by Barry Lopez
Richard was such an agreeable companion, thinking so hard about trying to find his way in the world, I was sad to see our last evening end. A year later, in the wake of an airplane crash he had limped away from, he came to visit me in Oregon. I was so very pleased for the opportunity to show him around.
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AT A MEETING of hunter-gatherer experts in Darwin in 1988, I met a young woman named Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, an anthropologist who lived in Alice Springs and who had gotten to know Bruce Chatwin when he came through the country with Salman Rushdie to research his book The Songlines. She invited me to come to Alice, as local people call it, to learn about the land claims movement in the Northern Territory, an effort to establish a legal basis for returning certain stretches of Crown land to their original owners.
It was some months before I was able to get back to Alice and meet Petra’s colleagues, including her then-husband, Jim Wafer, and the writer Robyn Davidson. Robyn, who had a background in anthropology, was teaching with several other Australian women in Aboriginal settlements. Like Petra and Robyn, these women were also providing professional help to the land claims movement. Robyn offered me her home to stay in while she was working in the settlements.
I returned to Alice with the intent, first, of traveling out bush with a group of wildlife biologists and field technicians from the Conservation Commission of the Northern Territory’s (CCNT’s) office in Alice Springs. They were collaborating on a project with local Warlpiri people, hoping to reestablish a population of rufous hare-wallaby on Aboriginal land in the southeastern Tanami Desert. (The word for this particular wallaby in Warlpiri, and about twenty other Aboriginal languages, is mala. A small marsupial, about the size of a hare—thus its English name—it’s also known locally as the Western hare-wallaby or pejoratively, as the spinifex rat. To scientists it’s Lagorchestes hirsutus.)
At the time, mala were endangered throughout their range. They were in direct competition with feral rabbits for habitat and they were preyed upon by feral foxes and cats, which had hunted them to extinction in the Tanami Desert. The spot the Warlpiri and the scientists had chosen for the reintroduction experiment, about 220 miles north of Alice Springs and about forty miles north of Willowra, a Warlpiri settlement on the Lander River, was in semiarid desert country, a savannah dominated by a scatter of melaleuca trees and tussocks of spinifex grass.
The biologists placed several groups of mala, raised in captivity in Alice, in a 240-acre enclosure adjacent to the (usually dry) Lander River and the sprawling Tanami Desert Wildlife Sanctuary. Electrified fencing kept rabbits and predators out. Once they had acclimated to the area, the idea was to release the mala into the countryside.
We set our camp up out of sight of the enclosure, next to a billabong. The purpose of this particular trip to the mala enclosure was to observe the animals from a distance, using the nearby brush for cover and approaching the enclosure only to check the drip tanks along the fence line, to be sure they were providing the mala with enough water. When we walked back into camp from our observation posts that afternoon, a few people headed for the billabong for a swim, a relief from the heat. I assumed my hosts had made certain it was all right to swim there. Places this obvious, no matter how remote the country you find them in might seem to be, always have the filaments of the Tjukurrpa attached to them, the Dreamtime narratives. It would be tragically easy to “pollute” such a place without realizing it. Just before I spoke up, the leader of our small group called the swimmers back.
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IN THE YEARS before I made this trip, I’d had the opportunity to travel, mostly in the Arctic, with a number of field biologists who’d developed close working relationships with indigenous people. They’d apprenticed themselves to native hunters in order to learn more about the animals they were studying, mostly, in my experience, wolves, bears, caribou, and marine mammals. They came to believe that even though Western field biology had traditionally ignored, or simply disparaged, ind igenous field observations, this enormous body of native knowledge was as precise and rigorous as what Western science had built up. It often, in fact, went deeper and was more nuanced. In the minds of many of the field biologists I accompanied, taking both kinds of research into account provided a more complete understanding of the animal. (It surprised no one that given periods of close observation exponentially larger than Western scientists had been able to manage, native knowledge sometimes corrected erroneous conclusions scientists had reached or challenged assumptions they’d made.)
The biologists I joined for the field trip to the Lander River mala enclosure had taken this kind of mutually respectful cooperation one step further. Knowing that mala were threatened throughout their range by feral animals, biologists at the CCNT approached Warlpiri elders about helping the CCNT restore the Tanami Desert population. The Warlpiri thought this was a good idea and helped the scientists locate a place on Warlpiri land that would provide excellent mala habitat. The scientists told the Warlpiri, however, that they needed a special kind of help to restore the mala to this part of its traditional range. They said they could get the biological part of the restoration project right (i.e., captive breeding and the selection of suitable habitat in which to build the enclosure, in order for the mala to make a successful transition from the breeding shed in Alice to wild land); but they felt their efforts would eventually fail because they had no knowledge of the spiritual nature of the mala, of its place in the Tjukurrpa. They asked the Warlpiri elders to assist in the reintroduction by “singing the wallaby up,” by ritually calling mala back into the country. After some hesitation, the Warlpiri said they would do it. The older men—no children, no women, no “white fellas”—would go out to a certain place in the Tanami, they said, “paint up,” and sing the mala back into the country.
The degree of awareness the biologists showed here was, in my experience at the time, unprecedented, and the approach they took spoke in a profound way to Warlpiri elders. The principal reasons for the collapse of mala populations in the Northern Territory were predation by feral mammals and rabbits that took over mala denning complexes and competed with them for spinifex seeds and other favored foods. The root cause of the collapse, however, was more complicated than this. Aboriginal people had practiced for millennia a sophisticated land-management technique called fire-stick farming on lands where mala lived. They used controlled burns—slow-moving grass fires—to remove dry spinifex brush and encourage new growth, thereby creating a mosaic of old and new spinifex vegetation which served their needs as hunter-gatherers. The practice also served mala well. They denned in the older patches of spinifex and fed in the new sections.
When Aboriginal people began coming in off the desert during a prolonged period of drought in the Northern Territory in the 1950s, taking up residence in settlements and mission stations, fire-stick farming no longer affected the ecology of the desert as much. This had a deleterious effect on mala populations, and because of this foxes, feral cats, and rabbits had a greater impact on remnant mala populations than they otherwise might have.
In the Dreamtime narratives of the Warlpiri, Luritja, Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara, Pintupi, and other desert traditions, Mala plays an important role in bringing Aboriginal lands to life. Like other Creation Beings, Mala was a traveler, and a Mala songline, marking part of his travels, runs roughly north and south from the Lander River country to an isolated monolith called Uluru (Ayers Rock). The collapse of mala populations along this songline threatened the spiritual foundations of many Aboriginal traditions, and as the mala population headed toward extinction, Mala ceremonies began to atrophy. The sensitivity of the CCNT biologists to this relationship between the spiritual and material world, and their telling the Warlpiri that they had neither the authority nor the ability to act in this realm, but that they understood that without the help of the Warlpiri here the reintroduction effort would collapse, wa
s mind-boggling for the Warlpiri.
I later had a conversation with one of the men who’d traveled out into the Tanami to sing up the mala, prior to their release from the enclosure. He told me that the idea of an animal being “locally extinct,” as the biologists said, was a difficult concept for him to understand. It’s possible, he told me, that the body of an animal might not be visible to someone traveling through a certain country, but the animal was still there. In its corporeal form it might be “finished” in a particular place, but it wasn’t “gone,” the way white people use that word. If you couldn’t see it, I asked, couldn’t find its tracks or scat or signs of its feeding, wasn’t it “locally extinct”? No, he said. He waved his extended left hand quickly in a sweeping arc. “It’s all out there, everywhere.” After he and the other men sang the mala up, he said, the spirits of local mala who were present entered the bodies of the mala in the enclosure.
Someone entirely wedded to a Western way of knowing might find this story fatuous, but in interviews with Western field biologists over the years, I’ve found that the issue of local extinction is, for many of them, not entirely clear. There are too many cases of animals being declared locally extinct only to have them turn up again. “Singing” an animal back into existence is a metaphorical expression for some as-yet-unplumbed biological process of restoration, quaint only in the minds of those who believe they already know, or can discover, precisely how the world is hinged.
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ON THEIR RETURN to Alice Springs, the CCNT field party dropped me in Willowra. Petra had long been conducting research in this settlement, and with her intercession I was able to stay there for a few days. Some weeks later she arranged for me to visit with Pitjantjatjara people in Mutitjulu, the community at Uluru. My experience in these places was little more than incidental, and of course I missed a great deal of what was right in front of me, not being familiar with the traditions or the “ways of seeing” of Warlpiri or Pitjantjatjara people, and not knowing the physical geography of either culture. Reading the work of anthropologists who were studying these two desert groups, however, and later interviewing a few of the anthropologists, as well as indigenous people in both those settlements, I came to appreciate their detailed knowledge of the physical world of which they were a part.
I was able to get away from Mutitjulu on several occasions and into the surrounding country with a small group of Pitjantjatjara men. They were bilingual and patient with my questions, and never appeared bored or offended by my effort to understand how very different this place was from other places I’d visited. One day when a couple of us were north of Uluru a mile or so, I asked my companions if they were permitted to tell me about the songlines that converge here, about the Creation Beings of the Dreamtime who came here. What direction did they come from, and where were they going? I wanted to know specifically about Mala. Had Mala been here?
Oh yes, one of my guides answered. Mala was here. With a tilt of his forehead he indicated a spot at the base of the north side of Uluru, an indentation like a grotto, marked at that hour of the day by a long vertical shadow. Mala had slept there, they told me. They told stories about Mala for a long while. The four of us were sitting in very strong sunlight on a sandy rise. They spoke in English and I resisted the desire to impose questions to clarify what they were saying. When they were finished, I was reluctant to break the silence.
I cannot recall all they told me. To have stepped away at the conclusion of one of the narratives and gotten out my notebook to write down what they said would have been rude, and, I thought, it might have given me the appearance of being a thief. And to have interrupted the experience itself with questions might easily have disrupted or truncated the stories, broken them off in such a way that the storytellers would have been reluctant or unable to submerge themselves again in the particulars of their emotional and intellectual history.
We continued to sit in silence on the sandy rise. I had the sense when they were speaking that the three men were really talking to one another, that I was not there, that they were reminding each other of the great breadth of Mala in their lives, in the life of their community.
We continued to sit facing the north side of Uluru. Then one of the men began pointing out other features of Uluru and explaining their places in the Dreamtime narratives, how each was related to the activities of other of the Dreamtime Beings. Somewhere in this explication I realized that they were describing features I couldn’t make out, because they were features on the other side of the rock, a part of Uluru I couldn’t see but which they apparently could easily imagine. Some time later they returned in their recollections to the place they’d first spoken about, the place where Mala slept, and I understood then that they had circumnavigated the rock. They had taken me completely around Uluru without referring to any shift in perspective that might be required for me to understand this. What was seamless for them was broken for me into two separate parts, what I could see with my own eyes and what I could not.
From childhood on, these three men had heard the Tjukurrpa stories that included Uluru. What they could see in any particular moment, and what they could remember having seen, which only memory, in fact, could give them, constituted a piece of whole cloth. In this way, not only did memory function as one of the senses for them but the way they described Uluru made it clear that they, far more than I, lived in three spatial dimensions. Their view of the physical world had no correct or privileged point of view. Sitting together on the north side of Uluru as they spoke with me about Uluru and the Dreamtime was actually incidental to their story, to accurately describing the way Uluru fit in their world. For them there was no “front” or “back” side, no “right” or “left” to the phenomenon. They were not hampered, as I was in my perception of the rock, by a lifetime of learning from flat surfaces, reading about the world mostly left to right and, as often as not, top to bottom—books, maps, drawings, and computer screens.
Traveling with these three men around Uluru—we also drove off one day about twenty miles to the west, to visit Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), a rock formation with a female identity for my companions—our conversations ranged across many topics: pop music, the virtues of the Toyota Land Cruiser in comparison with the Nissan Patrol, tourists swarming Ayers Rock (whom they referred to uncharitably as minga—ants), petrol sniffing, and the fortunes of the various rugby league and football clubs these Pitjantjatjara men followed closely. It took time for me to recognize that it was only when we were riding in the vehicle, or back in someone’s home in Mutitjulu, that our conversations became this topical and animated. When we were walking across the land together, no one said much at all.
Wherever we walked, our steps always seemed to fit the landscape. The pace never felt rushed or uncertain. Our movement was like water’s—measured, responsive to the topology of the ground. If someone began telling a story while we were walking, the story would be about a place we were then moving through. The story would start just as a prominent feature of the place came into view. The duration of its telling matched our pace through the region, with the story tending to end in the same moment as the prominence that was at the center of the story passed out of view. A rhythm (the pace of the story) within a rhythm (the pace of our walking) within a rhythm (diurnal time passing).
My intuition, that for my Pitjantjatjara escorts being fully present in a place meant not only a high degree of sensory awareness but being acutely aware of one’s memories of the place (or of what one had been told about it by a trusted voice), led me to another intuition, or at least to a fuller explanation of the meaning of our exchanges. Even though we all spoke English—the English spoken by two of the three men I was with was excellent—I couldn’t help but feel that something was not coming across. Something elusive in the conversation made me think I was missing important points my companions were making. What I came to believe was that the Pitjantjatjara were so
cognizant of the third dimension of the landscape around us that for them, the land we were passing through was never a projection. They were never outside a place looking in, they were incorporated within whatever we were seeing. To them, some of my questions about the places we were in were too strange to answer easily. For example, my questions about “aspect,” seeing something from a particular point of view, often seemed to present them with difficulty. These questions of mine grew out of my habit of flattening the third dimension (depth) in order to create a bounded scene, something a painting or photograph provides. When I lay awake in my bed in Mutitjulu one night, I tried to imagine the way in which our conversations on some occasions took place in the dimension of 2.5. And it became my opinion that they were not as eager to find and hold this two-dimensional view, the one I was most often comfortable with, as I was to learn how to stay with them in the realm of three-dimensional perception, once I located it.
The possibility of being able to see a country more fully in this way was clear.
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ONE AFTERNOON IN Willowra an opportunity I had not anticipated presented itself. Sometime in the late 1920s—I was asked not to present all the details of this story—a small group of Warlpiri men and women were murdered by territorial police at a water hole in the Tanami Desert. The murders spiritually contaminated the water hole and Warlpiri people stopped going there. Previously, it had been an important stopover, because surface water in that region is scarce.
Elders in Willowra had decided the time had come to return to this place and to “clean it up,” to spiritually cleanse the water hole and the land around it through ceremony, and to physically remove any natural debris that might have accumulated in the water hole.