by Arthur Groom
Many curved strata rise up beneath the cavernous right or eastern wall to an inaccessible ledge, crag, and bluff. There were shrieks and calls of birds beyond vision; hawks and shags in noisy conflict. The wild grandeur was marred only by prominent white signwriting on the red rock:
‘KATHNER-HOPE CAMP, NOVEMBER 1945.’
The Ellery River, tributary of the Finke, was named in memory of the astronomer Ellery by the Central Australian explorer Ernest Giles, on Monday, 2 September 1872.
At dusk I stripped to swim. The air was dry and warm; but the water, now dark and treacherous, was too cold to risk alone, and I splashed awhile, noisily, at its edge, conscious of the hollow echoes. Towards midnight a far-off whispering came in over the high hills. At first it was a complete sound in itself, distant and soft, then gradually becoming powerful and definite. It was soon part of the whole wilderness: part of the pines and ghost gums, and cycads and spinifex, and of the rocks and hills and valleys; surely the voice of an ancient people dreaming, and yet stirring once again in an ancient land; the ghosts of millions down the ages. It increased in volume from its first steady whisper, then it rose to a rushing by of all life and death, coming from afar, and going – goodness only knows where. In the vacuum of utter stillness beside a dying fire, I could sense acutely the first aborigines peering into darkness and fearfully chanting the legends of mythology that are now in danger of being lost for ever.
It continued for two or three hours until I realized that a boisterous breeze had descended to ground level with a penetrating chill that sent me into the depths of my sleeping-bag to shiver until morning.
Next day I climbed the high, bare quartzite ridge west of the gap, up through prickly spinifex and rocky outcrop, to the crest one thousand feet up; and looked out through winter’s clear visibility over this strangely beautiful coloured land of parallel ranges both north and south; for I was in the middle of them all. Some curved in scalloped crests running from west to east; other ranges, particularly to northward, towered higher than where I stood, in mitred peaks of deep purple, vivid blue, and shadowy red. Forty-two of these mitred peaks stood up on the northern range. Slightly east of north, about ten miles away, a dark slit of unfathomable shadow bit deeply into the rock. It was not shown on my maps, which indicated very little; but it is known to a few as Connann’s Gorge. A rugged mountain with three towering eastern buttresses, marked as Mount Giles, and more spectacular by far than all the rest, blocked a valley to the north-west – a hidden monument to an Australian explorer.
The long walk back to Hermannsburg was cooler and more pleasant than the first hot day. Water was scarce, with only one good pool thirty yards long, and several stinking rock-holes. Approach to these putrid holes was heralded by hundreds of parrots, pigeons, finches, hawks, crows, apostle-birds, butcher-birds, wrens, and common chats, all of deep interest to ornithologists. I sighted Mount Hermannsburg’s squared mass nearly twenty-five miles distant, and headed for it through scattered mulga and ironwood, and cut the Hermannsburg to Alice Springs track near the landing field.
There was to be a Sunday night singsong in the sandy yard beside the Superintendent’s house. Rex Battarbee and I stood awhile beneath a starry night in the shadow of the tall river gums surrounding the Mission chapel. Dark figures were moving silently across; all church services for the day were over, and the spell of day was still upon the natives. More than a hundred had gathered in groups of about ten or fifteen round small fires. There was a loud buzz of chattering, subdued giggling and laughter, and the white of flashing eyes; and that strange heavy odour of the aboriginal. The missionaries and the visiting members of the Mission Board were seated back in shadow. Old Abel the full-blood leader of the community, stood up alone above all the others as they sat watching him, waiting for movement, and a little fearful of him. Abel is a sort of boss cocky, leader of the native evangelists, bell-ringer in chief, organizer and community foreman. In the darkness his snow-white hair and bristling white moustache almost hid a face darker than the night. He coughed and rattled an order in Arunta. There was immediate silence. He raised his hands, called for close attention, and made an announcement that had obvious reference to the white visitors.
I sat with Rex Battarbee and Pastor Albrecht. Then Abel moved right into the glow, raised his hands again for complete silence, and the band of a hundred or more native voices commenced to sing in deep rich harmony, clear as an organ. They sang in the Arunta language, then in English; and by far the loveliest and deepest effect, which revealed the unforgettable harmony and ease of control and exhilaration in their voices, came from the rendition by these stone-age, primitive people of the hymns of Christianity translated by the early missionaries. They have been singing since the first Central Australian missionaries, Pastors Schwarz and Kempe, knew not what else to teach them away back in 1877. One can imagine the patience of the teachers, and the bewilderment of the black man trying to judge and understand the strange new music of the voices brought by the white men; but the black man has been chanting his own beliefs down through the ages, in peace and passion. It is one of the instinctive things of life with him, linked with all ceremony, decoration, and fantasy.
I did not sleep well that night, but lay awake in the white, plastered, stone visitor’s room at the eastern end of Arthur Latz’s home. A late moon came in and played strange tricks on Battarbee’s paintings round the walls. He slept like a log, unconscious of the hundred native voices I could not forget. I could sense the tragic passing of the native chants and ceremonies handed down with amazing accuracy and religious fervour by the patriarchal tribal elders, from generation to generation; only to be threatened with oblivion and forgetfulness.
But the savage and primitive ceremonies, once so much a part of the chanting, are now no more. White man’s laws have condemned them; and slowly, through the period of bewilderment and transition, the native has replaced many of his chants and myths and legends with the hymns of the missionaries. It is because of all this that the research work of T. G. H. Strehlow, in the compilation of Aranda myths and legends, is an important addition to the history and traditions of Australia.
Pastor Gross brought out the big three-ton truck, loaded it with a large tucker-box, mattresses, seats, and cushions.
‘All aboard! We’re off to Palm Valley!’ and almost immediately the truck was filled with Mission Board members and with native women of the domestic staffs. They clambered over the back and sides, passed up children, dumped them in corners or nursed them. ‘Mo’-car ride’ is always a treat, reserved as a reward for good work; and Mission trucks seldom travel without a few extras to help ‘hold the road’.
The high plateau of millions of years ago extended over a vast area, and sloped southward. Deep down, hundreds and perhaps thousands of feet down, hidden cores and splines of harder rock ran east and west; and all the watercourses followed the natural slope and ran off southward.
Ages of slow erosion have worn the great plateau or plateaux down and the rivers, too, have dropped slowly, mostly keeping their original courses; and as the hidden splines became exposed, the rivers cut down through them at right angles. The Finke is the greatest of all these rivers. Twenty miles north-west of Hermannsburg Mission it emerges as one wide united watercourse from the Glen Helen Gorge of two miles of red-walled canyons. North of that again, ten and twenty miles, its radiating tributaries, the Pioneer, Ormiston, Redbank, and Davenport, emerge from crevice and canyon far beyond the way of the average traveller.
Off we went with our chattering, singing load, accompanied by a procession of dogs, a few hundred yards as far as the main channel of the Finke; skinny hunting dogs, pet dogs with superior air, mangy dogs, fat dogs huffing and whimpering, mongrel dogs and half-bred dingoes; all sorts of dogs, for the dog is Priority Number One hunting aid and flea-infested hot-water bottle on winter nights.
South of Hermannsburg the Finke sweeps wide and vivid white with clean sand, grandly and in magnificent colour contrasts with
the red walls of the James Range; then it continues through forty miles of deep canyons separating the James to eastward from the wilder Krichauff hills to westward.
Palm Valley is a tributary ten miles down the Finke from Hermannsburg. The sandy road at first follows the bed of the Finke, and where the way is not sandy it is rocky and rough. We turned westward from the river, up a rocky watercourse that shook us all and brought yells of delight from the women. Pastor Gross deviated towards the massive red and purple walls of the Amphitheatre, rising and circling in gallery upon gallery of sandstone and shadow, with angry clouds now drifting overhead to give power to the whole scene. Out on the flat floor of the Amphitheatre a sandstone sphinx rises high and looks into the west; and well to southward a curving razorback, resembling the trunk of an elephant, juts out some hundreds of yards across the valley.
Pastor Gross drove cautiously over sharp rock into Palm Valley itself, and stopped the truck on a flat red sandstone floor between red walls rising several hundred feet in shadowy galleries. Vivid-white ghost gums grew in high cracks, and glistening green cycad palms lined the northern walls. We scrambled from the truck and walked beside the stream running through an avenue of the rare Livistona Mariae palm, first seen and noted by Ernest Giles at a spot a few miles lower down the Finke, on Saturday, 3 August 1872. There were bulrushes in the pools, and small fish, and the native women soon squatted in a sandy patch to dig for small edible yelka bulbs. The area is a Scenic Reserve, but unpoliced; and visitors, in ignorance or selfishness, take the young palms in a vain attempt to grow them in city fern-houses. The trade is not great yet, but it will grow if it is not checked by flawless regulations. There is a big danger in this creeping sort of vandalism.
The Mission Board members wanted to surprise Albert Namatjira in his native haunts. His presence somewhere in the valley was known, but no smoke or track or sound betrayed his actual whereabouts. Possibly he was asleep somewhere beneath a tree, or on a distant crag painting another of his famous watercolours, or away hunting for lizards over distant hills; but here, somewhere, wandered an unspoilt man of nature, putting on record the colours of Central Australia. It was a paradox almost unbelievable.
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* Udepata.
CHAPTER VII
HEADWATERS OF
THE MIGHTY FINKE
The Reverend F. W. Albrecht suggested that I should go with the Board Members on another inspection by truck, as far as Glen Helen Gorge on the upper Finke. We set out with stockman Arthur Latz at the wheel; and Abel, once again organizing songs amongst the dozen native women riding in the back of the truck. Rex Battarbee and I sat above the cabin and faced the full force of the wind. We called at a large earthen dam, empty and dry. The missionaries shook their heads. The water position was acute, and expensive attempts to store water out in the ‘sandhill’ country had been so far a failure. Abel wandered about the top of the dam. He was amused. His white moustache and floppy old hat lent him some distinction.
‘Long time ago,’ he ventured – and waved a hand to indicate vast country – ‘this country he got plenty rain – but no dam. Now we got plenty dam – no rain. Mad place altogether.’
We drove north-east back towards the Finke, mile after mile over spinifex and sand and clay-pan dotted with monotonous mulgas. Battarbee pointed out Gosse’s Range, a hazy pink massive crown of rock low down to the west, a vivid diadem of the desert. He explained that it was one thousand feet high, several miles across and perfectly round, hollowed in the centre, and well worth a visit. It was first visited by Ernest Giles on Sunday, 8 September 1872, and named in honour of Harry Gosse, one of the earliest officers attached to the original Alice Springs Overland Telegraph Station.
I was beginning to beware of distance and its treachery. Landmarks of the morning indicating only a few hours’ journey to reach them, after a hard day of travel still could be distant landmarks of the evening.
Arthur Latz drove with great skill. He knew every rock, blade of grass, clump of spinifex, and gully. He knew the speed and momentum necessary to coax the truck over dry sandy watercourses that were certain traps for the inexperienced. We crossed the wide, dry bed of the Finke and spread a large picnic lunch in the sand. Latz grilled several pounds of fillet steak, and the women produced green salads grown in the sand of the Hermannsburg gardens. The missionaries offered simple grace to the music of crows overhead. Latz was worried about the water problem. He might have to collect all his native stockmen and shift the few cattle in a hurry – the problem was, where to? Drought was rearing its ugly head, to strike once again and undo years of patient shepherding and hard work.
After lunch we drove on into the north beside the east bank of the Finke, a few miles up into the foothills of the Macdonnells, and stopped at the track’s end on solid rock strata. Battarbee and I walked ahead beside the river and in the shadow of its enclosing red cliffs. The rising strata had forced the water, which had trickled for miles deep beneath the sand, up to the surface, and there was an impressive chain of pools. Battarbee viewed everything with the eye of an artist, and was obviously planning a field programme for his class of native artists. I looked for camera shots and found plenty. He told me not to miss Ormiston Gorge, the far-flung, upper right-hand tributary of the Finke. He promised more colour and rocky grandeur there than anywhere else within a hundred miles of Alice Springs. Ormiston Gorge lies a fraction north of dead west, seventy-five miles by airline from Alice Springs, in a mountain maze where the parallel ridges of the Macdonnell Ranges system jump out of line awhile, and merge together near Mount Giles.
We missed Bryan Bowman, owner of the old Glen Helen Cattle Station, by a matter of two or three minutes. I had previously written to him and sent stores to await my arrival. Battarbee and I climbed several hundred feet up the rocky bluff west of the main gap, and looked down on the winding river and the silent old homestead and its broken windmill, less than a quarter of a mile away. We heard the faint whine of an engine and saw a long spurting trail of dust to north-west – Bowman, on his motor-bike, setting out possibly for days or weeks. This wizard has pitted himself and his bike against weather and distance in fertile land and desert sand; and apparently he goes when and where he wishes.
We sat awhile in late afternoon and traced the Finke winding away to north-west towards Mount Sonder* towering majestically four thousand eight hundred feet about fifteen miles away; then Battarbee pointed out the zigzag of the deep-green trees lining the Ormiston, junctioning with the Finke two or three miles to the north. In the distance, perhaps ten miles north-east, there was a rugged tangle of red cliffs, surmounted by spinifex-capped domes that indicated the only clue to where the twisting Ormiston might pierce the formidable barrier.
The missionaries and Battarbee, and Abel and his singers, returned to Hermannsburg, leaving me alone to watch the deep red and purple shadows of a Glen Helen evening turn the hills to fire, before a few minutes of deepening blue gave way to darkness and a bright starry night.
When camping right out in the open there is time and leisure to think of many things while the bowl of night turns slowly over. The freedom of thought and feeling is tremendous and lasting. I stored surplus gear in Bowman’s old stone homestead and set off on foot before sunrise for Ormiston Gorge. The floor of the Finke Valley north-east of Glen Helen could have been the surface of the moon. The land seemed unreal, still and strangely silent except for the ventriloquial bell-note of a bird, striking like a distant, elusive, metallic hammer. Walls of red and brown rock ran east and west, rising and falling in curving razorbacks. There were stone figures, spires, slits, and caves in the walls, and the suggestion of prehistoric creatures behind each corner.
Even though it was midwinter, with a night temperature of twenty-nine degrees, the day was warm enough. Walking would be suicidal lunacy in summer. I crossed the Ormiston near the crumbling foundation of Ragget’s old homestead. Ragget was a Glen Helen pioneer, and eventually retired to Alice Springs. There was a long, stin
king pool in the river, which bent back and away from my destination. I took a short cut over rough hills far too rocky for camels. It was hard going, strenuous, and with the stabbing needles of the spinifex ‘porcupine’-bush, piercing trouser leg, sock, and shoe; but the magnificent views from each crest were worth the effort. They enabled me to keep a check on the erratic course of the river, now making towards a point ahead of me from its long leg to eastward; but there still was no obvious way through the magnificent red barrier of rock, rising steadily higher and higher, as I approached, in an immense grandeur and depth of vivid colour.
Perhaps a mile from the barrier I entered the dry bed of the river at a point where it continued in an impressive strait for the cliffs. It was about seventy yards wide, with clean white sand and gravel between lines of tall, leaning river gums. An artist would find a picture in every tree.
I laboured slowly over the sand. Some of it was hardened like cement, but much of it was fine and soft and heavy going. It was not until I was within a hundred yards of a cavernous bluff rising against a much higher background of red rock and cliff, that I sensed water ahead and a probable bending of the river sharply to the right. Birds called louder than usual in this echoing place. It was a haunting, mysterious, noisy wilderness of red and purple shadows. I had seen the colours of the Ellery River twenty miles east of me, and of Palm Valley perhaps forty miles to the south. I had seen them at sunrise and sunset; and I had seen the sun set over Gosse’s Range like a blood-red glowing jewel on a far plain; but the colours and shadows of the Ormiston have their own incredible power and depth. The sun had gone to northward in its winter arc of noon, behind the main range, and I had before me, rising up, a depth within depth of coloured shadow in every shade of purple, pink, and red; and deep in the shadows, perhaps half a mile away, the dim red walls of the main mountain rose high, terrace upon terrace, until the last precipice went up for hundreds of feet. The contrast between deep shadow and gleaming sunlight above the crest was so sudden that the northern hilltops directly in the path of the hidden sun seemed to be on fire.