon. He reckoned he’d poisoned himself by eating sour chicken. Meals on Wheels had left a prepared meal the night before, but he couldn’t eat it then. During the morning, the tray had re-cooked in the sun. He was so hungry he’d taken a few bitter mouthfuls and fouled his gut. When the health worker from Aboriginal Congress Health saw him, it was off to Casualty at the hospital.* I hadn’t seen much of Jude for months until one day around that time our paths crossed near Billygoat Hill. He told me that the woman he’d lived with for a year in Port Augusta had died from drinking methylated spirits. Right now he had two wives and they were living in a flat on the west side of town. One of his current wives was ‘wrong skin’ for him, but the ménage à trois worked. Later that week I saw him outside Coles supermarket with one of them. I crept up behind, leant over his shoulder, and plucked a sardine from the tin he was savouring. He reeled in surprise then took me aside. Tears ran in runnels down his cheeks. His wrong skin wife had been drunk, walked in front of a car the day after we met and was killed. As a result, he would be speared or knifed in the thighs from her relatives.

*â•… A cursory visit to the Alice Springs hospital would tell about the state of Aboriginal health and mortality. Its emergency department treated about 30,000 people annually. Darwin, with three times the population, treated 38,000 people. Needless to say, the Aboriginal representation, as with the jails, was disproportionately high.

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‘See you, Rod. It’s all right,’ he said. We embraced softly and I wended through the car park to the Commodore. I glanced over my shoulder at Jude walking stiffly away and wondered what lightness, what levity might enter his life. Arranye meanwhile had a backache that ran down his leg. I collected David and Big Rose’s husband, Michael Marshall, from Charles Creek to see if they could help. Dominic had started the work the day before, blowing into his hands, rubbing them, and then placing them firmly on Arranye’s back. After a few placements he extracted a sliver of bone, which lay in his palm in a pool of blood. The old man sat up, smiling. Next day, however, he was complaining again. This day, Michael took off his singlet, held David’s hand to double the power, and sucked on the old man’s upper right thigh. ‘Hold hands like cup, Rod.’ He spat into his hand, and then emptied the blood into mine. He dried his hands on his bare chest and told me that Dominic had not managed to get the rest of the bone out. ‘I see through leg like X-ray. See it, all tangled ball. I be free it up. I be like vampire, you might be think.’

in its last throes. Driving off the bitumen gave it a hammering, prematurely ageing it. The plastic and rubber trimmings split or exploded in the heat, then peeled onto the road. Front and rear lights shook free of their housings. More than once I had tested the advertised adhesive powers of various super glues. The Whitegate mob had called both the Subaru and the Commodore Â�‘Aboriginal cars’. As the cars plummeted into decrepitude, they did indeed come to resemble the vehicles in desert communities that had endured comparable battering.

My Co m m o d o r e wa s c l e a r ly

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I’d told Lawrence many months before that I was getting rid of the Commodore. ‘Remember me. I ask it first,’ he’d said, when its market value was between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars. I couldn’t deter him with the recent spate of problems. But I went down market. ‘Five hundred,’ I said. ‘It’s just got new shoes.’ ‘No worries. Julie can pay with her next pension cheque. My brother from Santa Teresa is mechanic. He can get that Commodore motor that’s sittin’ there and make changeover.’ The young blokes tore around camp in it for a few days, dropping doughnuts on the bitumen outside Whitegate. Once, Lawrence waved to me as I walked down Undoolya Road. It was so odd to see the car with all of them in it, minus me. Before a fortnight had elapsed, the pulley fell off. The car waited in camp for the engine and the expertise of the Santa Teresa sibling. Until then it led a brief half-life. For days, Lawrence had sat in the driver’s seat, feet stretched out the door, running cassettes through the car’s most laudable feature. It was the most luxurious stereo in camp. Then it was gone. Benedict had taken it to Atitykala and hit a bullock. The bodies of both the bullock and the car were slumped in the scrub.

for the duration of winter. She resumed renting the same house; the kids spent time with each of us. The consistency of field trips with Arranye slackened as his health became yoked to the town’s medical services. Then they ceased altogether. Some days he was particularly weak. He would doze. Sometimes he woke lucid, sometimes blurred. ‘Oh, my son. When I wake, I not know whether I be north or south. Whether people round me talkin’ Kaytetye or Luritja.’ El ain e a n d t h e k id s r e t urned

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As a younger man he did stock work. Being of light stature, he was the favourite jockey for the whitefella Hayes on Undoolya Station. He trained horses on the bush track pummelled out of Emily Creek flats. Like many horsemen he carried a reminder of those days. But he fought off the appointment with the wheelchair for years, even refusing my hand to help him to his feet. Theresa Ryder urged the palliative care team from the hospital to attend him. Their care was unprecedented in a town camp. Fresh linen, a mosquito net, a urine bag, nappies and a few ampoules of morphine were delivered daily over his final week. The grandchildren were constantly in attendance. Family around him sang his songs. The animosity existing between middle-aged Hayes and Johnson men, the legacy of the crash, deterred the latter’s visits. The resentment reared early one morning when I visited Arranye before breakfast. ‘Adrian been take that rum from under Arranye’s pillow while he sleep. He don’t know it,’ said Bartholomew. I marched over to Adrian who was surrounded by his brothers. I swore at him for his cowardly behaviour, pushing my finger against his chest. ‘That was a shitty thing to do. You know he’s in pain. That was his last money he gave me for that rum!’ ‘That old man shouldn’t be dyin’ here. Theresa should be take him somewhere else. Old Timers’ Home,’ protested Adrian feebly. None of the brothers rose to Adrian’s defence. I turned and walked back to Arranye’s bed, where Bartholomew prodded the ashes. That last night the moon came crisp and callow, prising through the metal shutters of his shed. Charcoal clouds lipped their way across the hunched rise. Thirty or so people huddled in groups outside. Closer family circled around his bed along with the palliative care nurse. I bit my lip. We were mostly murmuring. Arranye was too weak to keep his eyes open and to engage in conversation. 238



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Louis Ryder, who arrived in the afternoon from Santa Teresa, was too late to speak with him. Sixty, usually silent and always sober, he was bereft. He slugged at a bottle of whisky, then cried at the moon, periodÂ� ically pausing to take his penknife and cut his chest and biceps. Each cut ended with an extravagant follow-through gesture. Then he raised both arms above his head and studied the trickling blood. He rambled shirtless through the chilling air, the suppurations forming a glistening map across his torso. ‘That my uncle, lying there. That my old uncle. I Louis Ryder. I cut meself right now for that old man. Oh, uncle. I too sorry.’ He spied me amidst a cluster of men in the greying light, lurched to pull me aside by the shoulders, then in against his stomach. ‘You got that old man’s Dreaming?’ ‘We taped a lot of stories together.’ I was unsure exactly where he was coming from. ‘He never be tell me too much. Now you got it,’ he persisted, softenÂ�ing his speech so that only I could hear. He held my shoulders at arm’s length, searching into my eyes. Then he dropped his arms, turned and wandered away. I ambled over to Raffi and Ronja and, with them either side, we broke spontaneously into Aaron Neville’s hymn ‘I Bid You Goodnight’. Arranye slipped into a coma. I kissed his forehead and stroked his hair. ‘We all love you, old man.’ Raffi ferreted under the blankets and found his cool, wax-tender hand. When Arranye died early that August, he was three score years and ten, the only man at Whitegate who had endured into venerability. Though I was deeply saddened by his passing, his was a life lived as fully as I could conceive, with few, if any, regrets. The week he died he delighted in recounting a dream he’d had of the two of us walking in Ruby Gorge, a place we had failed to get to. He 239



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also assured me, in spite of constant pain from his ruined kidneys and weakened lungs, that he was all right. ‘Why you lookin’ at me so worry? Don’t be worry ’bout me too much, my son. Only worry ’bout yourself.’ The Catholic Church in Alice Springs, which Arranye helped construct as a stonemason, was filled with Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from hundreds of kilometres around. Father Pat Mullins presided over Mass. There was nothing feigned or pompous about Pat. He’d gone some way to Arrernticising the ceremony, having hymns translated and sung in Eastern Arrernte, the cassock transformed in red ochre with dotting motifs, and the smoking done in church with native fuchsia. The bringing together of the Hayes and Johnsons made things tense. Verbal abuse disturbed much of the Mass, but it was contained. Mullins paused to invite those who wished to say something to come to the fore of the congregation. I didn’t need Theresa Ryder’s prodding to take my turn and speak of his qualities and achievements. I made thanks to the old man’s contribution to my education and his love of my kids. He was remarkable also for an absence of malice. I can’t remember any criticism he made that sounded like a complaint or a cry of injustice. This was despite all the changes and disruptions to his way of life.

T h e f o l l owin g n ig h t ,

Joseph Johnson junior died. He was about thirty. The Hayes men reckoned he had pneumonia. But he was in perfect health at the funeral when we commiserated. Others said his drink had been poisoned. Bartholomew Johnson, gaunt and grave during his vigil over Arranye’s decline, died soon after from a brain clot. He was twenty-nine. In the same week, Christopher Neil, aged thirty-one, died at Amoonguna. And Jude soon followed with pneumonia. Such was the ceaseless, speculative flux of Arrernte lives. 240



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It’s the Whitegate kids. Not mine. I’ve just said goodbye to them. At the airport Raffi was tense and silent, his eyes already swollen, though he hadn’t cried. Ronja, if possible, talked faster than usual. My wrists feel cool. A knot rotates in my chest. It heats in tears as they wander through the departure lounge to the tarmac. Their bodies are small against the 747 as the hostess ushers them up the gangway back into the big bird’s lungs. The world that we stepped through together has been reduced to telephone contact, mostly attenuated, and often mistimed. They are tired, or I have visitors. Our excitements pass each other down the line. I imagine them in the shallow valleys near home stooping to wonder over the amethyst and mint-coloured agates. I imagine them calling the dog, small voices fluttering across the ridges. The garden is scattered with mud villas Ronja has built. The Hayes boys ask where my kids are. I don’t know how many times I have to answer this question each time Raffi and Ronja leave. New South Wales is conceptually beyond them. This time Raffi and Ronja have asked for photos of the kids and the dog to pass around school. Harry and Adrian play the guitar and the mandolin, posturing like rock stars. Without my kids to play with, they’re bored within half an hour. ‘Rod, can we get lift to Whitegate?’ asks Harry. I feel heavy and need to let other lives into mine. I arc the car towards camp. Julie Hayes approaches and asks if I’d help them to get some wood. We drop by home to collect the trailer, then take the track towards Emily Creek. There are some dead ironwoods standing on the burred plain. I swing from their lower limbs and crack them to the ground. ‘Your “father” still with us, you know. Them stories he tell the kids at bedtime. We hear his voice in the hill round Whitegate,’ says Julie, as we snap the limbs to trailer-length. ‘I feel him too,’ I reply. ‘He comes to talk to me when I’m sleeping.’

A k n o c k at t h e d o o r .

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AFTERWORDS 243


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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ A rranye and m e recording stories

T h o u g h f u l l o f a nt icipation ,

I had been lonely when I came to Alice Springs. The Whitegate mob befriended me and the passions of these relationships came to attract me more than my job. From them arose an understanding of some of my assumptions about Indigenous Australians, during the course of which I made paintings. So much of these people’s lives impinged on me and was absorbed. Claims on my attention were presented so vigorously, yet if I wasn’t able to comply, the claimant drifted away undeterred. So many arrangements made to give lifts from camp to camp on the morrow. So many times I came for the scheduled pick-up to discover the person had embraced an earlier opportunity as it presented. The same capacity for spontaneous improvisation is expressed in a deeply honed sense of the precariousness of life. These days there is far more traffic at Whitegate with car ownership on the increase. So while there isn’t the previous strong reliance on my 244



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vehicle, it is still regular enough, and rocketing fuel costs haven’t helped any of us. More recently, though no landline exists for emergencies, many of the younger residents have mobile phonesâ•¯–â•¯and, indeed, iPods. Though the Aboriginal art boom hasn’t waned as expected, it has had little impact at Whitegate. Some adults have been encouraged into the market, given the astonishing appetite for desert dot paintings. There is a little production overlap through connections to the Keringke arts group at Santa Teresa, but this is hardly a significant or steady source of income. What and who shapes life in camp and life at my place remain different. My distance from relatives seems strange to Adrian and Xavier. that I have remained at the same address astonishes them. The Catholic Church has a purchase on their lives as none of the great religions do on mine. I do not endure poverty, daily discrimination and social bigotry. I am not told in so many invisible and visible ways that the ways of my culture, in my own country, are inappropriate and a failure; that my cultural practice, my reality, is inferior and irrelevant. Nor am I at the mercy of government agencies managing and determining my life, producing such dependency and despair that I resort to drugs or decide to terminate my life. The present unwillingness of the Federal Government to allow Tangentyere a say in managing affordable housing, rather than the Northern Territory government’s housing department, retards the developÂ�ment of responsibility by aspirant Indigenous home owners. Those who choose not to cave in to these abject conditions seem heroic. I have been caught, at times, in the crossfire of family disputes, treading carefully so as not to favour one side over another. In such stressed circumstances, after all, I do have the safety of retreat to my own home. Domestically, until recently I partnered Lareena Groves and we have a beautiful daughter, Anjou. They have moved to the mid north coast of New South Wales. Raffi still lives with his mum on the south coast and is thrilled to have entered into an apprenticeship in flatboard plastering. Ronja, singer-songwriter, film-maker and aspirant school teacher, currently 245


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lives with me. All my family of origin survive, as do my painter friends in Melbourne. Hopefully these pages convey the importance of Arranye in my life. But it would be misleading to present him with singular import. My experience has been that when you are embraced by an Aboriginal family, it is the whole family that you embrace. Individuals have come in and out of prominence in my life but not at the expense of the family as a whole. It has beenâ•¯–â•¯and continues to beâ•¯–â•¯a strange but gratifying experience, which I hope my words have conveyed. What has happened to all this mob? David Johnson got cancer in the throat and lungs and received chemotherapy in Adelaide. He took his subsequent hair regrowth as an indication he was healthy enough to resume smoking and passed away two years later. Joseph Hayes was run over and killed by a car at Amoonguna during an argument. Mary and Jamesy Johnson passed away. Eric Neil died soon after rolling into his fire. Then Jude followed ‘through the gap’, wasting away in hospital after a bout of pneumonia. Devon Neil was hospitalised in Adelaide after a shovel had been smashed through his skull during a fight in Port Augusta. He managed to survive and return home, take up employment and keep straight. His father, Bernard, however, died soon after. A few years later, Devon decided to cease the daily medication for his headaches and passed away in Darwin. Rosita Ryder and Jennifer Johnson died in their early forties. Brothers Nijas and Louis Ryder have both passed away. Big Rose Johnson, Jude’s sister, didn’t heed advice about mixing alcohol with medication and destroyed her stomach. With so many Johnsons passing away, the Hayes admitted them back to Whitegate. Few Johnsons took up the invitation. Old Magdaline Johnson received a belated message from the Queen and the Governor General a year after her hundredth birthday in 2006. She occasionally camped at Whitegate with her daughter Eva Hayes. As I write, she is confined to the Old Timers’ Home just south of Heavitree Gap. When Myra 246



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Hayes’s husband died she vacated camp for most of 2003 but returned early in 2008. With Tangentyere support, the Hayes men constructed a horseyard and bough shelter at Antulye outstation. There were plans to muster some horses from Santa Teresa and break them into quiet tourist nags. Lawrence went interstate to do a leatherwork course, making hat bands and belts, with an eye on the market place. Antulye could provide a neat tourist venture, with boomerang throwing, selling tea and damper, wood and leather artefacts, and story-telling about the immediate location. All these initiatives occurred in the late 1990s but nothing has come of any of them. More recently, some of the younger men have been invited by the Central Land Council to train as rangers in their homelands, an enterprise that has some momentum. Though the land claim hearings established for the Whitegate families their legal rights to occupy the estate on which their camp exists, wishes for better housing have not materialised as leasehold status still eludes them. Without that security of tenure, they cannot access government funding for housing and infrastructure. Sadly, one of the young Webb men, in a fit of pique, recently torched the improvised shelter of Whitegate’s church just a few months after its consecration. No one has moved to repair the roof or even admonish the man for his behaviour. Several months later he killed a Warlpiri man on the town footbridge and was famously tried by a tribal spearing at Yuendumu in tandem with several years in Big Houseâ•¯–â•¯an example of two-ways law enforcement. It is questionable, under the current Federal Government Emergency Intervention, whether such dual punishments will be tolerated. In the early years of the new century, Whitegate started its own school and named it Irrkerlantye/Brown Falcon after the ridge bordering camp. For several years the college, now Charles Darwin University, and Tangentyere backed the project in the old Santa Teresa town buildings 247


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at the southern end of town. The college retreated from its share of costs and Irrkerlantye was left to make regular, time-consuming submissions to a variety of funding sources, mostly Indigenous departments. Because all ages, including parents, were involved, the kids were receiving something close to continuous education for the first time. Their prior attendance at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School in Alice Springs never achieved such continuity. However, like most institutionally dependent projects that lead back to government funding, Irrkerlantye’s existence hung in the balance of the Northern Territory government’s policy. By 2007 the school had ceased as such, becoming a training centre for the adults while the kids were dispatched to a mainstream school. It must be said that, although the parents and staff anxiously fought for survival, after transitional stress the kids seem happier now and are achieving well in a local public primary school where they have maintained their group integrity as a learning unit within the school. Irrkerlantye continues as an art-producing Â�centre, famous for its dotted crosses, a true expression of the families’ devout Catholicism. The bi-lingual literacy programs that have grown with the Indigenous language dictionaries are not held in much esteem by governments. Even the Institute of Aboriginal Development hierarchy has cast doubts over the continuity of dictionary work. Children are no longer being taken from their mothers, but their mother tongues might have a diminished place in formal education. It is easy to present the camp life around town as dysfunctional: just take a photo of litter, dogs and snotty-nosed kids. So it is vital to note the Aboriginal-inspired initiatives as a counterbalance. The Central Â�Australian Aboriginal Alcohol Program Unit (CAAAPU) has operated now for well over a decade; it is voluntary for some, mandatory for Â�Correctional SerÂ� vices’ clientele who have served for drink-related crimes. The Arlwekere/ Alukura women’s camp has offered a service for pregnant and young mums. The Tangentyere nursery has a great track record providing town and distant communities with native plants and cultivation expertise, as well 248



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as a landscaping business. Not least is the wonderful Akeyulerre/healing place at the foot of Billygoat Hill. Senior Arrernte women have created a vibrant place where traditional healing practices occurâ•¯–â•¯stories, dancing and singing included. Aggie Abbott tells me Arranye continues to serve as inspiration for the place and we’ll get some of my photos of him enlarged to grace the building’s walls. Tangentyere has strived to bridge the gaping hole between a contemporary cash economy and Arrernte values, and its resolve and inventiveness to make compromises between the cultures has not eased. Unlike many well-intentioned non-Indigenous individuals and organisations, Tangentyere doesn’t assume silent cultural sovereignty and superiority. It accords with Arrernte reality and is in sympathy with its complexity and pragmatism. It adamantly resists governmental coercion to relinquish hard-won leasehold of the camps to government control. In the push to assimilate them into the larger urban community, Whitegate residents, like many campers, wish to retain their independent extended family group. As one of the two camps of the eighteen in Tangentyere’s membership that don’t enjoy leasehold, they are acutely vulnerable. Further, Tangentyere, like most Aboriginal organisations in town, constantly has to defend itself against allegations of nepotism. The state of life in the camps continues to raise questions about its effectiveness in delivering quality outcomes to its constituents. Even granted the preference for house occupation numbers in excess of that intended for three- and four-bedroom houses, the impact of urban drift from the bush has immeasurably exacerbated the crisis of housing shortage in suburbia and the camps. The recent decade, referred to declamatorily as ‘The Howard Years’, drip fed Tangentyere’s housing programâ•¯–â•¯the building, the rejigging and the maintenanceâ•¯–â•¯miserly to the extent of one to two houses per annum. In attempting to address a wide range of needs, are Tangentyere’s resources being prioritised? Despite the ruthlessness and suddenness of 249


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the 2007 Emergency Intervention, and the protestations regarding the quarantining of pensions, all current data indicate that children are beneÂ� fiting from improved nutrition and their school attendances are up. How does this gain stack up against systemic racial discrimination, the one clear response that Whitegate residents have confided to me? What stories would Arranye be telling today? Who would be Â�listening? In twenty years, we are told, half the Territory’s population will be Indigenous. The demography of Alice Springs indicates that during this decade school-aged Indigenous kids will outnumber the non-Â�Indigenous. This will be a huge challenge given the current low retention rates in the educational system and the poor scholastic achievements. The Larapinta Valley is straining to hold its people togetherâ•¯–â•¯this strange brew of whitefella and blackfella with its complex ruptures. How do we begin to understand the ambiguities and transmuted traditions transpiring in this deeply creased, cupped palm of country? Rod Moss Alice Springs January 2010

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Hard Light_ColSec.indd 251

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p r e v i o u s p a g eâ•‡â•‡ A rranye and m e in front of P ushing up R i v er at the A raluen A rts C entre , 1 9 9 4

in Alice Springs I was an exhibiting artist, showing in Melbourne and Canberra. In coming to the Centre, I Â�encountered an alien culture and predicated my pictorial strategies by trying to mobilise each image with full awareness of the absolute otherness – me the artmaker, who had no religion, and the Indigenous subjects, who had no art that didn’t exude a spiritual view. In their paintings the people of the desert cultures don’t attend to mimetic imagery, either of themselves or their social conditions. In fact their art, which centres on the painter’s Dreaming heritage, masks contemporary Aboriginal life and their lowly political status. This, in part, I sought to redress by making the people identifiable and by avoiding abstraction to the extent of relying on photography as a representational tool. Arranye had opened my first retrospective at Araluen in 1994, commenting on how my work served a ‘welcome line’ to the Arrernte and their country. This was corroborated during the 1998 retrospective when Kemarre Turner made the opening speech and had consulted Arranye. Their P r i o r to l i v i n g a n d wo r k i ng

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conversation was overheard and Kemarre’s words were translated by Jenny Green, who thought I’d appreciate hearing them. ‘Rod’s paintings aren’t anything special. Only ordinary life. People going about business. Rod sees us as people, not just black people, but as people like he is a white person. Just our skin is different. We are all still living in sheds and he helps us, thinks properly about us. People will think about you. People will think about you people at Irrkerlantye, still dancing and doing anthepe ceremonies. Town mob learn this from looking at the paintings. That’s why you take Rod to watch. They might believe that these things are not still continuing. But they are at Whitegate, not just like bush communities. Community mob takes photos at anthepe, the dances women do at initiation ceremonies. But we’ve got Rod with the picture in his head. Young people will see that their culture is still alive in the paintings, showing other people how people live at Whitegate, not houses like at Charles Creek. We are the forgiveness people. White Australians will see from the paintings that Aboriginal people still live in humpies and from soakages, and hunting on foot. So whitefellas will understand from seeing the paintings.’ The staged quality of the compositions in my paintings reflects the willing participation of the people depicted. To intensify the dialogue between Settler culture and the First Australians, I’ve resorted to older Western realist art to suggest that the West’s colonial attitudes have historical footprints from which there is no retreat. The paintings are a mix of realism and fantasy operating under a regime of photographic source material. My insistence on photography as a tool is a distant echo of the camera’s advance into the Central deserts shortly after the import of Christianity in the late nineteenth century. Painting the families is my way of coping, of digesting issues of difference. An endemic political correctness has swept across the continent since the mid-1990s and the silence between cultures seems greater than ever. My paintings work towards filling this void and, hopefully, transmit something of the truth and terror of the situation, even inspiring the idea of justice. 253


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1986 103cm x 133cm C ollection of A da m K night, Melbourne

Xavier

I worked up a drawing of Xavier Neil from a photo taken by my fence. He proudly displayed his ‘sorry cuts’, a sign of his connection to family and country. The image of Xavier in the

painting is close to his actual size. In the history of Australian art, Aborigines are incorporated into the landscape as part of the natural scene. I wanted to challenge the domesticated scale

of images of Indigenous figures. I was motivated by this notion of scale-setting for several years, which often led to two- to threemetre-wide works of cinematic scale. This work no longer presents as we see it here, but is the version Petrina initially encountered.

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1987 116cm x 205cm C ollection of E llis E yre , N e w south wales

Stone Slingers 1

Stone Slingers was the first work I made that was fully committed to pointillism and narrative. It shows the kids loading their slings and letting them fly at my neighbour’s roof. My flat is the prominent building. I have squeezed Mt Gillen’s peak towards the building, as it helps identify the location as Alice Springs.

I re-staged the event, using photos of Sean Johnson (left), Denis Neil (middle) and his half-brother, Ricky Ryder.

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1988 110cm x 160cm R eproduced by per m ission , the collection of the Q ueensland A rt G allery, B risbane

Big House

Big House features Xavier Neil who, no sooner than I had started the work, was back in jail. He was permitted a couple of weekend visitors and I waited my turn. The guards looked smart and well fed in their khaki uniforms. Xavier had on his prison-issue green t-shirt and blue denims, and looked fitter from his workouts in

the prison gym. The ambience of the place was good. At least it was in the low-security section, where minor offenders like Xavier were detained. I rhymed the groups of threes: the Aboriginal inmates, the anonymous white guards, and the flags, adding an Aboriginal one, which did not actually grace the prison.

Other relatives were also doing time. I found Xavier sitting with Arranye Edward Neil, his older brother, who was jailed for the manslaughter of a young man. There seemed to be only Aboriginal inmates, and I later confirmed that they made up 85–95 per cent of the prisoners. When the jail had been situated in town, it was easy for family to maintain contact. Subsequently the prison moved 20 or so kilometres south of town, creating transport complications. We joked in camp about Xavier being ‘permanently’ in Big House now that he was fixed in the painting. His younger brother Christopher (left) is depicted playing checkers with Joe Cleary. Neither of them had ever been to jail and both joked about being on the ‘inside’.

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1990 122cm x 304cm C ollection of J ane L loyd and Dav e A le x ander , A lice S prings

Gregory and Janet with Dogs

I placed Gregory and Janet Johnson on the track running adjacent to Pepperill Creek. It’s a morning light with the dogs on their usual trail, variously attentive to fresh sights and sounds. This was a usual arrangement, with Gregory always some 10 to 15 paces ahead of his wife, head down, ever vigilant for lizard tracks and other tucker.

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1990 130cm x 217cm C ollection of J ohn Waker m an , A lice S prings

Raft

The title alludes to Theodore Gericault’s great painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819). Gericault depicted the epic maritime tragedy of the frigate Medusa off the coast of West Africa. I used some of the painting’s gestures to construct a comparative image of grog abuse. In the hard light of day, the humpy stood for the raft of the Medusa with the same meagre sense of protection. There is a menacing lick to the white and blue-violet caps migrating

across the sand. A blue hue runs throughout as a reference to the Virgin Mary, worshipped by the families. Petrina Johnson nurtures Xavier Neil, just as the old man holds his dead son in the Gericault work. Marcus Driffen took the position of the mariner pointing to the rescue ship, perched on the horizon. Melita Johnson is looking at Marcus. For five years I had wondered how to say something about alcoholism in camps. The cheap white wine dispensed in 2-litre casks was the chief corrosive that debilitated so many Aboriginal lives. They pooled their social security cheques to buy casks at the bottle shop, then decanted the stuff into old tins to pass around. Halfway into the painting, Eric Neil, Xavier’s brother, had slept a freezing night in the back seat of my car. I discovered him

in the morning curled around a small pool of vomit. At dusk, the day I completed the painting, I heard Petrina calling my name from the driveway. She was alone, on all fours, pathetically drunk, inching along the paving beside the Commodore. Petrina groped towards me with her outstretched right hand and collapsed in a blubbering heap. I dragged her to the car, and drove her to camp. ‘Them mob at Hidden Valley been call me dog, I not dog!’ she wept. I helped her from the car to the ground in front of Xavier’s fire. Two days later she visited with Xavier, sober and reflective about the ‘grog sickness’ painting, which, she said, made her think of their alcoholism. Having suffered alcoholic dementia and diseases associated with alcoholism, Petrina passed away during October 2009.

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1991 100cm x 268cm collection of the Museu m and A rt G allery of the N orthern T erritory, Darw in

History Rolling II

The initial version of History Rolling was stolen in transit from the freight company that was given the consignment to transport it to a Melbourne gallery. According to Jude, there was a problem in the first versionâ•¯–â•¯the young Arrernte men in sacred dance formation. This was redressed to his satisfaction by the depiction of young men in free formation. As with all the paintings that depicted deceased

persons, there would not have been a problem exhibiting this outside of Alice Springs. This second version retains a sunset afterglow. The sky has a graded glazing of pinks overpainted with circles of pale yellow, each circle intersecting with one below to give a spiralling vibrancy. Arranye, centrally located, is much the same as in the original. Jude (left) and Noelly Johnson

(right) are close in. Marcus Driffen and Xavier Neil wander out of left frame.

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1992 136cm x 108cm C ollection of the artist

Caprice: Big Rooster

Big Rooster is a metaphorical image of the conundrums that tourists face in town when they meet with Aboriginal culture. Fed by images

in brochures promoting traditional Aboriginal lifestyles as signifiers of the Centre, tourists are alarmed to discover the polarity between Arrernte and themselves. Edward Neil stands in the main street holding a white rooster. He gestures to the bemused tourists (the nearest being my mother and father), inviting them to attend to the fowl. The gap in communication, though, remains. It is a display of Edward’s anarchic effrontery. A stormy sky carries metallic blues. It was in fact Edward’s idea to set the scene in front of the fast food outlet (since replaced by Red Rooster).

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1992 95cm x 128cm C ollection of L aurie B erry m an , A lice S prings

Myra’s Painting

Myra Hayes, the ‘Queen’ of Whitegate, was an enormous instigator for improved conditions throughout the 1990s and up into the twenty-first century until her husband died. I based the composition on Manet’s Gare St Lazare (1877), changing Victorine

Meurand’s book for the painting, giving Charmaine Neil the puppy to hold and situating them before the smoking fire in place of Manet’s plumes of steam. Hopefully, the hermeneutics of contemplation in the Manet have not been sacrificed. Adrian Hayes junior looks on.

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Sideshow Alley

I was captivated by the gaudy little stalls, boasting their wares and cheap prizes in loud primary colours. The shadow-written signage was from an era pre-dating my childhood. I was fascinated by the toothless, tattooed touts accosting passers-by in tones loud enough to compete with the hectic tunes of the numerous rides. The alley thrust the two cultures into unusually close proximity as both blackfellas and whitefellas shuffled its dusty length.

Noelly Johnson is holding Raffi, Devon Neil is the boy in the foreground and Xavier Neil is seen on the extreme right.

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1993 123cm x 264cm C ollection of A raluen A rts Â�C entre , A lice S prings

Funeral at Santa Teresa

Several months elapsed before I asked Arranye if it was okay to make a painting of Lizzie Gorey’s funeral. We staged the poses in camp and, in spite of the cold air, Arranye removed his shirt and put on his red headband, as this was how he wanted to be represented in the painting. ‘I been have big book in my akaperte [head]. I be look behind and in front and know where I going. That knowledge, young fella. That dangerous, might be.

Red headband show me be law man.’ I needed to set the scene in the appropriate tableau and drove to Santa Teresa one evening with Ronja to photograph the graveyard at dawn. We made camp in the scrub. The long, table-topped mountain to the west of the community was pivotal in setting the location. Joany McCormack, Arranye’s sister, is facing the viewer on the left; Arranye is in the middle,

Michael Stewart wears the beanie and Jude Johnson is standing beside Ronja in the dress.

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The Sorry Business of Eileen and Wheelchair Ross

When I lobbed in at Whitegate one day a group of people were crowded around the old man in the wheelchair, sobbing. His daughter had died. Big Rosey Johnson whispered that she’d died from mixing her medication with grog. People had come to touch hands and express condolences. The camp atmosphere had stilled. Few people moved and, when they did, they walked slowly. Radios were turned off. I was aware for the first time of how all the adults suppressed flamboyant behaviour in respect. The kids, along the

wall of the humpy, were eating ice creams bought from the Mr Nippy van that visited camp each week. Its theme jingle, the ‘Greensleeves’ lament, complemented the wailing and sobbing. I too found myself crying, for somebody I had never met. The hair cutting and body lacerating occurred later. Wheelchair said he would have to stab himself and burn his daughter’s clothes. It was totally inappropriate to hand down possessions of the deceased. Eileen, the bereaved mother,

showed me where she slashed above her clavicles, dangerously close to her throat. Wheelchair is easily recognised in the immediate foreground. Kneeling on the ground are Janet and Magdaline Johnson and, on the right, touching hands, are Eileen Sweet/ Ross and Gregory Johnson.

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1993 114cm x 220cm C ollection of J ohn H utton , B risbane

Pushing Up River

Pushing Up River recreated a common scene in the Todd River. I pictured three men struggling to push a paddy wagon bogged in the sandy riverbed. The central man, Edward Neil, pushes his back to the vehicle. Joe Cleary and Gregory Johnson assist. The police are concentrating on the ground for the moment when the vehicle frees up. Sitting to the right at some distance are Joany

McCormack, Janet Johnson and her sister, Eileen Sweet. The river is usually dry and is a conduit to regeneration after rains. A law prohibiting the consumption of alcohol in public places within 2 kilometres of a liquor outlet empowers police to clean up the river of its Aboriginal drinkers and confiscate the casks. One week in August 1998, 540 litres of wine were emptied

into the river. Often novice police, unfamiliar with the rigours of deep sand driving, are assigned to the river patrol. The drunks are temporarily released from the cage to help rescue the vehicle, before continuing on to the sobering-up shelter.

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Wigleys Waterhole

Long-awaited rain that refreshed waterholes gave urgency to a swimming outing. Given the rarity of the Todd River flowing, and that waterholes would soon foul in the heat, it was an opportunity

provided by nature that was not to be passed up. We nearly always drove via camp to pick up anybody wanting to join us. The most recognisable are Raffi and Malcolm Hayes in the

bottom right corner. Ricky Ryder leaps from the far bank, while Adrian Hayes prepares to flip a hat into the water with Noelly and ‘Amulte’ Johnson either side of him.

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21/12/09 4:47 PM

1994 112cm x 210cm C ollection of Ronja Moss

Kids Digging for Yalke

Ronja spent a day with the Whitegate kids in camp. In the late afternoon I took them over to Pepperill Creek to fossick for yalke, the bush onion. Yalke was Arranye’s dreaming. It is a small, nutty-flavoured bulb growing on the creek banks. The kids rooted it out and usually ate it raw, though it was occasionally

thrown for a quick turn in the embers. Regrettably, yalke, like many bushfoods and native grasses, is threatened by the dominance of introduced buffel grass, which can be seen running through the centre of the creek in the painting.

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21/12/09 4:47 PM

1994 140cm x 322cm P ri vate collection , G old C oast

Nigredo

The drawing shows the final hours of initiation into manhood. Women and children participate in this communal part of the proceedings. Arrernte women have no shared ceremony like the young men’s initiation. Women’s law regarding love songs, fertility and childbirth is passed on exclusively by the mothers. The Arrernte men hold the women’s law in great respect. Arranye had urged me for

several years to make a record of this special occasion, but I didn’t feel confident until now. It took repeated experiences of these nights to digest and transform the pattern of events into a rhythmic composition. Re-staging the parts of the event needed for the drawing was quite an effort, as most of the participants had dispersed around town. Jude Johnson was the final participant and

couldn’t understand why I hadn’t photographed the event at the time. I explained how the camera put a wedge between the experience and me. I had to absorb the event and then make the art. The concept followed the sequential framing of time seen on church walls, say with illustrations of the Stations of the Cross. I combined actions that condensed perhaps twenty minutes into

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a single image. The same characters appear several times in different stages of the ceremonial composition. Arranye was familiar with the sequencing, from a church mural in town, and enthusiastically endorsed my approach. I spent several mornings lighting small fires south of Whitegate to observe the light filtering through the smoke. I had driven out in the evening to tell Bernard Neil and Arranye not to be alarmed at my presence in the early mornings and that I was only arerte/mad for painting. They waved and smiled as I cruised past their breakfast fires. It took a further three weeks to do the drawing on the 3-metre sheet. Now I had finished my most important assignment, I was emboldened to drive over to Whitegate and collect Arranye and Bernard. I became anxious as I led them into the lounge room where it was pinned on the wall. Both men moved close to take in the details. There were mutterings and small puffs of approval. Then they sat down, studied it in silence and wept. It was a very special moment. The mood of ceremony had been successfully made into art, as far as they were concerned. What better kind of reception could I have asked for? ‘You show it how we make man,’ said Bernard. ‘We don’t know how you make your young fellas into man. Might make it man with rock’n’roll. Or, today, rap. We always been do it same way. You mob tie young fellas up in house an’ fence line. Our young fellas, once they taught, they free. Can go anywhere.’ Bernard is depicted in the far left sitting next to Arranye. Joseph Hayes is staged as the initiate seen repeatedly through the composition, escorted by Jude Johnson.

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21/12/09 4:47 PM

1994 140cm x 236cm C ollection of C a m eron Jackson , Melbourne

Hunting at Emily Gap

The painting of Edward Neil with the gun, standing behind Stephan and Malcolm Hayes near Emily Gap, evokes some of the casual feel of such trips. Adrian Hayes and Dominic Gorey handle

ammunition over by the station wagon with young Adrian. I centralised the attractive rusty hoop of the redundant water tank, which matched the car and the oxide-coloured ranges.

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Anthwerrke

Anthwerrke is the Arrernte word for Emily Gap, though it was popularly corrupted from English back into Arrernte as Imerle. Its proximity to Alice Springs, hence its use by the nonIndigenous for touristy adventure and recreational swimming, and the establishment of nearby Mengkwernele/Amoonguna

settlement, disturbed its use as an important ceremonial site. Though no ceremonies have occurred here for several generations, it remains central in the stories of the country, the significant site for ayepe-arenye/caterpillars to reproduce. All the young men at Whitegate received the caterpillar story during initiation as a basis

for their own relationship to the Alice Springs region. The partly submerged rock with the hooped watermarks is the king grub. Paintings of the caterpillar Dreaming are visible about halfway through the gap on the eastern flank.

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21/12/09 4:47 PM

1996 105cm x 155cm P ri vate C ollection , Melbourne

Roadmakers

I made a preliminary drawing of the missionaries and blackfellas working side by side on Arltunga road. But when Arranye saw the drawing, he immediately corrected me. ‘Who this whitefella holding the rock?’ he asked. I said, ‘That’s

one of the Catholic Brothers.’ ‘No, no, my boy. Mission mob only together with us mob till they drop us off. We do that shovel and barrow job. Hard work, that one. Proper hard work. No one do it like that today!’

I used Courbet’s Stonebreakers (1849) as an idea upon which to base my painting of the Arrernte working on the road. The central figures, David Johnson and Paul Hayes, were swivelled ninety degrees from Courbet’s profile pose. Other poses I lifted from the Australian late nineteenth-century realist Tom Roberts’s seminal work Shearing the Rams (1894), in homage to both Courbet and the dignity of labour. Arranye was particularly pleased with the revised work. ‘Now you do it, just like I tell you, my boy.’

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Riverside Bottleshop

This alludes to the intimidating aggression around the bottle shop driveway. Tension built around midday opening, when the crowds would wait under the rivergums (pictured to the right). Almost on a daily basis, the police cruised the area to prevent the scuffles and to quieten drinkers. Twice I was in the car, at the traffic lights,

and brawling drunks clambered over the bonnet. It was not uncommon to see drinkers asleep on the footpath or in the middle of the road. Now there are paid Shane Ride Security personnel, conspicuously posted. The pugilist is David Johnson, Patrick Hayes in the centre, and Patrick junior looking

down at Xavier Neil stretched out on the road.

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Dawn Service

Given the re-invigorated religious fervour of Santa Teresa, I wasn’t surprised to see the construction of a modest grotto on the low rise, mid-point of camp. Myra Hayes’s preferred location was on the higher western ridge. Arranye insisted on its centrality. He had the final say, which was respected posthumously. The young

men built it and the women embellished it with candles, rosaries and sacred photos. A few weeks after the old man’s funeral, I dropped Xavier and Lilla at camp and was touched to see them wander over to the grotto and light two candles and pray before retiring. Eventually, this space was enclosed with a bough shelter

constructed by the Hayes men and consecrated by Father Pat Mullins. Months later, it was incinerated during a drunken tiff. It has not been used since. Young Patrick Hayes expounds on Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Myra, Lawrence, Kaston and Norleen Hayes stand near the Cross.

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21/12/09 4:47 PM

1999 140cm x 90cm C ollection of L isa A boud and S ean H ogben , B risbane

New World Car Park

New World Car Park is another urban theme. I wanted to feature the mural on the west wall of the Coles building. There was something surreal about

Aboriginal people sitting before it, the large-scale depictions of Aborigines at their backs. Joseph Hayes junior lies on the trunk of a car and seems to respond to the signal from the cowboy in the mural, as other family members lounge around the vehicles. Harold Hayes is sitting on the fence railing and pointing in the opposite direction to the cowboy. Derek Hayes handles the stroller. The mural was painted by Bob and Kay Kessing and documents the settling of Central Australia. The corner we see has in it the arrival of a truck, a soldier asking directions from the black cowboy, and the Flying Doctors’ aircraft buzzing over watercolourist Albert Namatjira. He appears to be painting the landscape behind the truck,

which suggests he has internalised the landscape now separated from his direct vision: a neat irony.

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This Is Not a Bull

The title of this caprice might invoke Magritte’s This Is not a Pipe (1929) but it references Mark Tansey’s Innocent Eye Test (1981), which in turn refers to Paulus Potter’s Young Bull (1647). These works share the display of realist work in a gallery with spectators present. And Plato’s notion of grades of mimesis

and the artifice of painting are here given with Patrick Hayes, Kaston Hayes (turning from the magnificent Brahman bull’s testes), Bobby Hayes and Peter Clavey Johnson puzzling over my bull. A Top End kangaroo is on show as well as Gordon Bennett’s Inland Sea (1993).

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Reconciliation Walk over the Todd River

This is a reconstruction of the Reconciliation Walk over the Todd River in Alice Springs. It struck me how in this town, with its locus of black political power, the walk was so little represented by its Indigenous faction. I deployed classic poses in the confrontation between Xavier Neil and myself as we meet. Other friends and family

make up the cast, mostly affiliated with the Aboriginal industry, with some alluding to Raphael Sanzio’s School of Athens (1509). The central, mirrored poses of Xavier and myself were inspired by Martha Mayer Erlebacher’s The Path (1999). Bill Davis holds a placard sporting the Aboriginal flag and the question, in Arrernte, ‘Can we walk together?’

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Fire Paints the Country Black

During 2001 and 2002 the Western Desert regions were subject to vast fires. Some had such massive fronts that it was futile to fight them. The loss of species, plant and animal, perhaps extinctions, has yet to be estimated. Around Alice Springs, spot fires erupted, some

deliberately torched. At this time, I’d plonk my younger daughter, Anjou, in her car seat and take her for an afternoon cruise along nearby tracks. The rolling momentum had her nodding off in minutes. Once, when passing an incinerated patch, she remarked, ‘Fire paints the

country black, Dad’. Though I’d long wanted to paint her as one of Velasquez’s dark-eyed child beauties, this exclamation from my three-year-old moved me on from his tragic babes. She clutches her Snoopy Dog toy like a shield and clenches her fist, anxious in these surrounds. Kaston Hayes and Marla, our Jack Russell, accompany her.

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Fallen Man

I used Bellini’s Drunkenness of Noah (1516) for this image of Noelly Johnson being cared for by his sisters and Sylvester Hayes. The cup is a direct lift. Alcohol consumption per capita in Alice Springs is unrivalled anywhere in

Australia. Eighty licensed liquor outlets cater for the town’s 27,500 people. Popular media ignore the proportionally larger contribution of whitefellas to this statistic, concentrating on the conspicuous party groups in the riverbed and

parks, carousing argumentatively through the town’s central mall and sleeping where they fall.

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21/12/09 4:47 PM

2005 95cm x 169cm C ollection of R ose m ary White , N e w S outh Wales

Xavier’s Camp on Teppa Hill

Xavier Neil quit Whitegate in the early 1990s and resided mostly on Teppa Hill, north-east of Alice’s CBD. He’d shift camp depending on the time of year. In winter he

camped on the eastern flank to take advantage of the sun and for protection from the prevailing cold winds. During summer he mostly camped where this

painting is situated, overlooking the town’s industrial estate and rail terminal. The advent of the Stratco hardware warehouse provided an ironic contrast to Xavier’s hillside living quarters.

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2005–2006 125cm x 220cm C ollection of A nna Pappas , Melbourne

House on the Hill

The pictorial possibilities of this tin shed appealed, exposed as it is with open ground lapping its flanks, and vistas of plain receding to distant Emily Gap behind the lone bloodwood. The shed had long been abandoned when I adopted it for a domestic scene. I asked Michael Stewart and Gerard Rice to help people the place up,

putting Anjou on Michael’s lap while Gerard fondled ‘Whitey’ and pup.

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King of the Castle

This work attempts to convey some of the nonchalant feel of the Sundays spent with the kids looking for bush tucker. A string of kids would lead our morning strolls, excitedly scanning the ground for any semblance of life be it vegetative or animal. The awele-awele/bush tomatoes grow in small clusters on prickly,

blue-green plants that keep close to the ground. Bush banana was prominent and, in season, the nectar of the corkwood blooms is much cherished, plucked and licked like an ice cream. The ‘King’ is Kaston Hayes.

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2006 110cm x 140cm C ollection of R ita and L ionel L ubit z , Melbourne

Drum Atweme

Kaston Hayes seems oblivious to the drumming by the town’s most celebrated drumming outfit, Drum Atweme. The ensemble has been the success story of another Tangentyere-funded initiative

mastered by the indefatigable Peter Lowson. They’ve opened conferences and played at the Adelaide Arts Festivals.

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Kerre: Big Meat Morning

Undoolya Station’s whitefella Hayes occasionally slaughtered a few ‘killers’ to keep on side with Patrick Hayes at Whitegate. I went out to collect my trailer one morning. I’d left it for wood collection. There were steer heads lying on the dust, and the skins

and offal dumped in my trailer the previous evening. Adrian Hayes junior is centrally placed. Michael Hayes and Gerard Rice are at the tables.

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Confrontation

Raffi reported over Easter in 2006 how he’d been bailed up by a taunting ring of young Indigenous youths on the track that runs over the hill near my home in Alice Springs. Any proposed scuffling was abandoned when, fortunately, one of the lads recognised him. He passed on unscathed but shaken by the event.

Such incidents are indicative of the tensions between the races that percolate on a daily basis. Johnathan, Patrick and Daryl Loo-Hayes surround Raffi by the Colorbond fence line that surrounds the town estate, separating it from the vast eternity of the bush.

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The Calling of Dallas Gorey

This alludes to the moment when a youth is called by an initiated man to go to business/initiation camp in the bush. I asked Lorraine Gorey if she’d be interested to comply together with her son, Dallas. I’d originally thought to locate the composition in the bush but the lounge room table of Catholic paraphernalia was too good to pass. The table of icons to

the Virgin Mary is authentically note-perfect. However, I tarted up the wall with a pattern motif and added the Caravaggio quotation, Calling of St Matthew (1599), to enhance the iconography and the rhythms provided by Gerard Rice (right). Caravaggio’s sombre interior depicts the arrival of Jesus and the calling of Matthew by Jesus to

join his small band of followers. Gerard Rice, a senior man of cultural status, summons Dallas, the younger man, to come to the initiation camp. Lorraine is defending him, as is typical in a ceremonially mock display – preventing her son from being taken away. The painting concept displays two different or parallel ‘calling’ moments.

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2007 100cm x 80cm C ollection of S usan C hirg w in , A delaide

Intervention

The painting’s title is a reference to the Howard Government’s 2007 Emergency Intervention in

Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. But nothing short of divine intervention would be needed to reverse the consequences of Settler impact on Indigenous people, and something akin to the miracle birth would be required to imagine the ongoing viability of Aboriginal settlements and perhaps even Indigenous culture and identity in general. It is as though Caravaggio’s Nativity (1609) has appeared in the lives of Whitegate families (Jack, Norleen, Shirleen and Adrian Hayes), offering a chance of rebirth, of being born again.

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2008 85cm x 157cm C ollection of J ohn H utton , B risbane

Justice Parable

A simple reworking of Breughel’s 1565 master work. I replaced the rural landscape of Renaissance Holland with present-day Alice Springs. The backdrop of a church and farmhouses has become a strip mall, a new model sedan idles at the traffic lights, and a vibrant orange-pink afternoon light, casting strong blue shadows, stands in place of the pale grey

Dutch sky. While the action and poses of the figures remain the same, representatives of our legal system replace five of the six anonymous peasants. In ‘descending’ order, a stricken judge now leads the procession consisting of a barrister, followed by a solicitor, a lawyer, and a police officer. The last ‘peasant’ has been replaced with shirtless

and shoeless Adrian Hayes, replete with his own law paint, standing close to but independent of the hapless professionals. He surveys the scene with a bemused grin, one hand scratching his head and the other open-palmed and gesturing towards the procession, not all that surprised that this dire slapstick would occur before him. The chain of legal professionals here are depictions of Simon Leadbeater, Henry Smith, Suzi Lyon, Iain Campbell and Mandy Webb.

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Defining the Contest of the Drains

This is a capricious ‘contrivance’ of an idea marking a point of agreement between two groupsâ•¯–â•¯bush and urban peopleâ•¯–â•¯over land and water flow. Ronny Webb declares his ownership of country by scribing the sand before bemused town dwellers. The drain in which the assembly meets marks the boundary on the eastern estate

of town (the same flats appear in Stone Slingers). To the left stretches the scrub that will encompass Whitegate and Undoolya stations and on towards the Simpson Desert. To the right and west is the built environment of the town. The composition was inspired by a Breughel work, Christ and the Adulteress (1565). The Breughel provided me with the symmetrical

composition and an image condensed with Christian and local associations offering a way of depicting a bridging of the racial divide. Note the quiet contrasts of the pure bred Dalmatian and the camp dog, the clutched reference books and the stones. The woman caught in adultery is placed in a context of similar aberrations to the Breughel.

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1996–2008 76cm x 120cm C ollection of the artist

The Enigma of the Whiteman

A double self-portrait with homage to both Courbet’s Wrestlers (1853) and John Anderson’s Wrestlers (1990). The red turf is near Little Well, its quartz-ridden surface known as ‘pieces of the moon’. Joseph Hayes junior documents the bizarre entanglement of the arerte/mad

whitefella, nakedly wrestling his double. Also watching from left are Peter Clavey, David Johnson, Robbie Hayes, Dominic Gorey, Marcus Driffen, Michael Marshall, Patrick Hayes, Xavier Neil and Arranye. From Courbet I took the basic poses, angling them ninety degrees from the master’s

forthright profiling; from the Anderson I gleaned his proposition of the ‘self ’ in dilemma.

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October 9th, 2008: ‘but these are only our kids’ toy guns’

Someone had reported to police that a car containing a weapon had crossed Charles Creek into camp. After dark, according to the Kunoth family, about a dozen police in protective combat gear kicked in the doors in search

of the weapon. The process terrified old people and children. The weapon was a small plastic toy. Later, the family made a formal protest to the police, claiming their unprecedented ferocity had been promulgated

by liberties granted under the Federal Government’s Emergency Intervention. Goya’s 3rd of May, 1814 was running through my mind when I set up this confrontational tableau. Goya’s work shows the dramatic moment of execution by Napoleon’s troops of Spanish insurgents who had risen against the invasion of Madrid. In response to the intervention, journalist Guy Rundle wrote an essay in Coercive Reconciliation. He asserted that Australia is the only Western country of note to have invaded itself.

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Agony in the Garden: The Diagnosis of Dr Goldenberg

This outcrop is situated close to home on one of my favoured walking tracks. Good friend Howard Goldenberg has been visiting northern communities

for over a decade on a locum basis, ministering his medical expertise to those in need. He has regularly commented that he feels he is a mere ‘pus and blood’

doctor as the same people keep coming through the door with the same complaints, seemingly unconcerned with his advice. I consulted several fifteenth-century Agony in the Garden reproductions, chiefly Andreas Mantegna’s (the first memory, at the age of four, that I have of any high art). These outcrops around home have always made me think of Mantegna. With the Christ images in mind, I posed Noelly Johnson kneeling and imploring the attention of the doctor. Far from feeling offended by the negligence inferred by Howard’s gesture, Noelly later commented that the doctor was ‘listening to country’, a poignant insight, possibly, into our present priorities.

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And Dark Was the Night

Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia (1982) inspired this work. Here, Lawrence Hayes stands behind his son-in-law, Syd Impu. Perhaps he is in awe of the preternatural light; perhaps he is protecting his daughter, Shirleen, and

grandson, Tyrone, and son, Harry. Tarkovsky’s film has a pivotal scene with the central character, candle in hand, wading several times across St Catherines Pool while attempting to preserve the flame from being extinguished.

It is a depiction of an internal test of faith and psychic endurance in the face of formidable pressures. It is a conjunction of turning events and assembling elements of factual local life into cinematic ceremonial moment.

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2009 93cm x 123cm C ollection of ada m knight, m elbourne

INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

At first glance this is a simple role inversion with Arrernte elder Patrick Hayes counselling Dr Freud (Dr Howard Goldenberg) to ‘talk about creation stories’, as

per the inscription scrawled over the painting on the right. The outside desert is funnelled into the Viennese study via the coolamon on the left. The room houses

examples of Freud’s renowned collection, now, however, with Australian artefacts. The morphing of cultures is suggestively transacted, and possessing the driving seat gives Patrick a glint of satisfaction.

Re l at e d Re a d i n g

Allen, Linda, Batty, Philip & Morton, Johnâ•¯–â•¯The Photos of Baldwin Spencer, The Miegunyah

Press, Melbourne, 2007

Alexander, Christopherâ•¯–â•¯The Phenomena of Life; The Nature of Order, Centre for

Environmental Structure, California, 2003

Gillen, Frank (edited by John Mulvaney)â•¯–â•¯My Dear Spencer, Hyland House, South

Melbourne, 1997

Goldenberg, Howardâ•¯–â•¯Raft, Hybrid, Melbourne, 2009 Henderson, John & Dobson, Veronicaâ•¯–â•¯Eastern & Central Arrernte to English Dictionary,

IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1994

Hill, Barryâ•¯–â•¯Broken Song: TGHS Strehlow & Aboriginal Possession, Random House, Sydney,

2002

Johannsen, Kurtâ•¯–â•¯A Son of ‘The Red Centre’, self-published, Morphetville, 1992 Kimber, Richardâ•¯–â•¯Man from Arltunga, Hesperian Press, Victoria Park, 1986 Latz, Peterâ•¯–â•¯Bushfires & Bushtucker, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1995

295


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McLeod, Donâ•¯–â•¯How the West Was Lost, self-published, Port Hedland, 1984 Mulvaney, Johnâ•¯–â•¯The Aboriginal Photos of Baldwin Spencer, Viking, Melbourne, 1982 Schjeldahl, Peterâ•¯–â•¯The Hydrogen Jukebox, University of California, Berkeley, 1991 Spencer, Baldwin & Gillen, Frankâ•¯–â•¯Across Australia, McMillan & Co, London, 1912 Strehlow, Theodoreâ•¯–â•¯Aranda Traditions, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1968 Strehlow, Theodoreâ•¯–â•¯Journey to Horseshoe Bend, Rigby, Adelaide, 1978 Strehlow, Theodoreâ•¯–â•¯Songs of Central Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1971 Wallace, Kathleen & Lovell, Judyâ•¯–â•¯Listen Deeply: Let these Stories in, IAD Press,

Alice Springs, 2009

Wilcox, Michaelâ•¯–â•¯Blue & Yellow Don’t Make Green, Artways, Perth, 1987

296


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ACKNOWLEDG MENT S Non-Aboriginal friends also helped me by listening to or reading

various drafts of this book. Bill and Annie Davis, Peter Latz, Simon Leadbeater, Tony Lintermans, Alan Murn, John A Scott, Dave Richards and Ilan Warchivker were attentive readers and gave subsequent encouragement. Maxine Addinsal, Marlene Niland and Liz Wauchope helped with formatting the early drafts.

I’d been making paintings about this experience for twelve years before the writing was

thought of. I am grateful for the interest in these paintings shown by Rex Butler, Michael Eather, Kieran Finnane, Alison French, Howard Goldenberg, Barry Hill, Adam Knight, Mary Alice Lee, John Morton, Deanne Murray, Gwynn Narraway, Anna Pappas, Tim Rowse, Craig San Roque, Carolynne Skinner and Terry Smith.

Most importantly, thanks to Lareena Groves for support throughout the shaping of

the material. Her computer expertise and meticulous reading were crucial to the text’s rhythm and timing. These words only graze the surface of my gratitude.

As we rounded into the straight, Margaret O’Sullivan gave unstinted support, as did

Alexandra Payne at UQP. And on that final lap, the perspicacious Janet Hutchinson should be thanked too for her rejigging of the manuscript.

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ABOUT T H E AUT H OR

Rod Moss grew up in Melbourne, moving to Alice Springs in

1984. The burnished colours of Central Australia and its Indigenous culture have informed his art ever since. His paintings are in public collections and have been exhibited in all Australian states as well as overseas. His relationship with the Indigenous community is based on decades of friendship and trust, and he has written about the community with their permission and participation. His writing has appeared in Arena Magazine, Periphery and Overland, among other literary publications. He has two daughters and a son.


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