One afternoon, after our midday break, something dropped off Bub’s back and he flew into a panic. I now had Zeleika in the lead, because of her sore nose, and Bub at the rear. He bucked and he bucked and the more he bucked, the more bits of pack went flying and the more frenzied he became. By the time he stopped, the saddle was dangling under his quivering belly, and the goods were scattered everywhere. I switched into automatic. The other camels were ready to leap out of their skins and head for home. Goliath was galloping between them and generally causing havoc. There was not a tree in sight to tie them to. If I blew this, they might take off and I would never see them again. I couldn’t get back to Bub so I whooshed the lead camel down and tied her nose-line to her foreleg, so that if she tried to get up, she would be pulled down. I did the same with Dook, clouted Goliath across the nose with a branch of mulga so that he took off in a cloud of dust, and then went back to Bub. His eyes had rolled with fear and I had to talk to him and pacify him until I knew he trusted me and wouldn’t kick. Then I lifted the saddle with my knees and undid the girth on top of his back. Then I gently took it off and whooshed him down like the others. I found a tree a little further on, and beat the living daylights out of him. The whole operation had been quick, sure, steady and precise — like Austrian clockwork. But now, whatever toxins had been stirred up by the flow of adrenalin hit my bloodstream like the Cayahogan River. I lay by the tree, trembling as hard as Bub. I had been out of control when I beat him and began to recognize a certain Kurtishness in my behaviour. This weakness, my inability to be terrified with any dignity, came to the forefront often during the trip, and my animals took the brunt of it. If, as Hemingway suggested, ‘courage is grace under pressure’, then the trip proved once and for all that I was sadly lacking in the stuff. I felt ashamed.
I learnt a couple of other things from that incident. I learnt to conserve energy by allowing at least part of myself to believe I could cope with any emergency. And I realized that this trip was not a game. There is nothing so real as having to think about survival. Believing in omens is all right as long as you know exactly what you are doing. I was becoming very careful and I was coming right back down to earth, where the desert was larger than I could comprehend. And not only was space an ungraspable concept, but my understanding of time needed reassessment. I was treating the trip like a nine-to-five job. Up bright and early (oh, the guilt if I slept in), boil the billy, drink tea, hurry up it’s getting late, nice place for lunch but I can’t stay too long … I simply could not rid myself of this regimentation. I was furious with myself, but I let it run its course. Better watch it now, then fight it later when I was feeling stronger. I had a clock which I told myself was for navigation purposes only, but at which I stole furtive glances from time to time. It played tricks on me. In the heat of the afternoon, when I was tired, aching and miserable, hours lapsed between ticks and tocks. I recognized a need for these absurd arbitrary structures at that stage. I did not know why, but I knew I was afraid of something like chaos. It was as if it were waiting for me to let down my guard and then it would pounce.
On the third day, and to my great relief, I found the well-used station track to Tempe. I called Areyonga on my radio set, that unwanted baggage, that encumbrance, that infringement of my privacy, that big smudgy patch on the purity of my gesture. I screamed into it that I was all right and got nothing but static as a reply.
Arriving in Tempe, I had a pleasant lunch with the people who ran the station, then filled my canteen with precious sweet rainwater from their tanks and continued on my way.
7
SOON AFTER LEAVING TEMPE, I crossed a wide river-bed, slapping my bare feet on hot river pebbles and soft sticks and delighting in the crunch of glittering sand between my toes. Then I saw my first sandhills. This country had had bushfires through it the previous season which had been followed by heavy rains, so the colours of the landscape were now brilliant orange, jet black and sickly bright lime Day-Glo green. Whoever heard of such a desert? And above all that, the intense hot dark blue of a perennially cloudless sky. There were new plants everywhere, tracks and patterns I had not noticed before, patches of burnt bushes sticking up like old crows’ feathers from wind-rippled ridges, new bush foods to be searched for and picked. It was delicious new country but it was tiring. The sand dragged at my feet and the repetition of the dunes lulled me into drowsiness when the first excitement wore off. The stillness of the waves of sand seemed to stifle and suffocate me.
However, I had at least learnt to live with the flies by then and didn’t even trouble to scrape them away from my eyes, where they swarmed in thousands. The camels were black with them, and they followed us in clouds. In cattle country they were always worse than in the clean free desert. Ants work later shifts; in that blessed hour before the mosquitoes took over from the flies, masses of the horrid little creatures would crawl up my trouser legs while I was having a hard-earned cup of tea. This depended on where I camped of course and I soon learnt to stay away from nice flat claypan. The other nuisance in finding a good camping spot was prickles. Dry country has an infinite variety of prickles — there are little hairy ones that get caught in blankets and jumpers and saddle-cloths, there are tough cruel ones that get stuck in dogs’ paws, and there are giant monstrous ones that puncture bare flesh like tacks.
I had approximately two weeks’ travel before I could expect to reach Ayers Rock, and I was not looking forward to my arrival. Rick would be there to bring me back to reality. And I knew that the Rock was tamed, ruined by busload upon busload of tourists. By the time I got near Wallera Ranch, two days after Tempe, the tourists were beginning to drive me crazy. In overrigged vehicles they would come in droves to see Australia’s natural wonder. They had two-way radios, winches, funny hats with corks on them, stubbies (beer bottles) and leather stubbie-holders with emus, kangaroos and naked women tooled on them, all this to travel down a perfectly safe road. And they had cameras. I sometimes think tourists take cameras with them because they feel guilty about being on holiday, and feel they should be doing something useful with their time. In any case, when otherwise perfectly nice people don their hats and become tourists, they change into bad-mannered, loud, insensitive, litter-bugging oafs.
I must make a distinction here between travellers and tourists. I did meet some lovely people on the road, but they were rarer than hens’ teeth. At first I treated one and all with pleasant politeness. There were ten questions invariably asked of me, and I unfailingly gave my pat reply. I posed for the inevitable snap snap of Nikons and the whirr of Super-eights. It got so that I was stopped every half hour and by three in the afternoon, the dangerous hour for me, a time when my senses of humour and perspective fail me badly, a time when I cannot even be nice to myself, let alone these fools who would pile out, block my path, frighten the camels, hold me up, ask stupid boring questions, capture me on celluloid so that they could stick me on their refrigerator doors when they got home, or worse still, sell me to newspapers when the story broke, then drive off in a cloud of choking blinding dust, not even offering me a drink of water — by three in the afternoon I would begin to get mean. My rudeness made me feel a little better but not much. The best policy was simply to keep off the road or feign deafness.
Those two weeks were strangely disappointing. The initial thrill had worn off and little niggling doubts were starting to worm their way into my consciousness. It was all nice of course and even fun sometimes, but hey, where was the great clap of the thunder of awareness that, as everyone knows, knocks people sideways in deserts. I was exactly the same person that I was when I began.
Some camps on those nights were so desolate they stole into my soul, and I longed for a safe nook out of that chill empty wind. I felt vulnerable. Moonlight turned the shadows into inimical forms and I was so glad of Diggity’s warmth as we snuggled beneath the blankets that I could have squeezed her to death. The rituals I performed provided another necessary structure. Everything was done correctly and obsessi
onally. Before I went to bed, everything was placed exactly where I wanted it for the morning. Before the trip I had been hopelessly vague, forgetful and sloppy. My friends had made cracks about how I would probably forget to take the camels one morning. Now it was the opposite. The food was packed away, billy filled with water, tea, cup, sugar and Thermos out, nose-lines on the tree. I would roll out the swag, just so, by the fire and study my star book.
Stars all made sense to me now that I lived under them. They told me the time when I awoke at night for a piss and a check on the bells. They told me where I was and where I was going, but they were cold like bits of frost. One night, I decided to listen to some music and put Eric Satie into the cassette. But the noise sounded alien, incongruous, so I turned it off and sucked on the whisky bottle instead. I talked to myself, rolling the names of the stars and constellations around on my tongue. Goodnight, Aldebaran. See you, Sirius. Adios, Corvus. I was glad there was a crow in the heavens.
*
Wallera Ranch was not a ranch at all but a watering-hole for tourists. I went into the bar for a beer, there to be met by a group of typical ockers, all talking, as is their wont, about sex and sheilas. ‘Oh great,’ I thought, ‘just what I need. Some intellectual stimulation.’ One of them, an ugly weedy pimply little brute, had been a milkman in Melbourne and was entertaining his mates with gruesomely detailed stories of his countless conquests of sex-starved housewives. Another had been a tourist bus driver who said driving was a terrible ‘ball-drainer’ because all the women were always after his body. God knows there was enough of it. His beer gut was popping the buttons on his shirt. I left.
I was heading into wild camel country now. Their tracks were everywhere and the quandong trees were eaten almost bare. Sallay had put the fear of god into me about the renegade bulls, who were now coming into season. ‘Shoot first and ask questions later,’ he had warned, over and over. So I loaded the gun and slung it back on Bub’s saddle. Then I thought, ‘Christ, with my luck, it will go off and shoot me in the foot,’ so I took the bullet out and kept a few rounds in my pocket.
That evening, I camped in a washaway at the foot of some hills. The feed was lush — roly-poly, mulga, salt bush, camel-thorn, acacia and so on. For me there were yalka (like tiny onions) to be dug up and roasted on the coals. ‘This is very pleasant,’ I said to myself, trying to quell a growing unease. I thought the animals were a bit touchy too, but put that down to projection. I found it difficult to get to sleep that night, and when I did eventually drop off, I was assaulted by psychedelic dreams.
I woke earlier than usual, and let Goliath go for a munch. By the time I had packed up, they had taken off (straight back to Alice) and when I caught up to them, two miles out into the bush, they seemed frightened. ‘Must be wild camels around,’ I informed Diggity, though I could see no tracks. On the way back, I stumbled on a deserted Aboriginal camp made of mulga branches and almost hidden by undergrowth.
I spent that night with the Liddles at Angus Downs station. They stuck me in the shower, fed me up and when I spoke of the previous night’s experience, Mrs Liddle said that you couldn’t put a pin between the ghosts around that camp.
Next morning, I fiddled with the pack, designed Zeleika an elastic nose-line hoping she would not hang back on it, put Bub back in the lead, and headed off for Curtin Springs, where I spent a couple of days trying to restuff Dookie’s saddle. The pack was not yet perfect.
After that the tourists became just too much, so I set a compass course for the Rock and headed off across the dunes. Trudging across that solidified sea of sand was exhausting me, so I decided to ride Bub. And then I saw the thing. I was thunderstruck. I could not believe that blue form was real. It floated and mesmerized and shimmered and looked too big. It was indescribable.
I slid down the sandhill and pushed Bub quickly across the valley through a forest of desert oaks and up the next incline. I held my breath until I could see it again. The indecipherable power of that rock had my heart racing. I had not expected anything quite so weirdly, primevally beautiful.
I entered the tourist village in the afternoon, and was met by the head ranger of this vast national park. A nice man, whose job was not as enviable as it appeared on the surface. He had to protect that delicately balanced country from an ever-increasing number of Australian and overseas tourists, who not only had no knowledge of desert ecology and the effect their very presence had on it, but who insisted on picking wildflowers, throwing cans out of their car windows, breaking trees for firewood, lighting fires where they had no business to and then not dousing them out, and driving off the perfectly good road leaving wheel ruts that would last for years. He offered me a caravan to rest in, which I accepted, showed me a good place to hobble the camels, and told me he wouldn’t mind if I later camped by the Olgas for a few days.
The great monolithic rock was surrounded by fertile flats for a radius of half a mile which, because of the added run-off water, were covered in lush green feed and wildflowers so thick you couldn’t step between them. Then the dunes began, radiating away as far as the eye could see, orange fading into dusty blue.
The bush fire had swept through this country too, which, although making it now look prettier and greener, I thought might cause problems with the camels. Many desert plants, when they first shoot up out of the ground looking so deliciously edible, protect themselves with various toxins. While I knew Zelly would know what to eat and what not to eat, I wasn’t too sure about the others. Many an early exploratory expedition had failed because camels had been poisoned. So that my animals wouldn’t stray too far, Zelly and Goliath now took turns at being tied from the hobbles, with a forty-foot rope, to some trees. This was because Zeleika was unequivocally the leader, and without her the others would go nowhere. But it also meant that she would not be there with them to teach them what to eat. I hoped that there was enough good feed around so they wouldn’t attempt anything new. They were in fact very careful about this, as I was to discover later.
I sat up on the first sandhill watching the gathering evening changing the bold harsh daylight colours to luminous pastels, then deeper to the blues and purples of peacock feathers. This was always my favourite time of day in that country — the light, which has a crystalline quality I have not seen in any other place, lingers for hours. The Rock did not disappoint me, far from it. All the tourists in the world could not destroy it, it was too immense, too forceful, too ancient to be corruptible.
There were very few of the Pitjantjara mob left here. Most had moved away to more private tribal areas, though a few remained to protect and look after what is an extremely important site in their mythic culture. They were making a meagre living by selling artefacts to the tourists. Uluru they called it. The great Uluru. I wondered how they could stand watching people blundering around in fertility caves, or climbing the white painted line up the side, and taking their endless photos. If it had me almost to the point of tears, how much more must it have meant to them. There was one miserably small fenced-off section on the western side which read, ‘Keep out. Aboriginal sacred site.’
I asked one of the rangers what he thought of the blacks. ‘Oh they’re all right,’ he replied, ‘they’re nuisance value more than anything else.’ I was coming to expect this, and there didn’t seem much point in stating the obvious, that it was the tourists who were the nuisance value — that they were invading sacred land that did not, could not ever, belong to them, and which they could not even begin to understand. At least the man did not despise them.
Rick arrived the next day, all bouncy and enthusiastic and full of energy. I had been out exploring and wandering through the bloodwood forests of the southern side. He announced that he had a surprise for me and led me back to the caravan. There on my bed, leg bandaged and crutches resting by the pillow, was my dear friend Jen. My initial reaction was one of great relief, surprise and happiness. The next one was a petty little voice saying to me, ‘Are your friends going to follow you all the way
?’ I did double takes like strobe lighting. Jenny, being an acutely sensitive person, read this in my face as clearly as if I had screamed it at her, although I tried desperately to hide it. It set the tone for the rest of that difficult day — a subtle intricate unspoken tension, which both of us preferred to take out on Rick, rather than each other.
Jenny had fallen off her bike at Utopia and had lain in the dust for some time, unable to move, staring at her own bones beneath her ripped flesh. This had naturally enough set off several shock waves and dwellings upon the frailty of human life, from which she had not yet recovered. She was not up to handling the conflicting emotions that reverberated through the caravan that night like drums in a canyon. None of us was.
Rick showed us the slides of the departure from Alice on his projector. We sat there, Jen and I, like those sideshow clown heads — mouths open, heads swivelling. They were gorgeous photos, no complaints there, but who was that Vogue model tripping romantically along roads with a bunch of camels behind her, hair lifted delicately by sylvan breezes and turned into a golden halo by the back-lighting. Who the hell was she? Never let it be said that the camera does not lie. It lies like a pig in mud. It captures the projections of whoever happens to be using it, never the truth. It was very telling, to see how the batches of images changed radically as the trip progressed.
At first, I found it difficult to talk, to tell them anything, because it seemed that nothing much had in fact happened to me. I had just walked down a road leading a few camels, that’s all. But as we sat together that night, in the heavy air of the caravan, my brain started to crack open, spewing forth bits of cement and chicken wire and I knew that the trip was responsible. It was changing me in a way that I had not in the least expected. It was shaking me up and I had not even noticed. It had snuck up from behind.
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