Months passed after that journey. Chance threw me together with her from time to time, at Kintore, in the shadow of Mount Leisler, or at Kiwirrkurra, beneath lead-grey skies. I would spot her from far away, her little black-clad figure coming towards me, head tilted upwards, gazing through her permanently narrowed, squinting eyes. Often she would ask me for eyedrops, and sometimes I would even be able to help.
“What’s this one?” she would always say, angling her face right up to the clouds, and I would consult the label, and answer: “Phenylephrine hydrochloride – not for use when wearing soft contact lenses – but I think we’re probably OK on that front, aren’t we, Janie?”
Her eyes, which were black and bloodshot, would blink wildly, she would grimace as each drop splashed onto her irises, then smile her wide smile, and walk away.
“Yes, those eyes,” said the nurse in Kiwirrkurra. “She suffers from inward-growing eyelashes. It’s not that uncommon here. Every time she blinks, the sharp hairs sweep across her eyeballs, and cause her agonising pain. I don’t know how she can bear it. I pluck them whenever I can, but she’s impossible: she always vanishes. In fact, overall, her health isn’t great: diabetes beginning, kidney problems, acute respiratory infections. I don’t think the binge drinking in town does much good, either.”
“Binge drinking?” I said, appalled. “That can’t be so!”
“Why not – just because she’s an old traditional desert woman, lost in the Dreamtime, and so she couldn’t possibly have such dreadful modern habits? She’s not the only one like that. She’s unusual in other ways, though. I heard a story I’ll tell you. I can’t really believe it’s true – it must have been improved on, but what desert story isn’t? Apparently she got marooned a few years ago in Alice Springs, she had no money, and wanted to get back to the lands.”
“A mere thousand-kilometre journey.”
“Absolutely – and she walked it: right across the open desert. She just headed out of Alice Springs, west, towards the sunset, and turned up in Warburton a few weeks later, a little footsore, but otherwise quite well. What do you think of that for a walkabout?” We both glanced over at the little figure: she was close by, hunched over on the verandah of a nearby house, lost on the margins of a card-game.
Shortly after this discussion, the time of the Olympic Games came round, and Janie and the other desert women travelled to Sydney to dance in the opening ceremonies, which had been conceived grandly, with the aim of presenting Australia’s indigenous culture to the world. While they were in town, I wanted very much to repay their many acts of hospitality. I arranged to meet them all during a break between their stadium rehearsals, and at the appointed time I found them amidst the heavy crowds at Circular Quay. After some diversions, I took them to lunch in a restaurant on the top floor of the Customs House, from which there was a fine view of the Bridge and Opera House. It was the best the east coast of Australia had to offer: I hoped it would make a favourable impression. Janie sat beside me: but she and the other desert women paid scant attention to the spectacle before them, and consulted their menus with disappointed eyes. I read through the options, and explained them in some detail: vichyssoise, gazpacho, chive and coriander salads.
“Grass – all grass,” said Janie, dismissing these vegetal options.
Through the plate-glass windows before us, the sun gleamed on the harbour; the ferries and hydrofoils churned and slid into dock.
“Meat, then?”
Janie brightened.
“Aberdeen Angus steak, char-grilled to perfection …”
“What?”
I translated – there had been cows, briefly, in the 1950s, at War-burton mission: “Bullock.”
Janie nodded in connoisseurial style.
“Any malu?”
“They don’t seem to serve kangaroo here.”
“Outside?” asked Janie, gesturing with her lips to indicate the teeming cityscape, as if hoping that some small pocket of native bush had survived amidst the high-rise towers, and big reds might be grazing untroubled there.
“Have a look,” she insisted. “You got a .22?”
“One’s not really encouraged to carry shotguns, you know, these days, Janie, here in the centre of the city.”
The meat came, grilled to perfection: the ladies tried it, and picked at it politely. After a while, Janie strode to the window, and stared out across the harbour, her arms clasped behind her back.
“Plenty kapi,” she said, at last, in judgment.
“You’re right, Janie,” I could only agree. “It is a very big waterhole indeed.”
*
Much bigger than the desert wells we were bound for that afternoon, as the troop-carriers pushed over dune-crests and stony ridges, past stands of red mallee and bloodwood – but by this stage, as we drove, Esmee had begun making slight gestures in my direction, which I was quite unable to decode. They grew larger, wilder: eventually, she tapped my arm.
“Maybe you should stop writing down notes you won’t be able to read later, and pay attention now,” she said. “We’re moving from secular to sacred space.”
“We are?”
The landscape looked unchanged: then I realised that the sound coming through the walkie-talkie had shifted. In the front Toyota, the men were singing ancestral chants. Their voices would rise, then gradually fall away towards each verse-end, only to rise again, the cycle repeating, so that one was lifted up on a surge of sound, then cast down in wave-like fashion. Gradually, in our troop-carrier, the desert people gathered round me began singing too, the low, deep songs of the Tingari cycle – tales of the creation beings, wandering heroes whose travels shaped the sand-dune landscape, and whose movements can be traced, like so many pulses, or shimmers of light, upon the elusive surface of Western Desert paintings. That afternoon, though, the Tingari were not spirits, or distant, half-imagined figures: they were there, close beside us, marching in the groves of trees, in rock formations on ridge-lines; their leader was calling up his armies as their long march from the north-west coastline drew closer to its goal – and all around me, as they pressed close beside us, the faces were taut, the eyes gazing out were clear.
This mood lasted all through our slow navigation round the stony shoulder of a breakaway, until we came towards a grey salt-lake bed. Suddenly, with the speed of a cloud passing before the sun, things shifted once more. The troop-carriers stopped. There was silence. All the desert people got out. Slowly, without any words spoken, they arranged themselves, cross-legged. A young woman sat to one side and began to wail: her sobs were taken up by the others. For several minutes, this lament continued; the sun beat down onto the lake’s surface, onto the twisted shrubs and saltbush; the heat haze around us shook.
Time slowed for me; those moments passed like hours; all hope and life had leached out of the desert world – and when the sun dropped at last below the sandhills, and we moved off, I felt that sharp grief still had a hold of me: I scarcely registered the kangaroo hunt in the dying light that evening, the racing chase, the shots, the blood. There were campfires; the soft talk flowed around me in the dark. I slept fitfully, aware of a constant rustling in the bush beside my swag – and even as dawn broke, I opened my eyes. There was a figure bending over me. “You must have been cold, camped so far away from the rest of us. Maybe not such a good idea, in this dog country.”
It was the specialist from the Native Title Unit, Jan Turner. Her hair was tousled by the wind and sand. Her face was soft in the first light. She perched on the end of my swag, with the air of a hostess at a party, doing the rounds, and she was, in truth, the animating figure of the journey, and I had been watching her in wonder all through the drive the day before, as her attention moved amidst the cast of characters.
“You seemed distracted yesterday,” she said. “Are you travelling alright?”
I sipped the tea she held out, and tried to put in words some of the ideas that had come to me: how little of what I was seeing I could take in with my eyes
; how much, out in the desert, in such company, one’s feelings weighed.
“Of course,” said Jan. “You come to realise you know next to nothing; and you can anticipate nothing. One doesn’t always need to know. Knowledge is an overrated commodity.”
“That,” I laughed, “coming from an anthropologist!”
We sat together for a while, and Jan smiled at some stray thought, then began reminiscing, and talking about herself. She had been brought up beside the Burrup Peninsula, on the hard north-west coast of Western Australia, where the iron-ore terminals and salt-ponds stretch to the horizon. Her family background was in geology and engineering: when she branched out into the study of man, it was a distinctive choice. Her first field experience was at Kalumburu, the remote mission in the north Kimberley, by the mouth of the King Edward River. The time there was dark, and she moved on to Roebourne, another place for those with a strong stomach for human suffering. Some years passed before she found her way to the Gibson Desert.
“I still remember the first times, coming out here,” she said, “on those early surveys, into this country – the sense of joy, and the lightness, once we were beyond the established tracks. I felt I was finding things as well as leaving things behind. My picture of the people I was working with began to change. I looked at them, all the people I imagined I had contact with on an intimate level, people who are your friends too – Mrs Davies, Mr Giles, John Ward – and I came to see that I knew no more than a small part of their being, and only if I travelled with them into the landscape where they were born, and where they once lived, would I even begin to gain a sense of their true stature. I went much deeper into the desert – but eventually I realised there are limits to everything.” Then she told me the story of her keen interest in a particular men’s site, between Lake Amadeus and Warakurna, which formed a kind of terminus for many of the Western Desert’s most potent ancestral tracks. One day, she was on a light aircraft bound southwest from Kiwirrkurra to Warburton, and it became apparent to her that the plane would pass over this Grand Central of the sand-dunes. At her side was an old desert man, who told her how much he wished she could at least glimpse what they were overflying.
There the site was, looming ahead: it was no more than a low white rock-slab, with dark stain-marks on its sides. They flew nearer; nearer. The desert man placed his hands upon her temples, and clasped them tight, and guided her gaze as she stared down – then, at the last second, when they were almost directly above, swiftly, gently, he turned her head away.
*
When the packing was done, we took our places for the next leg. This time I was careful to sit next to Mrs Giles, in the vague hope that she might give her husband some news of me, when at last he came back from his medico-magical journeyings far away. The cavalcade of dogs and children jumped in; we jolted off, through plains of orange spinifex. My view, though, was blocked by a young, fragile-seeming kangaroo dog, which stayed alert, standing, or trying to remain on its feet, staring through the windows of the troop-carrier, whining gently and dribbling on my knee.
“Who’s this?” I said eventually, in some exasperation, after a couple of hours of this performance.
“New dog,” replied Mrs Davies, who was opposite me, raising her voice over the sacred songs on the walkie-talkie.
“What happened to the old ones? Where’s my favourite, Sister Girl?”
This was a faux pas. Mrs Davies frowned, and glanced off to one side.
“Passed away.”
“I’m sorry. And what about Mukul, that little black puppy that had such awful sarcoptic mange?”
“Mukul here,” she said, pointing at a placid, healthy creature curled up beside her ankles.
“He’s made a remarkable recovery.”
“This one’s my dog,” Mrs Giles broke in, stroking the back of the sleek animal before me, which had now placed its jowl upon the angle of my neck and was licking my skin with attentive thoroughness.
“And what’s it called?”
“You remember Starboy?”
“How could I forget?”
Starboy was the sombre, malevolent and murderous beast that accompanied Mr Giles everywhere on his professional rounds: a kangaroo dog so fierce it never failed to kill, and so self-involved it pursued no interaction of significance with the human domain.
“And this one,” said Mrs Giles, with a little note of pride, “is Trudy: Starboy’s love-friend. She’s a young girl; she just arrived – from LA.”
I looked at Trudy with new interest.
“You bought her in Laverton?”
“We got her there.”
“And are they happy, she and Starboy?”
“Yes,” said Mrs Giles. “They’re married. Starboy’s much happier now. It was time for him.”
“Why? How old is he?”
“Starboy,” replied Mrs Giles with great precision, “is twenty-three.”
I turned this piece of information over, rather conscious of the odd question-and-answer routine one falls into with even one’s closest desert friends, until it occurred to me that canine marriages followed naturally along the lines laid down in the human order, and male dogs of force and authority should always have younger brides; and Mrs Giles and I successfully teased out these tricky points.
“Just one last thing,” I said. “I’ve always wondered how Star-boy got his name.”
But Mrs Giles, at this, assumed a very cryptic expression.
“He’s not really Starboy,” she said at last.
“He’s not?”
She leaned back, lips pursed, as though reviewing a set of complex mysteries.
“No – he’s got another name – but almost the same.”
“And where does the other name come from?”
At which, with an air of great finality, she leaned forward to me.
“From before,” she said. “Early days.”
Some kilometres on, after a hard passage, we pulled up beside a deep-red outcrop.
“It’s no accident, of course,” said Jan, coming up to me, in a conspiratorial whisper, “that we’ve been talking about dogs all morning. This is still very much dog country: there are Dreaming sites along here everywhere.”
“But I was just talking about the kangaroo dogs,” I said.
“Sometimes, you know, a dog can just be a dog.”
“Another one over there,” said Mrs Giles, overhearing this, and she pointed at a little white stone poking from behind a screen of burnt grevilleas. She nodded in her most emphatic manner:
“From the Dreamtime.”
“You see,” said Jan, and she unfurled her field notebook joyfully.
And as we drove, the seminar unfurled: cliffs as dogs, trees as dogs, the moon man and his dog familiars. By the time the experts in the front compartment had launched into an intense discussion of the elusive Tingari, and their propensity to shape-shift, and even assume the guise of dogs, so that stray dingoes one encountered in the Dreaming landscape might often really be men, and indeed all species types should be regarded in a blurry, provisional perspective, my attention had begun to wander. There was a warm, acrid smell in the back, and it was getting quite strong. When I braced myself for a deep wash-away crossing, and put my hand upon a moist, yielding mass of brownish tissue close beside the rump of a mange-ridden, slumbering camp-dog, I began to look round more closely. The whole rear of the vehicle had been converted into a charnel-house, with bits of flayed and eviscerated kangaroo carcass lodged in nooks and crevices all around. There was a charred tail wedged in the back door lock-handle, and the desert women alongside me would lean over from time to time in mid-sentence and tear off a handy strip. A carbonised haunch was half-hidden by a swirl of tiger-print blankets and sand-impregnated swag-cloth, while a little skull, with a few stray scraps of burnt flesh still clinging to it, lay close by Janie on the jump-seat – and every now and then a dog would make a sly feint in the direction of one of these morsels, edging closer, sniffing, licking, until a loud
shout, and a fierce blow of retribution, restored order.
The sun was low when we reached the day’s destination. The men from the first Toyota walked with purpose up a bare hill. A spinifex fire was lit; its black smoke and oily flames rolled skywards. I went to one side, and looked on. The old men stood upon the crest, gazing out, singing loudly, urgently: there were tears on their cheeks; they gestured, they made imploring signs. I saw their figures dancing in the fire-distorted air, and tried, by some instinct, to stamp that scene, in all its details, upon my mind. But all I can see now is the figure of John Ward, in striped shirt, jeans and belt, and black, broad-brimmed hat, pointing outwards, shaking his outstretched hands towards the surrounding ranges – and as I call him back now from the vault of time, I feel myself overcome.
*
He was a man of high degree: complete in himself, and certain of his world. I have walked at his side into gatherings of desert men, far from his own country, and seen the crowds make way at his approach. I have driven with him between the sites round Karilwara, and heard him singing like some romantic bard to each desert oak and each landscape fold. And I have watched him scan the skies, standing, reading the cloud patterns, calling them forth with his graceful hands. He was the rainmaker of the Western Deserts, and it may be because of these responsibilities, this involvement with absence and desire, that his mind possessed a distinct streak of fantasy. On first encounter, his bearing was austere; it seemed to murmur of concealed ceremonies and the shining peaks of law. But there was a fond, soft aspect to his character, which lay close to the surface, and gave him, for all his majesty, an open, child-like air.
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