At night-time, throughout that journey to Yankaltjunku, I would hear his voice drifting from the fires where the desert men had camped. He was singing, instructing, telling the ways between remote waterholes.
It seemed logical, on several days of the expedition, for me to ride with him, as I had on earlier trips. We had even developed an odd greeting ritual for the moment when we first saw each other after long intervals: I would press his hand to my forehead, and he would then seize my palm, or the back of my hand, and kiss it fervently. I am at a loss now to say how the custom began, or where Mr Ward had come across this unusual form of welcome, though I cannot entirely resist the idea that perhaps he once saw on television some old French costume drama depicting the court manners of Versailles in the days of the Sun King, and absorbed the hand-kiss as a standard gesture of the worlds beyond the desert. This exchange of ours doubtless spoke richly of misreading and confusion, but it was my hope that I could give him in this way some sign of the feelings that woke inside me whenever I came back to the desert and caught sight of him – love, regard, an inner warmth.
So it was a dark moment when, some months later, my satellite phone rang, just as I was passing by a Coalition air base in the north Iraqi city of Kirkuk. It was Esmee’s voice, low, down an unsteady, crackling line. A pair of Blackhawk helicopters flew overhead; the wind in their wake swept past.
“It’s Mr Ward,” I heard her saying. “He’s had a stroke. You might want to call him …”
She gave me the numbers for the hospital; the line broke. We transferred, at high speed, across town, to the compound of the Kurdish regional government. We passed the tank-traps and the guard-posts; we went down concrete corridors, across courtyards, into a reception room with blacked-out windows. It was full of refugees and wounded soldiers. I dialled the number.
“Kalgoorlie hospital: how may I direct your call?”
There was a degree of misunderstanding.
“We don’t actually have a ward of that name. We’ve got an A Ward, and a B Ward. It’s a very bad line, mate: where are you calling from?”
“Kirkuk.”
“In Iraq? For real? I love that war on terror stuff! How’s it going? Are you under fire?”
“Might be,” I said, glancing round, and feeling all the eyes on me.
Our Peshmerga bodyguards were stretched out on the faded armchairs; my photographer had undone his bullet-proof jacket, and was starting to prowl about.
“Fantastic! Must be exciting.”
“It’s not really the adjective that comes most immediately to mind.”
“So who did you want again? Hang on.”
I found myself talking to a young nursing sister.
“He’s not too good,” she said.
“But will he make a good recovery?”
“What was that? – I couldn’t hear you. Oh – look, it’s hard to say, with these traditional people. He was in the Dreamtime anyway, wasn’t he? I’ll tell you one thing, for sure: he doesn’t want to settle. I’ll put him on.”
“Mr Ward,” I was about to say – but down the line his voice began speaking, singing, chanting. The sound was deep, and rhythmic. I listened for several minutes, through the interference, cradling the phone to my ear as the music of his words ran on, circling, repeating. For a moment, he would hesitate, or break, stammer – then the song flowed onwards, I was drowsily caught up with it, I was there again, on the road to Yankaltjunku, on the jump-seat of the Toyota, clinging on, with Mr Ward beside me, beckoning to each landmark as we drove, singing into the walkie-talkie as though his voice alone could breathe life into that silent world.
*
“Have you given much thought to the water situation?” I said in a low voice, a couple of mornings on, to Dianna, who was riding in the back of the last Toyota with me, as we edged over a set of sharp gullies and up onto a ridge with bleak views of burnt desert on both sides.
She closed her notebook, in which she had been dutifully recording GPS references and odd scraps of information vouchsafed by the women sitting round us: the trees and their promiscuity, their tendency to move by night-time, how the finest, long-leaved desert oaks were really warriors with combed-out hair.
“I’ve been thinking of nothing else for the last few hours,” she said, a little frown-mark making its appearance on her forehead, her air of eighteenth-century reserve and self-possession giving way an instant.
“But there’s something new worrying me now: we seem to have headed off from the rest of the group. Their tracks went straight at that last range, and we’ve gone round. We’re actually bound in the opposite direction.”
She leaned forward, and yelled up to the front: “Can we call the others on that walkie-talkie?”
“No answer, Inyalangka,” the men shouted back after a few unavailing experiments.
“We’re running out of water,” she called back. “They’ve got the full jerry-cans. We need to be in touch with them.”
“No worries,” the shout came back. “Might be we’ll find some of our own.”
The women round us nodded sagely, as if this was the least problematic of plans. Dianna and I fell into a slightly distracted discussion of the trip, and our initial impressions.
“Of course,” I said, “it’s one thing, knowing that a landscape is full of sites, and tracks, that there’s a hidden net cast over the whole topography. And it’s something else entirely to drive through the country and see one’s friends thrown into transports of joy and pain, and fear and ecstasy, just because of the place in the desert where they find themselves. It’s as if we’re in the middle of some constant group psychoanalytic session, and everyone around us is being rocked by mental storms.”
“Emotional storms,” said Dianna. “Storms of the soul and spirit. I think they’re the lucky ones, who don’t need to dream to experience that.”
“And do you think maybe that was why you came into this world? It’s always seemed very attractive to me – to study people whose feelings are less buried and coded: to hotwire oneself, and have them do all the work of living. I rather like the idea of the anthropological moment.”
“The anthropological moment?” Dianna echoed.
“Yes – when the truth floods in from another person. Perhaps it doesn’t ever happen in conventional life.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? Isn’t that one reason why we all come out here – to be swept away, to feel vicariously? Sometimes I almost think that’s why Australia allows Aboriginal people to keep on living in remote communities, among all the horror and the sadness – so they can go through their passionate lives, and suffer for us, and redeem the complacency of our world, and purify the air we breathe that’s so thick with empty language and recycled images.”
“You know,” said Dianna, “I’m having a little trouble staying in the anthropological moment right now!”
“Why? Are you allowing yourself to dwell on the minor detail that we’re alone in the middle of an empty desert, without water or conceivable means of finding any, and completely out of contact, in a troop-carrier full of old traditional people who haven’t been in this country for twenty years?”
“That kind of thing,” said Dianna, smiling at Janie, who was sitting, almost swamped by clambering camp dogs, between the two of us. But at that moment the Toyota swerved down a sudden slope. Janie and the other women round us jumped out.
“Rockhole,” she said, sitting down cross-legged beside a small, dust-filled cavity, and I felt my heart beat faster from excitement and relief.
We watched. Janie dug. Minutes passed. The other women tried in turns. They were six feet down when they stopped.
“Nothing,” they declared.
“So – what now?”
Janie shrugged, and made the sign to carry on.
We drove for several hours, through featureless terrain. The sun’s heat was already weakening when we stopped again, beside a red rock prominence.
“Where
are we?” I asked the men.
“That’s Yankaltjunku, right over there,” they said, in tranquil fashion, pointing to a mesa system in the middle distance.
“That’s where we’re going? We’re not lost? Then why don’t we go straight there? You know we really need to find some water.”
“I think,” said Dianna, beside me, in her most even, expository voice, “that we actually have to go this way. There’s a path of approach; a right track.”
“So any idea we might have had that there was some choice about the way we were going was an illusion all along.”
“Something like that.”
“And I was thinking to myself how stupid we’d been to drive out like this.”
“You mean drive out on a trip that’s organised on Aboriginal terms?”
“I have the odd sense that all the crazy things that go on – the twilight kangaroo hunts, the detours you know are going to end in punctures, the side trips out of radio contact – they’re all in some way designed as tests of our ability to endure and trust, and be willing to accept that we’re completely without control over what happens: that we’re in the power of a group of people who may be faintly well disposed to us, but who see a wholly different world from ours.”
“I’d imagine,” said Dianna, after a pause, “that’s pretty much the way that life feels for Aboriginal people in Western Desert communities most of the time. Look over there!”
Behind me, Janie and the women had begun digging out another rockhole. A cascade of milky-coloured water was bubbling up. There were smiles of triumph on their faces.
“Witu rockhole,” said Janie. “We knew it was here. Our country.”
The dust-plume of the other Toyotas came into view at that instant over the ridge-line.
“I suppose,” said Dianna, “there was never anything to worry our selves over – but what would we be without episodes of anxiety and doubt? One night’s camp here, then tomorrow, the promised land: that should be something to see.”
*
And I too was full of eagerness, next morning, as the troop-carriers edged their way across the dunes, between cracked boulders and blood-red outcrops. We crossed a purple gibber plain; a last, low bluff – then, among the passengers around me, there was a new kind of silence. We came to a stop. We walked, we saw the summit with its jagged standing stones, we found the steep gorge channel: pools of fresh water ran like a ribbon there, caught between sheer walls of rock.
I can picture all these sights still, with exact clarity, and the low gestures of the desert women, as they moved towards the sacred stones, and stroked the sides of each in turn. Their faces, too, which were calm, and solemn. Indeed, in those first minutes at Yankaltjunku they seemed to me like some family of displaced gentry from a war-torn reach of Central Europe, returning after years of exile to their ancestral home, gazing at its treasures, peering out through dusty windows, venturing with slow steps down once-familiar stairways and corridors. I watched as they found the clawed rocks where the Turkey and the Emu once fought; I watched them trace the path of the Emu’s children between the range-spur and the water-channel. How soft their homecoming was; how full of tenderness! But all the thoughts that came to me were cold. I felt only the sadness of arrival, and the secret longing that always springs up, unbidden, inside me: to be gone; to be bound somewhere, elsewhere, with anticipation as my only guide.
I turned to Esmee, who was standing beside me.
“It’s so hard,” I murmured, “isn’t it, to be in the moment?”
“Not for me,” she answered. “This is it: the climax of the journey. In some ways, it’s the climax of everything we’ve been doing – to come out here again – to be in the painting.”
“I have more the sense,” I said, “of being in one of those old grainy, black-and-white ethnographic films from the ’60s. It’s as if we’d stepped into the frame, and we were with them, back in the early days.”
“It’s typical of you, really,” whispered Esmee, “to see this as the end of something, and not the start of something new. You’re an antiquarian, aren’t you – always looking for what’s pure, and perfect, and almost gone.”
I let those words of hers course through my mind, and they played against the ideas I had of time, and space, in that country. A gleam shines on the horizon: one turns one’s head to look, and the light is gone. Often it has seemed to me that everything we glimpse in the desert is elusive, and vanishes, or is caught only in the cage of memory and retrospect – just as what I saw then in the heart of the Gibson has only begun to take its true shape now inside my head.
All through that afternoon, as the desert men and women explored the hills and water channels, I sat with my ironies, and sense of being in a fairytale. Thoughts came to me, in mechanical fashion, and left. I seemed to have no grammar for them, no vocabulary – and that was a freedom of a kind. Zebra finches from the waterhole flew up, their wings whirring. They perched in the ironwood trees, scolded in unison, then fell quiet: and I was tempted, in that silence, to close my eyes, to lean back, be still, and let the sun’s annihilating rays come down.
*
At length, Ian Ward – Ribs, Mrs Davies’s son, the leader of the expedition – strolled over towards my swag and sat beside me in a patch of shade. He was immaculately dressed for the great day: black shirt, sand-stained beige chino trousers, dark boots and black hat: there was a band of ochre across his forehead from the ceremonies of the night before.
“Here you are,” he said, “hiding yourself away. My friend!”
And this was the right greeting: my sense of nearness to him was strong, even though, by an odd logic that has always seemed to me as much characteristic of Australia at large as of the desert, I found that I had spoken less with him, over the time since we had first come to know each other, than with many other desert men I knew scarcely at all.
“You got water? Everything you need?” he asked. “Didn’t I tell you? You would see with your eyes, and you would believe – there can be water in the desert!”
“I remember the first time you told me about Yankaltjunku,” I said. “You told me that when you came out here, to your birthplace, you would cry so many tears they would fill up the whole valley.”
“I was talking about the claypan at my birth-site,” Ribs said. “This is my conception-site. It’s different. When did I tell you all that, anyway?”
“On that trip we made, years ago, down the old Gunbarrel Highway, and round, with that crayfisherman from the coast, who had strong ideas about reconciliation. You took us both out and made us sit on a free-standing wood platform in the back of your troop-carrier, and we bounced around all the way.”
“That’s right,” said Ribs, grinning, and beating his knees with his hands. “That was a good trip! Good kangaroos!”
“It wasn’t that great. There were those friends of yours who started shooting at us, when we were climbing up the Townsend Ridges.”
“They weren’t shooting at you – they were shooting at the bush turkey. It was a natural thing. Anyway, don’t sit alone. Come and sit with us.”
“It’s your show,” I said. “Maybe it’s best for me to watch on the sidelines.”
“But we came here for you, as well as for us. We wanted you to see this place. It’s important you know – that we’ve got this country in our hearts.”
“That’s a very anthropological thing to say.”
“I am an anthropologist,” said Ribs, enthusiastically. “I’m a professor. Of many things. Geology, ecology. You know that. If you think like an anthropologist, that way – well, this place is like a box. A big, controlling box at the heart of four Dreaming stories. But there are other ways to see. Look down there, to the gorge. Can you describe this? Describe it, with your words? What it looks like – what it is? I wish you could look, and feel what I feel. I look there, and I see where the Bush Turkey and the Emu speared each other. And it makes me full. It gives me myself back, being here.”
&
nbsp; “But you’re yourself always,” I said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone with a stronger presence – or a stronger sense of their own presence.”
Ribs gave a little sigh, and allowed this compliment to wash over him. His look turned sombre. We walked along. A mazy discussion began: the land, and its different levels, the way its most vital aspects were all hidden from Western eyes.
“Did you know,” he said, “the lake goes underground, that salt lake where we camped before – all the way from this desert to Telfer mine, over there in the north-west? It goes overground, it goes undergound, and you have to see it in your mind. We do that: we see the scene behind the landscape.”
“And how did you find all that out?”
He looked at me in an abstracted way.
“It can be sad, to be the last one who knows these things. It makes me happy to be here – sad too. It’s such a lovely country we left behind. I see so many pictures in my head, from when we were living here, when I was a baby boy.”
“And what will happen here, now?”
“Of course, the mining people, they all want to come in,” said Ribs, rather reflectively. “They think we’ve finished with the country. But if they do try, then we will put something in their minds, to make them turn back: because we can do that.”
We had reached the crest of the enclosing ridge. Away, in the direction of our last camps, the spinifex fires we had lit days ago were still burning. Their smoke-plumes dissolved into low smudges against the blue. Far off, to the north, flecks of cloud had begun to form.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful, some day,” I said, “to drive out in that direction, right across the desert, and one would come out at the Perceval Lakes, or Joanna Springs? That would be a journey – and you’d probably come out a completely different man.”
“North of here,” said Ribs, sternly, “no! It’s danger country.
You can’t go there. If you go that way, it’s full of water-snakes.
They live in the water, they’re in every drop of the water, they’re part of the water. In fact, they’re anacondas, and they’re spread out everywhere, in all the waterholes. Some are friendly; some are not. It’s danger all the way!”
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