Perhaps most disquieting of all, he has had dealings with the Ngyumpany-Ngyumpanya, thin, exiguous creatures who live in the underground kingdom and haunt desert people in their dreams. These beings surround the communities of the Gibson Desert; one of their strongholds is the Clutterbuck Hills, close by Patjarr, where Mr Giles often lives. On one occasion, they took Mr Giles down to their subterranean preserve, tied him up, split his chest open, opened up his skull, and in this way showed him “all their secrets”.
For the sceptics, there are several responses. First, Mr Giles and his fellow Maparnjarra, and the doctors and healers in other tribal groups across the desert, are not alone in their convictions. Mr Giles’s medical services are in constant and urgent demand, for acceptance of the reality of the spirit kingdom and of the potency of the old healing methods is nearly universal in the Gibson’s communities. If anything it is deepening, as though making a last stand, even as Western influences such as television and pop culture spread across traditional Aboriginal society.
A quick glance at a Ngaanyatjarra township like Warburton Ranges offers proof: the walls of buildings and the children’s playgrounds are graffitied with thousands of tiny stick figures – mamus, or little mischievous ghosts. Spirits, especially harmful, health-threatening ones, crop up constantly in conversation. The voluminous, recently published Ngaanyatjarra dictionary is replete with spooky vocabulary: invisible killers, avenging spirits, witches in profusion.
This belief system, which still governs most desert people’s view of nature, the relationship between living and dying, and the domains of happiness and health, reaches much further into everyday affairs than Western religions. It may be no coincidence that communities with strong surviving beliefs are often more functional than those where traditional practices have been disturbed. For the magic realm – Mr Giles’s realm – is not an optional extra that can be simply shorn away as desert Aboriginal society modernises. It is close to the core of that society, one of its most striking pieces of intellectual architecture, maybe even one of its lessons for humanity at large.
The idea that there are things of transcendent value lurking at the heart of the continent has been steadily gaining ground in recent years. A certain enthusiasm for the higher reaches of desert belief clearly underlies much of mainstream Australia’s appetite for Aboriginal art, while “spiritual tourism” is a growth business in the Centre; at least one adventure tour company includes a special visit to traditional healers.
The federal Department of Health and Ageing is pondering a formal study of the practices of Aboriginal medicine men; three similar research projects are already under way in Alice Springs. Books have been written, films made, papers prepared, and healers are now in regular attendance around Northern Territory hospitals, working in informal tandem with orthodox medical services.
Given this broad interest in the Maparnjarra’s craft and a growing acceptance of its effectiveness, it’s striking how few Western observers familiar with Aboriginal healing truly believe the doctors can do what they say they do: suck blood, sticks and stones from their patients’ bodies. Yet this scepticism often sits alongside an uneasy acceptance that the Maparnjarra know things we can’t imagine; that there really is, just as there seems to be, a grandeur and a strangeness to their world.
Alice Springs scientist Peter Latz, an expert on traditional plant medicines who grew up on Hermannsburg mission among Aranda people, puts the bleakly rationalist view, at least at first: “They’re magicians, just like Western magicians, and they work on people the same way. Sometimes, when they do treatments, the patient has been sleep-deprived for two days, and in that state you’ll believe anything. Bear in mind that new-age healers also have a reasonable success rate: half of all disease is psychologically influenced. In Aboriginal thought, any serious illness was always considered to be the result of bad magic, and when you come from that framework, it’s very easy to work on psychological mechanisms.”
And yet Dr Latz remembers meeting old medicine men of great ability, healers who had spent years training in the bush, cultural purists who rejected European ways, refused to put Christianity before Law, to drink, smoke, or even speak English (on all these points of the Maparnjarra index, Mr Giles qualifies superbly). “Don’t get me wrong,” says Latz, “there are some things that go on in Aboriginal communities that are inexplicable in terms of present-day science. Let’s say it’s 80 per cent trickery and 20 per cent something else. When I think of the old doctors, I think of how I used to go down to camp, sometimes, at Her-mannsburg, and hear wailing begin; they would know someone had died, at a great distance, and they’d be right. I’ve witnessed that precognition.”
Longtime Western Desert anthropologist David Brooks, who has a special interest in the field, shares this mixed attitude. He recognises a particular, haunting tone about Mr Giles, whom he knows well: “Mr Giles has a sort of sensuous quality. When he touches you, you can feel something more than when most people touch you. The feelings I’ve had have surprised me. He’s got a mesmeric aspect. He’s clearly a man with a very strong psychic capacity. He would have some sort of intuition. There’s quite a few people like that in the desert. More Aboriginal people have these qualities than we do.”
Yet Brooks tends to doubt that Mr Giles can really pluck sticks and stones from a sick patient’s body. “In a way the removal of stones by the doctor is just the mechanism, in the same way that tarot cards are a framework through which special intuitive qualities in our world are recognised.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is medical personnel, faced by the baffling problems of Aboriginal health, who endorse the effectiveness of the treatment techniques of the Maparnjarra men. Remote area nurse Elke Zalfen, who worked alongside Mr Giles for two years at Patjarr community, also feels the blood-sucking, stick-removal routines are psychological tricks which in recent years have become more prominent in the repertoire because of their spectacular appeal. But that’s pretty much where her reservations end. “Mr Giles can help people with both physical and psychosomatic problems. I always found patients I couldn’t help would go to see him; the belief in his work is so strong they would instantly feel better. With young guys who had been petrol-sniffing and were very angry, he would treat them with a strong effect, producing a remarkable transformation into peace and happiness that lasted for days. In settling disputes, or when someone’s worried, or distressed, he has an amazing, calming energy.”
Like other bush nurses, Zalfen has extraordinary tales of Mr Giles’s intuition: how he took one look at a burned patient everyone assumed was dying and correctly predicted that he would live; how he regularly diagnosed internal organ problems in mystifying cases, and how those verdicts were always subsequently confirmed by ultrasound.
What’s the secret? Zalfen is a student of Reiki, a Japanese healing art, and detects parallels between the craft of the Maparn-jarra and other schools of non-Western medicine such as Native American or Buddhist healing. “I believe Mr Giles is working with energies,” she says. “When he diagnoses, he rubs his hands together to sensitise the palms so as to pick up disturbances in energy. His technique is to scan the body so as to pinpoint problems. I think he can see the aura, or energy field, around the body.”
Zalfen has often studied Mr Giles in action. She has seen how, before a treatment, he, like Reiki therapists, clears his body’s meridian lines and draws on a universal energy. “It enters him, and then he goes and heals; and I’ve noticed that afterwards he clears his body of the bad presences. To me, it’s plain he becomes a channel – harnessing a serene power, distributing wellness through the balancing of positive energies. I think people like Mr Giles are people you can trust – and that it’s important for the human race, for belief, to have such figures.”
Mr Giles is largely unaware of all this outside agonising over the nature and extent of his capabilities. These days, his chief preoccupation is a familiar one in desert Aboriginal society: finding reliable transport – to be sp
ecific, a Toyota troop-carrier that could serve as an ambulance so he can travel about remote Western Australia like the scores of obscure bureaucrats who seem to be in perpetual shuttling motion down bush tracks.
It’s at least arguable that no single reform would do more to improve psychological and spiritual wellbeing in the Gibson than a scheme to provide Maparnjarra services. Mr Giles has even, rather whimsically, helped design his preferred vehicle: roo bar for those late-night mercy dashes, roof-rack for swags, red hand-print (“my hand”) instead of red cross on the side. For the role of Maparnjarra carries with it obligations: to share oneself, to treat, to be on hand at the side of illness.
Like other men of traditional power, Mr Giles feels his lack of mobility and fears that unless he can be present by turns in all the communities of his language group wherever sickness strikes, the wellbeing of the world he is responsible for will gradually wither away. Behind this concern is a wider, graver one: how to maintain belief in the deep wellsprings of traditional life when one lives in a domain so buffeted by outside influences?
I spent the last days of my spell in the desert with Mr Giles watching, recovering, listening, my impressions deepening, until the wet weather came and it was time, before the sand-dune roads became impassable, to flee the onrush of the storms. I drove out east through the desert country and as I went I found my thoughts returning constantly to the Maparnjarra man, and that first evening when the sun was dipping below the hills. I saw him as if he was still before me in his world, so near at hand, so far away. When someone has called up the energies of the universe for you, and seen through you with his hidden eye, how can things ever be quite the same again?
The Black Screen
“FILMING – IT’S LIKE BEING SPEARED,” exclaims Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek, ceremonial master of the stone country in West Arnhem Land, grimacing at the camera for a new documentary, Fragments of the Owl’s Egg. A few sequences later, he is sitting before one of the rock-art sites that choke his country, smoking a Winfield Blue with great commitment and explaining the principles of cinema to the ancestor spirits: “Old people! Are you angry that we are here? You don’t need to be – we are showing the paintings for these white people to record. They get ‘pictures’ that can capture our likeness: these are like a reflection on water, or a shadow that we cast …”
Similarly, at the close of Ten Canoes, Rolf de Heer’s landmark 2006 film from the Arafura wetlands, veteran Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil’s wry, dry narrating voice takes a step back from the ancient myth-tale of revenge and law that has just been acted out before us by his relations, and seeks to bridge the gap between life and screen. “Now you’ve seen my story,” he says, as the camera pans, and the light plays on the paperbark trees. And then, with understatement: “It’s a good story. Not like your story, but a good story all the same.”
And in the climactic scene of the highly praised Yella Fella, a lacerating filmed self-portrait, actor Tom E. Lewis breaks the propulsive f low of his journey narrative and turns to face the audience. Abruptly, every code of cinematic distance and polite racial discretion is pulverised, as he glances round the Tennant Creek cemetery by nightfall and sums up, in tears, a life of hurts and rejections by both sides of his heritage: “I’m not black, I’m not white – I’m a yellow fella, and I’m gonna stay that way!”
Unusual transactions are taking place between Aboriginal people and the movie camera these days – as these three new films, all from remote Arnhem Land, and each in its particular fashion revolutionary, indicate. Indigenous Australians, for so long excluded from the continent’s history, then, perhaps a generation back, brought cautiously in from the margins as colourful bit-players, are no longer mere objects, gleaming in all their fascinating difference at the centre of the visual field. With remarkable rapidity, they have become subjects: they no longer simply dance, or act their lines. They make films, or shape them; they speak from their own perspectives. For mainstream audiences, it is no longer a question of invading their world: Aboriginal directors and cultural brokers are themselves representing it and showing it to us. This trend is connected to the fast-paced emergence of indigenous people as the cultural emblems of Australian identity – and film is very much the new frontier here.
It has taken barely a generation to go from the first significant, sympathetic depiction of an indigenous presence in the movies – the young David Gulpilil as the elusive desert boy in Nic Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) – to today’s ambitious, exploratory, Aboriginal-haunted productions. In part this is because of the breakdown of the barriers of geography, and the increasing centrality of the cinema and the televisual in modern lives. In part it is because of the profound affinity between indigenous cultural patterns and film. Remote communities in Northern and Central Australia have a tendency always to seem like stage-sets, full of beauty and picturesque squalors: life there is performative, rich in drama, shimmer, the flicker of enacted momentary events. The marriage between the camera and the indigenous world, first explored by pioneer anthropologists, and long spiced with eager voyeurism, has not been a difficult one to consummate. The relationship, though, has undergone rapid political and aesthetic change. A glance in time’s rear-view mirror shows how steep the learning curve, for both sides, has been.
Just thirteen years ago, indigenous intellectual Marcia Langton prepared an urgent manifesto for the Australian Film Commission, laying bare the habits of the time, and dissecting the place of black Australians in the movies.
“Can we decolonise our minds?” she wondered, as she allowed her thoughts to drift over classics of the epoch, like Crocodile Dundee, in which the hero has such intense understanding of the natives that he can sneak off for a quick night-time corroboree while his American bride-in-waiting slumbers peacefully beside a scenic billabong.
Attitudes to Aboriginal people, though changing fast, were still laden down then with stereotypes. Above all, indigenous ways of being and thinking were constantly judged from the mainstream perspective. Radical anthropologist John von Sturmer wrote a celebrated essay in those days: “Aborigines, representation, necrophilia.” He argued that Aboriginal societies were seen as beyond the pale, because of their alarming excessiveness, their appetites, their mesmerising refusal to accept limits. He felt a destructiveness was still being directed at indigenous people: they were treated as spectacle, as tableau. Ideal, in fact, for film. Hence the crucial importance of the reversal in recent years that has seen the tone of Australian films about Aboriginal themes, and even the control of the camera, shift.
Many factors have gone into this: some trite, some profound. The coming of native title has required an exhaustive public discussion of the roots of Aboriginal identity; intermarriage has been a striking social trend; the Sydney Olympics canonised Cathy Freeman as popular Australia’s sporting icon; Aboriginal art has become the nation’s favourite investment vehicle and international badge of culture.
All this has meant a vast infiltration of the Aboriginal: an increase in visibility, leading to familiarity. Indigenous actors, dancers, sportsmen and performers all fill the public space. Above all, an urban Aboriginal creative class now exists, and has begun its own momentous investigation of the traditional world of the remote Centre and North. This has resulted in a new current of art and film, drenched both in longing and in deep, sundered sadness.
Thus, in the blink of an eye, Aboriginal Australians have walked out from the realm of myth and legend; they have gone from the gloomy surveillance of anthropology into the sunshine of story. It is an epic journey that can be traced best in the cinema, and seen in several strands.
First, in the wake of Walkabout, came a series of indigenous-accented films, looking back into Australian history, or recapturing the Aboriginal presence in modern life. Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, which starred young Arnhem-Lander Tom E. Lewis, and Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, another production where Gulpilil played a cryptic, cameo role incarnating difference, both appeared i
n the late ’70s, and unleashed a cascade of successors. The first overtly political black films, made by partisans of the land rights movement, were shown in the same era, while a current of gritty “realist” films with Aboriginal themes was inaugurated by Phil Noyce’s Backroads. This involvement of the country’s best mainstream directors, then early on in their careers, suggests the ferment of the scene in those times.
The next wave came in the ’90s: native title and the social crisis unfolding in remote communities were filling the headlines when the desert thriller Dead Heart, set in an ultra-dysfunctional remote community and starring Bryan Brown and Ernie Dingo, had its first release in 1996. Indigenous film-makers were also making distinctive works: by the millennium, Rachel Perkins and Ivan Sen were well into their careers. In this way, a twin pressure was changing the image of the Aborigine on screen. For young Aboriginal directors had their own way of looking, and of seeing the indigenous world: artist Tracey Moffatt offered up a critical remake of Jedda, the old Charles Chauvel Aboriginal melodrama, as early as 1990; Sen began a series of atmospheric road movies, while Perkins made One Night the Moon, an evocative ballad-musical exploring ideas of race.
As the Dreamtime stereotype died, and Australia’s murky frontier history came more vividly alive, mainstream film-makers also began finding high drama in indigenous stories, and started to take great pains to ensure correct consultations with Aboriginal actors and communities who had custodianship of the tales they wished to treat. Phil Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence of 2002, a stolen generation drama from the Pilbara, was widely seen and praised; Rolf de Heer’s Tracker, also a hunt drama, also made in the same year, told the story of a native tracker aiding in the brutal pursuit of an Abori ginal fugitive. These were poignant, understated films, in which the depth of the lead indigenous character “tracking” his quarry (Gulpilil, in both movies) through the landscape was as striking as his unknowable remoteness. And these films, by their acceptance of a central role for their Aboriginal actors, by their love for the indigenous face, and way of being in country, and even by the simple way this was conveyed, and admired, said much about the new cultural climate.
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