Tracks

by Robyn Davidson

  God knows, it was a simple enough statement of fact, but it had an effect on me. From that one conversation my obsession with Rick and Geographic, and my anger with them, began to fade.

  The time spent there was so pleasant, so relaxing, and I was learning such a lot that I was sorely tempted to stay for the rest of the year, for the whole of summer in fact, then continue on my way when the cool weather returned. There were so many things to weigh up. For a start, I had arranged to meet Rick in Warburton, and anyway, what would Geographic say? I didn’t care much. But the feed was not all that good here, and the camels were mainly eating a particular bush which gave them horrid green diarrhoea. And I felt restless and wanted to push on and this eventually outweighed the pleasure of being with people I cared for.

  Eddie was sticking to two things like glue. Me and my rifle. His eyesight was terrible so he could not have used it very well, but the gun never left his side. I had radioed Rick and arranged to have one the same brought out to Warburton. The old man would walk down with me to check the camels of an evening and he would carry the rifle on his shoulder and sing to himself. I felt, well, flattered I suppose, that he should want to look after me in this way. On one of these evenings we passed a group of women coming towards us. One skinny old lady in a faded dress ten sizes too big for her detached herself from the group and wandered over to about eight feet in front of us. Eddie squinted and then broke into a delighted grin. They shared a polite and obviously respectful exchange, eyes and mouths smiling at each other. I couldn’t understand what was said, but I imagined that she was some old and dear friend that he’d grown up with. We walked off and he continued to smile that special happy smile to himself. I asked him who it was, and he turned to me beaming, and said, ‘That was Winkicha, my wife.’ There was such pride and pleasure in his face. I had never seen that particular quality of love shown so openly between a man and wife before. It staggered me.

  That meeting between Eddie and his wife was the first insight in a series which made me realize that, contrary to what most white male anthropologists would have us believe, women hold a very strong position in Aboriginal society. While men and women have separate roles, necessitated by environment, these roles are part of a single function — to survive — and both are mutually respected. With their dexterous food-gathering, the women play a greater part in feeding the tribe than do the men, whose hunting might only bring in the occasional kangaroo. The women also hold their own ceremonies and play a large part in the protection of their land. These ceremonies exist parallel with the men’s but it falls to the men to be the enforcers of the ‘law’, and the caretakers of the ‘knowledge’, made manifest in sacred objects called ‘tjuringas’. If there is sexism amongst Aborigines today, it is because they have learnt well from their conquerors. The difference in status between black women in Alice Springs and black women here was unbelievable.

  I remember one story, which I have never had verified, but which rings true, concerning a myth belonging to some tribe in Western Australia. In the beginning, the women had everything. They had the power to procreate, they supported the tribe and kept them alive with their knowledge of bush foods, and they had a natural superiority. They also had the ‘knowledge’ which they kept hidden in a secret cave. The men conspired to steal this knowledge, so that things would be more balanced. (Now here comes the crunch.) The women heard of this, and instead of stopping them, realized that this was the way things had to go, for the sexes to remain in harmony. They allowed the men to steal this ‘knowledge’ which has remained in their hands until today.

  I asked Eddie if he would like to come with me to Warburton, the next settlement, two hundred miles to the west. I was bitterly disappointed when at first he didn’t seem to want to, protesting that he was too old for that sort of thing now. Besides, he didn’t have proper shoes, but that was no problem as I could easily get him a pair at the store. I did think he might be right about his age. He was very old, and I wondered if the twenty miles per day routine might prove too much for him. Of course, he could always ride Bub. When I voiced my doubts to Glendle, he laughed and assured me that Eddie could out-walk both of us. He also said he was certain the old man would come as he had noticed a definite twinkle in his eye at the suggestion, and he thought I was a most fortunate woman, as Eddie was a respected elder of the tribe. The next morning, Eddie came to tell me that he had decided to accompany me after all. He needed a few things so we went to the store to purchase them — new shoes and socks, and a tarpaulin for Winkicha while he was away. The store was typical, a small galvanized iron shed, selling the basics — tea, sugar, flour, the occasional fruits and vegetables, soft drinks, clothes, billy cans. It was refurbished with goods once every couple of weeks by a road-train or a light aircraft from Alice.

  On the following morning, we got ourselves ready for the walk to Warburton. I had discarded much of my junk at Pipalyatjara, so the pack was lighter and easier to load. This process of paring down possessions continued all the way through the trip, until I had only the barest of essentials. Glendle gave me packages of luxuries that he’d ordered from Alice, small plastic bags of white wine and extra packets of tobacco. Eddie took nothing but his tin of medicines. I had noticed from our time together on the track that he suffered from some pain in his shoulder. I put it down to arthritis but on the morning of our departure, while Glendle was sick in bed and Eddie and I were fiddling around outside the caravan making last-minute arrangements, an old man came up and spoke to him. They walked to a spot about fifty yards away, and in full view of myself and all the others who had gathered to say goodbye, Eddie bent over a 44-gallon drum, while the old man proceeded to wave his hands over him, rub his shoulder and so on. I went in to Glendle to ask what it was all about. He told me it was the nankari (Aboriginal doctor) fixing Eddie up for the trip. He told me he would probably suck a pebble from Eddie’s shoulder, which might have been ‘sung’ there by an enemy. Eddie returned in five minutes and produced the pebble that had been extracted.

  There are many cases of Aboriginal people who sicken and die because they believe they have been ‘sung’. When this happens, the ‘sung’ person must go to a nankari for treatment. That is his only hope.

  While it was impossible for me to leap outside the limitations imposed by my culture’s description of what is possible, I have no doubt whatever that nankaris have an equal amount of success in healing the sick in a tribal situation as do Western doctors in curing detribalized people. The more enlightened white health-workers are now working hand in glove with nankaris and midwives in trying to cope with the various diseases and ailments that affect Aboriginal people.

  Once again, all the checks and double checks and final adjustments necessary for departure had put me on overdrive, but five minutes out of the settlement, the calming rhythm of walking and the reassuring sound of the bells clanging behind, and Eddie’s presence, settled me down.

  We stopped in at Wingelinna to say goodbye to the people there, which took an hour or so. I was itching to get away, still caught in my Western nets, trying to fight them and having little success. At last all the farewells were completed and we began walking into the afternoon sun. We hadn’t gone a mile before a car pulled up with some young men — another half an hour. Itch itch itch. On again, then another car, and so on. Late in the afternoon, Eddie informed me he needed pituri, a tobacco-like plant that Aborigines chew. He pointed to a valley in the ranges a mile or two off the track. We walked in silence through the hushed, lush valley. Eddie picked the plants he wanted while I watched. The vague uneasiness and fidgetiness of having the projected pattern of the day rearranged was soon soothed by the meditative way in which we searched for them. This valley was so delicate, so silent, and we didn’t speak a word while we padded reverently through it. Once out of it, however, and back into the brutal afternoon sun which scorched my face, no matter how far I pulled my hat down, I again experienced that mental chafing at the bit. I tried hard to wrestle with it, pu
sh it out of my mind for good, but I was being torn by two different time concepts. I knew which one made sense, but the other one was fighting hard for survival. Structure, regimentation, orderedness. Which had absolutely nothing to do with anything. I kept thinking wryly to myself, ‘Christ, if this keeps up it will take us months to get there. So what? Is this a marathon or what? This is going to be the best part of your trip, having Eddie with you, so stretch it out, idiot, stretch it out. But but … what about routine …?’ and so on.

  The turmoil lasted all that day, but gradually faded as I relaxed into Eddie’s time. He was teaching me something about flow, about choosing the right moment for everything, about enjoying the present. I let him take over.

  After a few days, my Pitjantjara was improving but it was still useless in fast conversation. This didn’t seem to matter at all. It’s amazing how well one can communicate with a fellow being when there are no words to get in the way. Our greatest communication lay in the sheer joy in our surroundings. The sound of birds which he taught me to mimic, the gazing at hills, the laughter at the antics of the camels, the hunting for meat, the discovery of things to eat. Sometimes we would sing together or alone, sometimes we shared a pebble to kick down the road — all this was unspoken and perfectly clear. He would quietly chatter and gesticulate to himself and the hills and plants. Outsiders would have thought us on a par for craziness.

  We left the track that evening — Eddie had decided to take me through his country. For a week we wandered through that land, and Eddie seemed to grow in stature with every step. He was a dingo-dreaming man, and his links with the special places we passed gave him a kind of energy, a joy, a belonging. He told me myths and stories over and over at night when we camped. He knew every particle of that country as well as he knew his own body. He was at home in it totally, at one with it and the feeling began rubbing off on to me. Time melted — became meaningless. I don’t think I have ever felt so good in my entire life. He made me notice things I had not noticed before — noises, tracks. And I began to see how it all fitted together. The land was not wild but tame, bountiful, benign, giving, as long as you knew how to see it, how to be part of it. This recognition of the importance and meaning of Aboriginal land strikes many whites who work in that country. As Toly wrote in a letter recently:

  There is a peculiar power and strength in the country here which in many ways expresses itself in Aboriginal people and which I feel can belong to me too. It keeps unfolding and unfolding and is inexhaustible. What you make of it depends on you.

  I remember that time now as one of delightful calm. But it is a blur, it is undifferentiated. When I try to separate the days, I find that I cannot. I can remember certain incidents with crystal clarity, but when and where they happened I have not the faintest idea. I did discover, however, that the old goat could walk fifty miles to my ten. He gave me pituri to chew when I was tired which tasted unutterably foul but made me feel like running the next thousand yards, as if I’d smoked eighty cigarettes all at once. He made an ash from certain bushes which he mixed with the plant, so that it stayed in one glob when he chewed it. He would stick this glob behind his ear to be used later, like bubble gum. I offered him wine at night but he refused it, laughing, then acted out an old man being drunk. He told me to stick to my wine and he’d stick to his pituri.

  Eddie never interfered with the handling of the camels, which pleased me greatly. Camels are really one-man (woman) animals and don’t take to being ordered about by strangers. Besides, I treated them like glass, spoilt them and fussed over them, and I knew Eddie’s feelings towards them would not be nearly as sentimental as my own. The only time I got faintly titchy with the old man was when he insisted that I should whoosh down Bub so he could ride him for ten minutes, then whoosh him down so he could get off, then do the same thing a mile later. He got titchy in return because, no doubt, he couldn’t understand why anyone would have camels if they didn’t work them; which was quite reasonable but didn’t take into account the fact that they were adored pets rather than beasts of burden, in my eyes at least.

  At night, while I busied myself with unsaddling, Eddie would build us a temporary wind-break, a wilcha. This was done expertly and quickly with a minimum expenditure of energy. I think deft is the word. He would drag old trees into a semicircle or three sides of a rectangle, clear a space of prickles for us to sleep in, and build the warming fire. No matter how many blankets I gave him, he never put these over him, but underneath. And after our meal and our talk, he would make sure I was comfortable, virtually tucking me into my swag, then he would curl up, head on his hands and fall asleep. All through the night, he would wake up, check on me and restoke the fire. He accepted the junky food I had with me but would have loved, I know, a kangaroo half-cooked in the coals. This is a delicious meat, and it is cooked by first singeing the hair and rubbing it off, then burying it in a mixture of sand and coals and leaving it for an hour. The insides are still bloody and red, but the meat and the offal sweet and juicy. There are strict rules governing the killing and cooking of kangaroo, in fact of all desert foods. Stories abounded of people who broke the law, by not killing correctly, and suffered terrible accidents because of it.

  I had two knives with me, one for leather work and one for skinning and cutting up meat. Eddie asked me one day why I had two, when one would do. I explained to him that the sharp one, which I kept in my belt, was for game. ‘Marlu, kanyala,’ I said and mimed cutting meat. I swear the old man nearly had a heart attack. ‘Wiya wiya, mulapa wiya. Tsc tsc tsc tsc.’ He shook his head in horror. He then grabbed me by the hand and proceeded to tell me that I must never under any circumstances cut the meat of a kangaroo, or skin it, or take its tail. He repeated this over and over and I swore I would never do such a thing. And again that night, he made me promise that I would never break the law in this way. I reassured him. In any case it was extremely unlikely that I would shoot a kangaroo for myself. There was far too much meat for one person and a dog and I hated shooting these lovely animals. I shot at the many herds we passed to please Eddie, but missed every time. Rabbits I had no such qualms about. They had been introduced, along with flies, by Europeans, and were now in plague proportions destroying whole tracts of land. Although I thought rabbit the least edible of all the bush foods, Diggity and I ate it often. As far as I knew, there were no stringent rules applied to the hunting of rabbit, since it is an animal that did not come from the dreamtime.

  Unfortunately, it came time for us to cut back on to the road. We passed maybe one or two cars a day, and these mostly Aboriginal people visiting family and relations in the two settlements. It was nice to see the flip side of the coin. If ever a car of whites passed, Eddie surreptitiously and suspiciously stood beside the gun, just in case. If it was blacks, it was all laughter and talk and sharing up food or tobacco or pituri. We could usually tell if it was an Aboriginal car coming, because they invariably sounded like sick washing-machines. The process of selling broken-down second-hand cars to Aborigines at exorbitant prices in Alice Springs is a lucrative business. Luckily Aboriginal people are great bush mechanics and can usually keep them going on bits of string and wire. There was one story at Docker River, of a group of young men who bought a car in Alice, four hundred miles away, and halfway home the body of the car literally fell to pieces. They simply got out (all ten of them), took off their belts, tied it all together and drove happily home.

  Having Eddie with me was magic in terms of being accepted by Aboriginal people. Everyone knew Eddie, everyone loved him. And because he was there, and because I had camels, they loved me too. We stopped one day at a small camp by a bore, where there were maybe twenty people. We sat down together outside a humpy and talked for hours, drinking weak, cool super-sweet billy tea and chewing damper. Because I was the guest, I was given the tin mug to drink out of instead of sipping it straight from the billy like the others. The mug had been used for mixing flour and water so great clumps of the stuff floated around the top. It
didn’t matter. By now my attitude to food had changed utterly. Food had become something you put in your mouth to give you energy to walk, that’s all. I could eat anything, and did. Washing had become an unnecessary procedure by then too. I was putrid. Even Eddie, who was no sparkling example of cleanliness, suggested I should wash my face and hands one day. He was finickity about Diggity too, and refused to let her drink from his mug.

  Neither of us liked being on the road after our time in the wild country, because we had to deal once again with that strange breed of animal, the tourist. It was very hot one afternoon, stinkingly hot, and the flies were in zillions. I had the three p.m. grumps, Eddie was humming to himself. A column of red dust hit the horizon and swirled towards us, hurtling along at tourist speed. We swerved off into the spinifex, pincushions for feet were better than idiots at this hour of the day. But they saw us, of course, a whole convoy of them, daring the great aloneness together like they were in some B-grade Western. They all piled out with their cameras. I was irritated, I just wanted to get to camp and have a cuppa and be left in peace. They were so boorish, so insensitive, these people. They plied me with questions as usual and commented rudely on my appearance, as if I were a sideshow for their amusement. And perhaps I did look a little eccentric at that stage. I had had one ear pierced in Alice Springs the year before. It had taken months to work up the courage to participate in this barbaric custom, but once the hole was made, I wasn’t about to let it close over again. I had lost my stud, so put through a large safety pin. I was filthy and my hair stuck out from my hat in sun-bleached tangles and I looked like a Ralph Steadman drawing. Then they noticed Eddie. One of the men grabbed him by the arm, pushed him into position and said, ‘Hey, Jacky-Jacky, come and stand alonga camel, boy.’