Country

by Tim Flannery

  Rod was feeling particularly low as he told me this, for a day or two earlier he had interrogated a young man who had driven an axe into his fourteen-year-old girlfriend’s head. She had been madly in love with him and, very much against her family’s wishes, had run away to be with him. He was in his early twenties, and for a few weeks love had blossomed. Then he had gone out drinking, and when he returned the girl asked him why he had got drunk and left her alone.

  He was a fine young man, Rod said, gentle and intelligent, but in a fury he had killed her. All the devastated youth said by way of defence was, ‘It wasn’t me. It was the drink that killed her.’ Rod was leaving the island. In all his life as a policeman in indigenous communities across Australia he had never had such a depressing posting.

  It was not a kangaroo but a hopping mouse that facilitated a further insight into the difficulties faced by the Groote Islanders. The northern hopping mouse (Notomys aquilo) has its headquarters on the island, specifically in sandy areas fringing Groote’s east coast. To visit there I needed the permission of Claude Mamarika, the leader of the Aboriginal community of that part of the island. Around the mine, Mamarika had the reputation of being a hard man.

  It took a couple of hours to drive to Claude’s home, and as we passed the rocky knolls and groves of spindly palms, Murrabudda told me that Claude’s mob had moved to this location to escape the influence of the mine and, particularly, of grog. But for all their efforts it had followed them—young men carrying it home along the dusty, potholed road regardless of what anyone said. Just a few weeks earlier, Murrabudda told me, Claude’s son had been killed while driving, drunk, along this very stretch.

  We pulled up to the shabby fibro cottage in the sand that was Claude’s home and I wondered how to ask this grief-stricken elder for permission to fossick around the sand dunes looking for a mouse. The man that answered my knock had a scowl on his face, and for a moment I didn’t know what to say; but then Claude’s eyes lighted on my son David, and he smiled. He and David talked a bit, and David explained that we had come to look for mice, at which Claude’s smile grew even broader, and he pointed to the dunes behind the shack. I left with a deep sense of gratitude to this embattled leader, who was facing not only the disintegration of the traditional life he had known and treasured, but also the tragic death of his son. I’m still dismayed at my country that such heroism, which is required daily of so many of today’s Aboriginal leaders, goes unsung and unheralded in the wider community.

  The hopping mice proved hard to find, but we finally located several trackways leading to a burrow. Then we dug and dug and dug. We were still following a spiralling burrow a metre deep as the tropical sun stood high in the sky. The burrow widened slightly and I saw movement in the sand. There’s only one way to catch a mouse you are digging out—you must pounce on it and hold it firmly. So I pounced on the squirming pile of sand and gouged out a handful. It didn’t feel right for a mouse, so I flung the object away from me, and saw a scorpion, longer than my hand and a pasty-white colour, writhing angrily in the sand. Somehow in our digging we had confused the burrows.

  The Groote survey continued for several years, and I had the privilege of studying rock-haunting ringtails, ghost bats and northern quolls, and hosting young crocodiles in my bathroom. The latter came courtesy of Charlie Manolis, an expert on reptiles, which brings to mind another Groote experience. I had got up early to check a line of boxtraps that I had set the day before in a large patch of deciduous vine thicket growing behind some dunes. It was a dirty, dusty environment. The ground was carpeted in dead leaves and the tangle of vines and low, prickly bushes forced me to walk bent over. Native rodents love such places, and it was important that I got to the boxtraps before the sun rose too high, stressing any captive creatures. But an early morning start was not my idea of fun that day, for GEMCO had hosted a highly convivial, libation-fuelled barbecue for us the evening before.

  Checking such a trap line is normally easy. You look to see which traps have doors snapped shut. If the trap has not been triggered, the ball of peanut butter and oat bait must be tossed out, along with the army of ants and other insects; but the full traps must be picked up and the ‘trappee’ transferred to a canvas bag for examination. I usually peer into the trap before emptying it, for you can never be sure what you’ve caught.

  On this morning most traps were empty, but ahead, under a bush surrounded by a dense layer of fallen leaves, was a sprung trap. As I bent over to pick it up, a lightning movement caught my eye and I glimpsed, just centimetres from my face, the business end of a king brown snake. Before I had fully registered its deadly presence, I rocketed backwards; the snake moved just as quickly in the opposite direction, slithering away like liquid through the dead leaves that had so well disguised it. I opened the trap and found a terrified mosaic-tailed rat inside—a common native species whose scent had attracted the snake, which had been trying to gain access to its prey when I arrived on the scene.

  23

  The True Experts

  Now that I understood something of Groote’s fauna, I was anxious to examine the adjacent mainland, and the most convenient place to do that was at Oenpelli, just inside Arnhem Land, near its border with Kakadu National Park. In the middle of the dry season Oenpelli is one of those picture-postcard perfect places. The surface of the expansive lagoon behind the small settlement is covered in waterbirds, while through the heat haze rises a rugged quartzite mountain, fringed with rainforest and riven with massive crevasses and overhangs, so as to resemble a huge, ruined rampart. The massif is known as Injalak, and it contains one of the most astonishing art galleries in the world. From it I hoped to learn about long-term changes in the region’s fauna.

  On my first morning in Oenpelli, in 1996, the honking of magpie geese and the wistful cries of the whistling kites were incessant. Smoke from dry-season burning hung like mist over the floodplain, seeping through rocks and softening outlines so that the place resembled a work from the 1890s Heidelberg School—a Victorian winter’s morning by Frederick McCubbin perhaps—except that it was already nudging 30 degrees.

  At the Injalak Arts and Crafts Centre, overlooking the lagoon, I wait to meet Tony and Isiah, two of Injalak’s custodians. There are already a dozen or so people gathered around the fibro building that stores the completed artworks. Outside, half-painted barks and sheets of paper lie interspersed with roasted magpie geese. The scent of wood smoke, goose fat and singed flesh fills the still air as I’m offered a piece. It is delicious—smoky and moist—the same way meat is enjoyed in New Guinea. Tony arrives and we begin to chat about animals. He says that the knob-tailed gecko is a spirit that ‘rapes men’. I’m not sure what he means by this, but geckoes are loathed throughout Australasia. In New Guinea people hate their feel, particularly the way the skin of some species comes away at a touch. Perhaps at Oenpelli the great, unblinking eyes of the knob-tails, along with their gory, red-streaked tongues, somehow suggests homosexual rape.

  Isiah arrives and the three of us head out to Injalak Hill, where the melodious calls of butcher birds and honeyeaters fill the air as we climb the boulder slope leading to a cliff at the summit. After breaking through a rim of scrubby, deciduous rainforest, we are transported into an astonishing vision. Below a rounded bluff of quartzite is a long rock shelter, and its entire rear wall is covered in the most vibrant art imaginable. Great X-ray illustrations of barramundi overlay kangaroo, catfish, echidna and hand stencils form a riotous montage of images, as lively and unforgettable as the life in the lagoon that inspired it.

  We pick our way through the maze of tunnels and paths that lead from one gallery to the next and my amazement grows, for images of mythic ancestors and spirit beings, very different from the styles we have just seen, fill the walls. And it is here that a second aspect of the complex becomes apparent. Scattered about in niches and in crevices under boulders are piles of ochre-daubed human bones, some of which still bear fragments of clothing. I can understand wanting t
o be put to rest in such a place—so rich in life, heritage and activity.

  In one crevasse high above our heads I discover that Injalak is home to a colony of appropriately named tomb bats. They are large for insect-eating bats, and they rest propped up on their elbows, like so many jet fighters awaiting take-off. And there, at my feet, are the droppings and bones of short-eared rock-wallabies. The creatures are less abundant and more wary here than on Groote, but signs of them are everywhere.

  At 3 pm it is unbearably hot, so Isiah suggests that we rest at a shaded lookout where we might get a breeze. There, with the whole of the lagoon and Oenpelli laid out below, I make a baffling discovery. Among the bones of wallabies and waterbirds left from dinners past are the last mortal remains of a goat. This mystifies me, for there are no feral goats in Arnhem Land, and no domestic ones nearby. When I show Isiah the bones he bursts into hysterical laughter and points to Oenpelli, saying that long ago it was a mission station, and the missionaries kept goats. There had been quite a kerfuffle when the goats disappeared. Dingoes were blamed, but now I had found his father out. ‘Good thing those missionaries didn’t study bones and come up here!’ he says, cackling with delight.

  When we return to the Injalak Arts and Crafts Centre, Isiah introduces me to an older man called Thompson Yulijirri, whose knowledge of animals and Aboriginal lore is unequalled. When we meet he is painting a picture of an antilopine kangaroo (Macropus antilopinus), which he knows as ‘kolobarr’, and a dingo. The creatures are facing each other, almost like animals on a coat of arms, while between are the accoutrements of the corroborree—didjeridu, ochre, boomerangs and spears.

  We get on famously, Thompson and I, for he is happy to have someone to talk about animals with. He tells me how the echidna is the pet of the Mimi spirits—those beings that live in the rocks and create lightning and thunder—and how, as his painting suggests, the dingo and kangaroo were once friends. The antilopine kangaroo, the largest marsupial of Australia’s Top End is, Thompson says, now very rare around Oenpelli. ‘People have to go a long way towards the coast to hunt it,’ he says, but it is still well remembered, for when they must travel far the Oenpelli people perform a dance where they ask for the swiftness and endurance of the great roo.

  I examine Thompson’s painting at some length. The distinctive features of both roo and dingo have been evened out, making the creatures look more similar than in life. Perhaps this is a way of illustrating their ancestral amity; but the kangaroo is painted X-ray style (so that its internal organs and bones are visible) while the dingo is not.

  ‘Don’t eat that one, so don’t know how he looks inside,’ Thompson says of the dingo by way of explanation. I realise that he has painted the genitals of the two male creatures with startling accuracy. The dog, being a placental mammal, has the penis positioned in front of the scrotum, while the kangaroo, like all marsupials, has the scrotum well in front of the penis. This would not be so evident had Thompson not depicted the antilopine kangaroo with a partial erection, the penis protruding from the cloaca. I comment upon this asymmetry in the otherwise symmetrical painting, and Thompson goes silent. It’s not prudery that has affected him, for his eyes shift, examining my face with a searching look before darting about to see if anyone is near. With the coast clear he mumbles, ‘Secret story, that one.’ I don’t ask any more questions.

  Thompson now seems inclined to paint alone, so I join the others hanging around the shop. They tell me that art can be a trap, with famous artists sometimes hounded by commercial buyers, even on remote outstations. They whisper about cops holding artists in jail until they have finished a painting, and how credit is extended to famous artists needing cash to fly relatives to funerals, with payment in paintings demanded. I also learn some interesting things about traditional Arnhem Land societies. In some areas second daughters were, in traditional times, expected to forgo reproduction to assist with raising their nieces and nephews. They were given ‘medicine’ and ritual treatment at their first menstruation to destroy their fertility. I’ve never heard anything like this before, yet it is reminiscent of the reproduction of some Australian birds, where the young of the previous year delay their own breeding to help their parents bring up the new clutch, because Australian conditions are so harsh that the parents can’t do the job alone.

  My time in Arnhem Land passes too swiftly. I’ve so many questions that I could stay for months rather than the days scheduled. Fortunately, I have other work soon to take place in central Australia, where the true experts on Australia’s marsupials live. And, on a spring day in 1997, I found myself sitting on the banks of Tietken’s Birthday Creek, a beautiful coolibah-fringed waterway that drains the Musgrave Ranges in northern South Australia. Around me Aboriginal children are alternately playing and listening as a Tjilpi—an Anangu elder by the name of Ginger Wikilyiri—tells of the creatures he knew as a youth. I have brought a box-full of museum specimens along, and as Ginger gently picks up the stuffed animals, his eyes fill with sadness. He seems to be searching their soft fur for answers as he says that once they were everywhere—then, how quickly, they were all gone.

  The plains and ranges hereabout once swarmed with rabbit-sized marsupials, and their disappearance is one of the most mystifying extinction events the continent has ever seen. Twenty-three species were lost, the remainder being confined to offshore islands or remnant patches. By and large, all that is left today are the larger kangaroos and the mouse-sized creatures. But the remarkable thing is that even now there are people like Ginger who can remember eating those extinct animals. Talking to such elders is like consulting an encyclopedia of now vanished desert life—to a biologist this could hardly be more exciting.

  Ginger says that he does not know why they disappeared, but a big drought in the 1930s may have had an effect—foxes too. A woman elder by the name of Mungita chimes in, saying that the drought was important. As they pass the museum skins around, they speak at length and with eloquence in their Yankunytjatjara dialect about the mystery. They clearly feel a great fondness for the vanished animals and the way of life they supported, which is undulled by a half-century absence.

  I inquire, one by one, about the various species. Once its Aboriginal name is ascertained the information comes out in a precise, almost formal way. This one lived on the sand dunes, that one in the rocks. This one bred in spring, and had two to three young. That one had a single young at a time. This ate leaves and that one insects. Perhaps this is how elders pass on their voluminous, detailed knowledge of the land to the younger generation—as a catalogue full of detail, all of which must be memorised and added to by experience.

  So devastated is the mammal fauna of central Australia that even the brushtail possum is gone from Anangu lands. It was once common, Ginger says, and it held on a little longer than the rest. Then Ginger’s son Gilbert, who is perhaps in his fifties and has until now been silent, pipes up. ‘I know where they went,’ he says in a whisper (a tone Desert people adopt when a major point is to be made). ‘They all gone down

  Ginger Wikilyiri (right), and myself holding a museum specimen of a chuditch.

  to Adelaide. I seen them there.’ And indeed, although it has vanished from 80 per cent of its habitat, the brushtail possum remains abundant in Australia’s cities.

  Later that day we return to our camp among the granite domes of the Musgraves. A light rain has fallen, and the lichens on Sentinel Hill now look alive, punctuating the rocks with pale green. Somewhere among those domes are the last of the middle-sized mammals left in the region—three small colonies of black-flanked rock-wallabies (Petrogale lateralis). A team from the South Australian Department of Environment and Heritage is there conducting a survey, and has caught a female. I have the honour of holding her while she is weighed and her pouch checked for young. She is a lovely, soft creature with a well-grown joey. Despite her fertility the colonies are vanishing, laid siege to by changed patterns of fire, introduced predators and competition from goats and rabbits. Fox-
baiting might give them a chance, the rangers say, but dingoes take the baits too, and dingoes kill foxes, making them important allies. To my dismay I discover that rabbits are—with the aid of a post-calici bounceback—relatively abundant, as are cats.

  As I sit among the granite tors discussing the diminishing wallaby colonies, my attention is drawn to an older man who has thus far remained silent. His name is Robin and he speaks very little English. I learn through an interpreter that Robin was born on the other side of the frontier, and has always led an independent life, avoiding the mission stations. His principal early contact with Europeans was through dingo trappers, with whom he travelled on camel and horseback, learning how to take dog scalps for the bounty. Robin is one of only two old men in the area who can still knap stone (strike flakes off larger pieces to make tools), and as someone who lived through a first-contact situation he has interesting things to say about the arrival of the Europeans.

  Robin saw his first white man while he was still a youth. Both he and Ginger explain that Aborigines encountering Europeans for the first time stalked the intruders, doing without fire for days so as not to draw attention to themselves. This fascinates me because it bears on an important argument surrounding land management in Australia—how frequent was fire before 1788, when the First Fleet brought its convicts to Sydney Cove? There are those who argue that burning the bush was rather infrequent back then. They explain away the many instances of smoke recorded by explorers as the result of signal fires lit by Aborigines to alert others to the presence of the strangers. But Robin and Ginger’s testimony points in the opposite direction: fire may have been suppressed by Aborigines who saw the intruders, so the columns of smoke recorded by Europeans may have been fewer than normal.

  Both men also have something to say about the chuditch (Dasyurus geoffroyi), a cat-sized, white-spotted carnivorous marsupial that once ranged through the inland, and which they know as ‘achilpa’. When they state without hesitation that its main diet in their area was termites, I at first think that these venerable ‘professors’ must have confused it with the striped numbat (Myrmecobius fasciatus), but then I see my western arrogance is getting in the way, for they are sure that achilpa could also kill and eat rabbit-sized creatures.