by Monica Tan
Edward’s insouciant choice of shoe and the way he almost slouched along with a natural gait, straight-backed yet relaxed, made a mockery of us all and our top-of-the-line, abrasion resistant, antimicrobial sandals (and the spare top-end sneakers in our packs). An old cordial container filled with water swung from one shoulder on a rope, a walkie-talkie and first-aid kit from the other. A packet of smokes stuck out of his back pocket.
‘I’m practically running,’ panted Roger.
Later I asked another walker, a physio, about whether the Goolarabooloo guides used a particular movement we should be emulating. She didn’t think so; she just thought they were comfortable in the environs. They weren’t working hard like we were having to—in uncertain territory, alert, anxious, taking note of everything, with information overload. ‘Not in your own body, somehow,’ she said. They were acclimatised to the heat, to walking the soft, undulating sand, that with every step seemed to disappear underfoot with a sigh.
The Lurujarri Trail wasn’t the first multi-day walk Roger and his wife had done. There had been the Portuguese section of the Camino de Santiago, which leads to the shrine of the apostle St James the Great in north-western Spain. In Japan they’d walked the Kumano Kodō, with its three ancient shrines; over the centuries many of the villages it passes through have grown accustomed to the pilgrims, accommodating them with affordable traveller inns.
‘I guess this is a bit of a pilgrim’s walk too,’ I said.
‘Yes, I guess it is!’ Roger replied, sounding surprised.
Now in August, mornings on the Lurujarri were cool as south-easterlies swept over the landscape. Then temperatures would climb as high as thirty degrees in the afternoons, before quickly cooling off in the evenings as sea mist came prowling on dry land.
Our 72-kilometre hike over nine days was along the bottom third of a 450-kilometre Dreaming track that follows the Ululong Law cycle. It begins at Ardiyaloon (One Arm Point) on the coast of the Kimberley, then traces the coastline south to Wabona, about two hundred kilometres south of Broome. The Ululong links the lands of the Bardi-Djawi, Nyulnyul, Jabirr Jabirr, Ngumbarl, Djungun, Yawuru and Karajarri peoples.
On the Ululong, the Dreaming is known as Bugarregarre. The ancestors in these stories were not ordinary flesh-and-blood men and women. Rather they were powerful beings that lived when the land was unformed—half-dream, half-reality, a thick primordial soup. As they lived and journeyed, their actions and interactions with one another gave the land its shape—the very mountains, rivers, rocks, waterholes, stars, trees, animals and birds we could see today—and through their wisdom and follies laid down the patterns of life and Law, showing all subsequent generations how to live.
In a story shared on the SBS series Songlines, Goolarabooloo man Richard Hunter spoke of his people’s Naji spirit beings. ‘These first people come out from Dabberdabbergun, the birthplace. They used to walk up on to the beach. It was a silent world. The first sound was created and wake everything up. Now they have to drink. So Bugarregarre they dreamt that there is water, but it’s inland. So they made their journey.’
All over Australia, Dreaming stories coalesce around physical tracks, known in English as songlines, songcycles or Dreaming tracks. Each has a birthplace and an end place, and in between many, many sites that are the settings for these stories. Over the millennia the sites have remained spiritually charged thanks to countless ceremonies conducted by human caretakers. Because the stories describe the land in immense detail, they can be used as oral maps and allow story keepers to navigate tremendous distances.
Australia’s vast lattice of Dreaming tracks simultaneously acted as trading routes upon which shells, ochre, axes, spears, boomerangs, shields, narcotic plants, songs, dances and even wives were once dispatched.
Some of these tracks cover mind-boggling distances. The Eaglehawk Dreaming track, for instance, connects Heavitree Gap in Alice Springs to Byron Bay on the east coast, while the Black Snake/Bogong Moth Dreaming track connects Normanton in the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Snowy Mountains near Canberra. Many of today’s highways are upgrades of colonial-era dirt roads that were built on Dreaming tracks, including one that starts in Darug Country in western Sydney, goes through Sackville and then along the current Great Western Highway to Little Hartley just beyond the Blue Mountains.
We passed by a large and shallow pool of water, so still the vain sky bent down and filled the surface with a perfect likeness of itself. In less than a day of walking, we had left behind the hustle and bustle of Broome town life. Out here evidence of human occupation was still tangible but more muted and melted into the non-human world: a few footprints, the ashy smudge of an old fire. This was a landscape dominated by an infinite sky and imperial ocean, and I was immediately humbled by it.
Somewhere in the tidal flats of Ngunungurrukun we stopped for a break. To my delight, a guide gestured towards the horizon at a mixed flock of gudurlwarany (brolgas) and lindalinda (jabirus or black-necked stork). I pointed my binoculars at the birds, watching as a lindalinda gave a small flap of its wings, lifted into the air and performed the folk dance for which its species is famed. The bird was dressed formally: black and white feathers, with a head and neck that from certain angles shone with the shifting bluish-purplish-greenish iridescence of a soap bubble. All of the birds moved with slow-moving elegance—avian world royalty. Edward said they were pecking for yarrinyarri, a type of bush onion. He plucked one growing shallow in the sand and showed it to us. It was tiny and light-brown, the size of a child’s fingernail.
One of the senior patriarchs of the Goolarabooloo community, Phil, pointed out a water soak in the distance. He had a croaky, commanding voice and an impressive belly on two solid legs that made him look stately. I squinted at a patch of dark green that, seemingly to him and the other guides, was clear as a neon sign reading ‘HERE BE WATER’. He said you could dig or, ‘When the tide comes in, it pushes the water up, fresh as.’ Such secret stores of freshwater were once crucial to survival. I was struck by how much I took water for granted. On this trip it was delivered in plastic tanks on trucks; if I were here alone with no supplies, I would be dead in three days.
Phil was guardian to ‘living history’ and of these lands through which the Dreaming track passed. He had a duty to keep making this same journey as the ancient ones, and to ensure through ceremony—song, dance, ritual, painting the body with ochre, stories, language—that the land was kept in good health. The more knowledge an elder has, the more status and power they are bestowed in their clan. In this part of Australia, the most senior men burdened with guardianship of the Dreaming track and their lands, and with responsibility for the smooth transmission of knowledge and transfer of duties to the next generation, are known as maja (Law bosses).
The very existence of the land is dependent on that transmission. In the Goolarabooloo world the divisions between past, present and future often merge. Guardians aren’t so much repeating the past or upholding tradition as they are actively maintaining living history. In a documentary I’d watched, one of the key non-Goolarabooloo members of the Goolarabooloo community—a wiry, suntanned Dutchman called Frans Hoogland—illustrates the Dreaming by pressing a handful of sand into an amorphous shape in his hand, then letting it crumble: a metaphor for a reality that isn’t fixed as it is in Western thought, but rather a creative, ongoing, flexible process, constantly reshaped and ‘kept together through interactions between people, animals and the Dreaming’.
We walked ‘long-way’ on the beach, and in parts the hike grew tedious. To pass the time I took note of marks in the sand: the spotted scuttling of hermit crabs, the two-feet-and-a-tail marks of wallabies, arrow-like bird tracks, snakes, car tyres, what looked like dingo tracks and, of course, human footprints. Stare at something long enough and details will emerge; I’d never noticed how distinct a footprint is. Humiliatingly, a couple of walkers pointed out that I was ‘duck footed’—something I was aware of but was ordinarily concealed.
; I thought back to my visit to Lake Mungo, where I’d seen on display a replica of a series of Pleistocene-era footprints discovered there in 2003. It was the largest such collection anywhere in the world. Some twenty thousand years ago, the twenty-five individual trackways—mostly human, but also some marsupial and emu—were made on a damp claypan. In 2006, park officials invited a group of highly skilled Pintubi trackers from Central Australia to take a look. The trackers concluded that among this family group traversing the claypan was a child who walked, paused, turned and ran away from the group but then walked quickly back. A day or two later another group, likely men, crossed the same area while running. The trackers also deduced that a spear was thrown, missed its prey and skidded into the ground. Most intriguing was a single line of right footprints, which the trackers said must have belonged to a one-legged man capable of hopping very quickly with the other hunters.
At the time I’d read this, I’d been incredulous that the trackers could extract such detailed knowledge from footprints alone. Only now did I have an inkling of just how much information footprints betrayed.
We veered onto a narrow track through dense vegetation, spreading out along a line so we were walking in small groups. One of the guides, Tay, and I found ourselves separated from the rest of the pack, but he continued to identify for me trees, fruits and birds, and the porpoises swimming in the ocean. His hair curled in tight black coils that from the sun had become coppery red at the ends. He, too, suffered from duck feet and I thought, Boy, we must look like a pair of dopey Charlie Chaplins.
He pointed out one of the region’s best-known plants, the gubinge tree. Also known as the Kakadu plum, it’s tropical-looking with broad paddle-shaped leaves, and it has one of the highest concentrations of vitamin C of any fruit in the world. At this time of year its branches were barren, but back in Broome at a market I’d sampled a dried piece—unsurprisingly it had an extremely citrusy taste, almost like orange sherbet. A local industry was shipping boatloads of the stuff overseas, and countries like China were requesting volumes forty times what northern Australia could supply.
The trees here had so much personality. The morrells around me seemed to grow horizontally, spreading out with low branches like opening beach umbrellas. Wavy-edged leaves quivered in the wind.
Among the Goolarabooloo people, married men and their mothers-in-law have an ‘avoidance relationship’: if one walks into a room, the other is obliged to walk out. And so the shrubby jigal tree, with leaves like butterfly wings facing back-to-back, became known as the mother-in-law tree.
Oddest to me was the manujen with perky orange fruit like Jaffa lollies, currently ripe. Earlier one of the guides, a white woman who’d been a friend of the Goolarabooloo people for many decades, had mentioned the fruit ‘leaves your tongue feeling furry’. I plucked one and popped it in my mouth; it tasted like sweet potato and, sure enough, the strangest sensation soon followed, as if my tongue had sprouted a layer of fuzz.
Tay and I rejoined the rest of the group and walked through a section of Lurujarri covered in middens and flecked by thousands of colourful, triangle-shaped rock shards, mainly cast-offs from stone toolmaking. We continued to walk, through an expansive ocean of sand, and were eventually directed by our guides to gather around some pale stones. The hot sun felt like a cattle prod against the backs of our necks.
I gasped as I stared at the ground: these weren’t stones, rather bones bleached blindingly white from years of sun.
Tay crouched by the bones, and with large and gentle hands lifted up an intact skull, sand pouring out through the gap in its cranium.
‘Was that person from this trip or the last?’ joked one of the walkers.
Edward didn’t immediately reply, rather gave a secretive smile and then explained these were the bones of their elderly people. ‘They just go here and die. If they old and crook they camp here, have a drink of water until they can’t go any further.’
It was easy to picture: an old lady sitting cross-legged in the sand, stoking a small campfire. The sun rises, then sets, and the moon does the same. She watches quietly and waits, fading with every hour. All around her are the lurujarri—coastal dunes for which the trail is named—and the yanijarri—red pindan cliffs—the last things she will ever see.
It was haunting to think about, and for a moment none of us said anything. I listened to the wind on the sand, like the shuffling footsteps of silent congregants in a cathedral. So often Indigenous Australians reveal a majesty in their relationship to the land that makes us non-Indigenous Australians feel ashamed of our boorishness.
Along the trail, we passed by ancient burial sites dotted between water soaks, bush food pantries, dinosaur prints pressed into the rock and rock tool workshops. We were camping in spots that had been camped at for thousands of years, and would soon be fishing on reefs that had been fished on for thousands of years.
The trail was first opened to the general public in 1987 by Paddy Roe, the former head of the Goolarabooloo people, in an effort to ‘wake up’ a relationship between non-Goolarabooloo Australians and the land. The trail is unique in the way it welcomes non-Goolarabooloo Australians to directly experience healthy Goolarabooloo Country. This coastline was mostly left untouched by pastoralists, industrialists and urban developers, and throughout colonisation had been kept in good spiritual condition via song and ceremony. As one of the non-Goolarabooloo members of their community said to me, ‘whether black, white or brindle’ they were bound by one simple, guiding principle: ‘maintain Law, culture and the buru (land)’.
One of the walkers asked how old the human remains were, and Tay said that nobody knew—archaeologists weren’t allowed to touch them. On every walk along the trail they covered the skull back up, and by the next journey it had been exposed by the wind again. Here, preserving and respecting something meant leaving it where it was, as it was, rather than erecting a fence around it, collecting it for scientific study, or sticking it in a hermetically sealed glass cabinet in a museum thousands of kilometres away.
Tay scooped up a few handfuls of sand and reverentially spread it over the skeleton until all traces of it were erased.
With exhilaration I spotted camp on the horizon. Together with other walkers, I gave a weary cheer. Our group dribbled in at different times, having done the last section of the walk at our own pace. We’d left last night’s camp at seven in the morning and it was now four in the afternoon.
A plastic mat had been rolled out over the sand. Too tired to do anything else, I dropped my pack and plonked myself on it with a satisfied grin. Tarps had been strung up on a nearby tree for extra shade, and adjacent were long trestle tables that served as a makeshift kitchen and buffet area.
The Goolarabooloo guides were assisted by some non-Goolarabooloo volunteers—sun-dried nomad types—and over the many hours we’d walked they had been busy transporting gear on a truck, including two heavy fridges, our luggage and bits of furniture, to set up the camp. One volunteer was feeding logs into a fiery pit, over which stood three huge blackened pots with ladles: one with drinking water, the second to refill the dish-washing station, and the third with steaming black tea.
Those nomads were a better cultural fit with the Goolarabooloo than us urban professionals. Their laissez-faire attitude tried our patience. We wanted to know what, where and when things were happening, and the replies from the Goolarabooloo could be maddeningly vague. When can we go crab hunting? ‘After lunch sometime,’ they’d say, with a shrug. Yes, but when precisely after lunch? The Goolarabooloo were only specific when it mattered, and I had to admit that had advantages. Plans were adapted to shifting conditions; we could choose the best thing to do when the time and weather was right.
The nomads and Goolarabooloo families were close. Between them were long-standing friendships, some spanning decades. Together they had erected their tents away from us walkers in a huddle of nylon and polyester, with four-wheel drives, big as bulls, parked nearby. I marvelled at the way b
oth groups never seemed to give off any sense of needless busyness. Even when they were working hard—stirring cooking pots, gathering firewood, washing cutlery, passing around chubby babies dusted with pindan—they maintained the impression of sustained repose. Those who weren’t working or out fishing or crab hunting sat about in their campsite on weaved mats or camp chairs, chewing the fat in a low, quiet drone, now and then shooing away a fly with an easy wave.
Some of the paying walkers felt too intimidated to breach the divide and interact with the Goolarabooloo families. To me it was like being back in school and rapping nervously on the staffroom door—there was an air about the place that shifted when I entered, and I instinctively felt it was out of bounds. I also suspected that the Goolarabooloo families were a bit shy.
I erected my tent between two paperbarks on the edge of camp. Unlike those I’d seen in other parts of Australia, the paperbarks here were stunted and hunched over. Their flaking-bark boughs reached towards my tent like the thin arms of protective grandparents. I made things extra homely by hanging my water bag on a branch and using my sarong to create extra shade.
Getting to the bathroom required a bit of a trudge through a long sandbank. The path was lined with red ribbons tied in bows to tree branches and solar-powered lights planted in the ground. Finally I reached a small water tank with hand soap, where the path split and led to two drop toilets. Each had a bamboo curtain strung up to provide some privacy and a container of toilet paper labelled ‘shit pit kit’.
I was weary and sweaty, definitely ready for a swim. The entrance to the beach was west of the campsite, so I took the path curving along a small sand dune that blocked any ocean views. I could hear the waves, so knew I mustn’t be too far back. To my left grew mangroves so impenetrable they seemed bewitched to guard something precious. I passed a flock of parrots, the neon green and red of a traffic light, decorating a bush.