Wayfinding

by M. R. O'Connor

  * * *

  As I drove from Darwin to Katherine I began to realize the landscape was unlike anything I had seen before. There were slight slopes and rock outcroppings, but mostly I drove through what seemed like a never-ending forest of sparsely spaced eucalyptus, or “gum” trees. For nearly two hundred miles, towering scarlet gum, poplar gum, ghost gum, river red gum, and white gum trees almost bare of their leaves passed outside my window. In between the trees, long yellow grass grew high except for intermittent patches where it was blackened by fire. To me, this singed landscape looked half dead, but Aboriginal people see burned landscapes with a sense of satisfied pride. Burning is beautiful because it is evidence that the land has been cared for and the creation of the ancestors maintained.

  The historian Bill Gammage has written extensively on the practice of burning in precolonial Australia, describing fire as an ally for Aboriginal people, who worked the land “as intimately as humans can.” Fire, he writes in his award-winning book The Biggest Estate on Earth, “let people select where plants grew. They knew which plants to burn, when, how often, and how hot. This demanded not one fire regime but many, differing in timing, intensity and duration. No natural regime could sustain such intricate balances. We may wonder how people in 1788 managed this, but clearly they did. The nature of Australia made fire a management tool.” When European settlers arrived in Australia, the landscape they encountered was not wild in any sense. Its features—often remarked to be as beautiful as the gentrified English countryside—were the result of applied geographical and ecological knowledge, all encoded into the Aboriginal Law and Dreaming songs. Gammage argues that a key truth about the Dreaming is its fusion of theology and ecology: “In its notions of time and soul, its demand to leave the world as found, and its blanketing of land and sea with totem responsibilities, it is ecological. Aboriginal landscape awareness is rightly seen as drenched in religious sensibility, but equally the dreaming is saturated with environmental consciousness.”

  I arrived in Katherine at sunset and slept a few kilometers outside of town at the home of the local doctor, his wife, and two young daughters. Their open-air house sat on several dozen acres of bushland that stretched down to the Katherine River, and we ate dinner in the near dark. Around the corner from my bedroom was the open bathroom, and they warned me to shine my flashlight on the ground to avoid stepping on the olive pythons that slither onto the concrete floor of the shower to absorb its heat. I woke at dawn and stopped at the supermarket on my way out of town to buy provisions—bread, avocados, cheese, butter, and tea—and then set out on the Victoria Highway heading west. Harney’s grandfather Pluto had helped to build this highway, leading a bulldozer along a Dreaming track while Harney, just a young boy, walked alongside listening to his grandfather’s stories.

  After about a hundred miles I saw an old oil drum can and a faded piece of wood with the word “Menngen” written on it. I turned right and stopped the car to open a cattle gate. The dirt road was soft and red, and the gum trees seemed even more barren. Over the next twenty miles all I saw were scattered cattle, broken-down cars, and a few mummified carcasses of dead donkeys lying in the grass. I opened and closed one cattle gate after another until I finally came around a bend to a grove of shady trees and houses surrounded by old machinery and horses in paddocks. No one seemed to be around until finally Harney himself pulled up in a baby blue pickup truck and greeted me. He had gotten my letter and seemed happy and completely unsurprised to see me. At eighty-three years old, he was smaller than I imagined, and his hair was grayer than in pictures I had seen. He wore a brown oilskin decorated with a thin braided rope and old cowboy boots, gray pants, and a plaid shirt. He told me he had gone into town that morning to get some beer, whiskey, and provisions for our trip: he was going to show me one of Menngen’s hundreds of rock-art sites, a Dreaming place, and then we would camp near a waterhole for the night.

  I grabbed my swag—Australian lingo for sleeping bag—and my cooler or “Esky” and jumped in the passenger seat of his truck, its armrests filled with old pens, combs, and canisters of chewing tobacco. Harney got in the driver’s seat and we began to drive slowly through the maze of dirt tracks that penetrate the interior of Menngen. As he drove, Harney began giving me a natural history lesson of the plants, animals, and landscape around us. In compressed English, he enthusiastically described and narrated all we observed, translating, in effect, the landscape for me. I was reminded of what the archaeologist Isabel McBryde had written, that any time she traveled with Aboriginal people she was “constantly impressed by how different were the landscapes … [we] were observing. Theirs were numinous landscapes of the mind, peopled by beings from an ever-present Dreaming whose actions were marked by the features of the created landscape.” I merely saw trees, grass, and dirt bleached by heat and sun, while Harney evidently saw a landscape teeming with history, food, medicine, shelter, tools, and stories.

  He named all the trees (“That’s a coolabah tree, there’s a wattle tree, there’s a stringing bark, that’s bloodwood…”) and how they could be used by humans and animals. He pointed to the termite mounds in between the trees, some four feet high or more, likening their shapes to people or objects. “Looks like a little kid standing next to them! Look at that one—that one’s interesting!” Women, he told me, use the termites for medicine after giving birth to ensure that their milk will come in. “Put [them] in the fire, heat it up, crush it up, make it like a powder,” he said. “They get a special type of grass, set the grass on top, steam comes through. Cook the breast.” We talked about his grandfather Pluto, who had helped to create the Victoria Highway. “Grandfather walking, telling us the story of all the different places, that how we grew up,” he said. “Fly dreaming place, possum dreaming, pole cat, dove dreaming.”

  When Harney was barely a teenager, he began delivering mail by packhorse to cattle stations. “I was going up where there was story on the Aborigine walking track,” he remembered. “From Willeroo all the way to Katherine, good walking track. Eighteen miles about four days. Just walking, no car, a lot of walking, remembering, singing. Took our time, weren’t in a hurry to wake up any time in the morning.” Can you sing those songs, I asked him, if you’re driving in a car? “In a car when you travel, you miss a lot of country, a lot of stories,” he said. Harney’s knowledge of his country’s stories was what enabled him to stake a claim to the land we were now traveling on. Merlan had told me how when she returned to Katherine again in the 1980s to continue her research and eventually publish the first and only grammar book on the Wardaman language in 1994, there were only about thirty people, all over the age of forty, who still regularly spoke the language. (Today, she estimates there are just a handful.) Around that time Harney was living in Katherine, working as a farmer and mechanic. He had two sons from his first wife, who had passed away from an undiagnosed brain tumor, and he had married a woman named Dixie. At that time Australian courts were beginning to recognize the ownership rights of Aboriginal people to their traditional country under the Land Rights Act of 1976. As Harney recounts in his autobiography, he told Dixie, “Well, everyone else is claiming the land. You follow me, I want a land claim on my country, back of the Flora [River].”

  In order to claim ancestral territory, Aboriginal people needed to show that they were the descendants of those who lived on the land, had spiritual affiliations and responsibilities to it, as well as the traditional rights to forage. In order to fulfill these requirements to the satisfaction of the courts, anthropologists were often enlisted to gather the Dreaming stories and history of the country, as well as to create maps and surveys of the territories in question. The Australian anthropologists Betty Meehan and Athol Chase were working on a land claim for the entire Upper Daly region and approached Harney. Was he connected to the region on the back of the Flora? As he recounted in Born under the Paperbark Tree, he said, “Yeah, that’s my proper Dreaming there.”

  “You know all the history?” they asked
him.

  “Yeah, I know all the history.”

  “Oh well, it’s up for the land claim. You want to land claim it?”

  “All right,” he said. “We’ve got all these children coming up, we must take them back to the bush to show them the history and their heritage in the country, their story, their singing, and do lots of ceremonies.”

  “Best to fight the government and get your land, otherwise they’ll destroy all your Dreamtime story in the country there,” Meehan and Chase said.

  Harney showed the anthropologists his Dreaming sites, traveling by airplane, helicopter, and car. He sang traditional songs in front of the judge in court. While awaiting a final decision on the claim, the judge granted Harney and his family the right to live on the land even though the owner refused to give it up and even dropped poison bait to kill their dogs. During that period of waiting, Harney’s mother, Ludi, passed away at the age of ninety-three. When the land claim was finally granted for some seventeen hundred square miles to be controlled by the Wardaman Aboriginal Corporation, Harney and his descendants were granted ownership rights to one hundred square miles. Harney called it Menngen, after his mother’s Dreaming, the white cockatoo.

  In Wardaman tradition, the white cockatoo is the bird that keeps an eye on the other important birds like diver ducks and wedge-tailed eagles, who are in turn tasked with ensuring that people are following traditional rules in anticipation of sacred ceremonies that begin in October at the start of the wet season. Together the birds are guardians of the law, making sure that secrets aren’t divulged to the wrong people, that taboos aren’t broken, that certain borders aren’t crossed. In the night sky, the white cockatoo is represented by the star Fomalhaut, which appears in the northeast in late July, heralding a change in seasons. It is also a part of a celestial songline that begins with the Creation Dog in the north and stretches across the sky to include the stars of the Rock Cod, Eagle, the Big Law Place, Red Ant Doctor, White-Faced Grass Wallaby, and Catfish Law, and ends with the Bats in the southern sky. The Bats, the constellation the Greeks called the Pleiades, represent the children and teenagers who will be initiates. By following this celestial sequence of stars, one would have been able to navigate to the traditional place of the ceremonies.

  Harney was initiated at the age of twelve, he told me. Joe Jomornji decorated him with his own blood and put feathers over his body, and he stayed up for three nights listening to the men dance with didgeridoos and clap sticks, and the women danced too (though for this he was covered with a blanket so he could only hear, not see, what was happening). After the third night, at dawn, he was held down and circumcised with a stone knife. After that he attended the ceremonies every year and learned more Dreaming songs. “I grew up with the song. We sit down and know exactly what name is our places where we’re going. We sing and we happy,” Harney recounted in the book Dark Sparklers. “We sing like we know where we stay at a house. We sing like we know exactly where all these places. We name them: the routes to travel, right to the end of the songs. Yeah, I sing one and I follow my Dreaming: and my Dreaming stops and another Dreaming goes on. No matter what happens we sing together.”

  After an hour of driving, Harney started “looking for the good shade” and stopped near a coolabah tree for lunch. He ate boiled beef on bread and we shared cheese and avocados before continuing to drive on the dirt paths for another hour. I had long ago lost track of our bearings. Harney talked about his first marriage, his education in the law, and the Dreaming stories belonging to his father and his mother. The forest got denser and the track ahead was invisible under the thick brush. We startled a group of animals—red kangaroos, wild horses, and the auspicious brolga, beautiful white cranes native to Australia—gathered around a small spring. “If I get close,” Harney said of the brolga, “I’ll sing a song for them.” But, surprised by the truck, the animals scattered.

  Just beyond the spring he stopped the truck and we began walking through a dense grove of trees, vines, and foliage. I didn’t realize it at first but the vegetation was disguising a giant boulder, at least sixty feet high. As we circled the rock, one of its bare faces was revealed, across which was an ancient mural painted in red, white, yellow, and black ochre. The images stretched from the ground up to twenty feet or so. There was the underside of a frog with a gaping vagina whose contours mimicked the natural indentation of the rock, and a series of “lightning people” from whose heads extruded beams of light. Harney pointed above our heads to footprints imprinted in the rock. These he said were left by ancestors, who had walked this way in the Dreamtime. As I looked closer I recognized two different-size prints: alongside the adult-sized footprint was the much smaller stamp of a young child, and I felt a shiver. These footprints weren’t meant to be interpreted as symbolic representations of ancestors: they are the literal traces of individuals who traveled here long ago. In this place, the Dreaming was as real as the Laetoli footprints preserved in volcanic ash in Tanzania.

  We sat on two stones beneath the boulder. Around our feet were the detritus flakes of stone tools and spearheads. Harney began to tell a story in Wardaman, pausing every few minutes to translate it into English for me. He told of a time when people traveled all over the country, women on the left side and men on the right, to make a “huge big creation song, got to name all these places, painted all the young ones. All day everybody’s happy,” he said. “Oh it was a good time.” Then Old Rainbow heard all the noise and people decided, “Let’s kill that Old Rainbow.” Hence began an hour-long saga of floods, battles, the creation of weather, earth, and sky. Harney told each intricate sequence and detail of the story, explaining the birth of the land itself. I was riveted, disoriented, swept along by a version of history whose cast was unfamiliar. I knew this was a simple story, probably reserved for young children and the uninitiated, but it hardly mattered to me.

  That night we made camp next to a beautiful, pondlike waterhole surrounded by river gum trees. We drank beer and ate around the fire. I told Harney about my two-year-old son back in the United States, and he gave him a new name in Wardaman, Wajari, meaning “mother away, kid behind,” which made him laugh uproariously. As it got dark and the stars emerged in the sky, he picked up two sticks to clap and keep a beat, and began singing—a saga of humanlike animal beings roaming the land. Sometime in the middle of the night after we’d fallen asleep I felt rain on my face and opened my eyes. But when I looked around all I saw were thousands of stars sparkling above. Nearby, Harney was also sitting up in his sleeping bag, quietly observing the sky. “Huh,” he said to himself, as perplexed as I was by the rain that fell from a clear sky. The next morning we saw the marks in the dirt that the raindrops had left behind, proof we hadn’t dreamed it all. After breakfast we sat under a wattle tree drinking smoky-flavored Billy tea and continued to talk—about ancestors, traveling, the Wardaman words for directions, survival techniques if you get lost in the bush, fishing, medicine, and the law. “Would you draw something for me?” I asked. I wanted to see the Dreaming tracks that cross Menngen. Harney took my pen and paper and sketched the border of the cattle station. Then he began to draw the contour of one Dreaming track after another. “This is Grasshopper Dreaming,” he said. “This is Water Python Dreaming. This is Diver Duck People.”

  All together he named forty-two Dreaming tracks before running out of space on the page.

  I was careful not to lose my notebook after that. I camped around Katherine for a few days and then drove back to Darwin and flew to Sydney to begin the nearly ten-thousand-mile journey back home. I considered the notebook a precious reminder of my glimpse into another world whose reality began to predictably fade as I went back to the familiarity of my life. When I looked at it, I was reminded of the paintings of Yukultji Napangati, a Pintupi woman from the Great Sandy Desert, who was one of the last Aboriginal people to “come in” from the bush in 1984 at the age of fourteen. Napangati’s paintings are composed of thousands of lines oscillating across the surf
ace of the canvas. The pictures seem to defy two-dimensional form—their surfaces move and undulate. One depicts the rock hole site at Yunala, west of Kiwirrkurra in the Gibson Desert, the same place where Jeffrey Tjangala, Yapa Yapa Tjangala, Fred Myers, and David Lewis had gone during their desert adventure. To Napangati, Yunala is where a group of female Dreaming ancestors once camped and dug for bush bananas and silky pear vines. When I stared at the painting and let my eyes slightly lose focus, the thousands of lines seemed to become a topographical map representing every inch of the desert. The painting is a painstakingly rendered visualization of a memory of a place.