Another Country

by Nicolas Rothwell

  “Well, I guess that rather detracts from the appeal of some clarifying, all-revealing trip out towards the blue peaks. It’s a shame: I’ve always been intrigued by the way the great explorations across the desert tended to run east to west, and almost never south to north. And then there are all those stories about the covert war that’s going on between the magicians in the northern and the southern desert.”

  Ribs carefully paid no attention to this.

  “I used to walk around, to the north,” he said, after some while. “And I often dream north. I go there in my dreams. I went to school in Wiluna: in a way, that’s all country for me too.”

  “That must be a consoling thought,” I murmured, watching the light and the haze on the range-lines.

  “Actually,” said Ribs, abruptly, “we sometimes ask what you want out here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You – why you like to come out into this country. You’re not an anthropologist. You’re not a geologist. It’s a long way to come if you’re not looking for something.”

  Those words hung between us. I turned over the usual answers in my thoughts.

  “Maybe we’ve got something else you want,” he said, grinning. “There’s plenty of spinifex.”

  “I’d say it’s more the absence of things. The lack of things that make one unhappy: crowds, people one can’t understand, or the people one understands too well. We’re far from the race of life.

  Death seems closer, and easier to bear.”

  “I think there’s a lot of strangers, from the city,” said Ribs, after a while, “who come out into the bush to look for truth. And we’re happy to help – with what we know: at least a little bit of it. I remember meeting one bloke who was travelling, out near War-burton. I was driving past in the Land Management Toyota. I stopped: and he wanted me to take him to a seven-foot man from the desert, and that man was going to give him power. I said I’d drive him round, and be a guide for him, if he wanted – but he was going off the rails. He wouldn’t take any water at all – he said he would only drink the blood of a long-horned red deer.”

  “A stag? And what did you say to that?”

  Ribs rose from his haunches, in a very seigneurial way, as though to indicate that this exchange of ours was over.

  “I said he wouldn’t find any of them out here. Other animals, yes. Kangaroo, dingo, kipara – bush turkey – but that won’t surprise you.”

  *

  Nor was I surprised, over the days ahead, to see bush turkeys rise up by the dozen before the troop-carriers as we sped through the dune-fields on our journey back. “Kipara, kipara,” the women beside me would cry out, like some early-warning radar system, the instant they saw the bird’s raised head peeking above the spinifex – for to this day the turkey preserves a naive and tranquil temperament, and seems wholly unsuspecting of the harshness that fills the desert. How many times have I watched, my heart tight with anguish, as the rifle-barrel lowers, the shot explodes, the turkey, frozen still, trusting in its sheer immobility for disguise, trembles at the impact, falters, flaps a few paces, drops bloodied to the sand; at which its partner, close by, flushes, flies a short way, lands, cranes its head back, and the whole cycle begins afresh. And how many times have I looked on as the turkey is hauled on board, the lovely, brownish blur of its breast feathers heaving as it breathes its last, blood oozing from a ragged neck-wound, its translucent eyelids drooping slowly closed?

  Dreams of death and violence held me all through our last night out, at a camp amidst tall, twisted desert oaks, and I woke still seeing in my mind’s eye the climactic moment of the hunt from the previous day, when Ribs had chased down a wounded turkey on the track before us, running it over briskly with the troop-carrier’s front wheel: a cloud of feathers detonated round us; blood spume hovered in the air.

  I opened my eyes. Jan was bending once more over my swag.

  “I always seem to be waking you up on this trip, don’t I?” she said, brightly.

  “It’s puzzling for me, too, Jan.” I hauled myself up. “And how do you think it’s all gone?”

  “Anthropologically, of course, wonderful. No informants could be kinder, or more generous. No country could be more weighed down with traditional significance. It’s as if we’ve been out in a vast dynamo that charges up the whole surrounding desert. I’m full of emotions. But not all of them are happy ones.”

  “Do you want to say any more?” I asked, taking the mug of black tea she held out.

  “You know! I’m sure you feel it all too. I can remember very well the time when I first came out here, and learned a few things about the country: I became full of fear. I was afraid that all its secrets might be revealed. Now I almost suspect that I was frightened about the revelation of myself.”

  She glanced about, with the air of someone trying to evade a trap of logic.

  “I think you’d met my friend Pat Vinnicombe, hadn’t you, who worked for so many years on the rock carvings of the Burrup Peninsula. Ever since she died, so suddenly, she’s been very much in my thoughts. She had a great influence on me – in particular, one book she wrote, long ago, about the rock art of southern Africa, People of the Eland. It opened with a lovely sentence: ‘There was a dream, and it dreamt us’ – and out here, on a trip like this, surrounded by songs and stories, I wonder too if we are more than a dream, a pattern of thoughts that the country brings to life. Or sometimes I think that it’s a play, the life of the desert, and that the time is drawing near when it has to be written down. And that’s what gives me a sense of shadows coming over. I don’t want us just to be recording angels: the documentarists at the end of the world.”

  “It’s not only an end,” I said, shielding my eyes. The sun was over the horizon now: its pale light was on the tops of the sand-dunes. “And every world comes to its natural conclusion, anyway, and there’s a rebirth. It’s like chapters in a book. That’s more the metaphor. Long after we’re gone, and no one’s dreaming us, there will still be people in the desert.”

  “Do you think so? Do you really believe that? When long trips like this one come to a close, I’m always optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. I can see hope for the future, and things passing away too. But what I feel this time is that the world’s changing: the sandhills and the ranges, the desert oaks and the waterholes. As we drove, I was wondering how much longer the old people can keep singing and nourishing the country.”

  I listened to these words of hers, and a bleakness spread through me. I thought of the Bush Turkey’s deception; I pictured that first fireball of grief and doubt rushing through the landscape. Then I looked up. The high cirrus clouds were catching the light. They glowed in the sky: turkey feathers, high above – the quilled feathers of the slain turkeys, hundreds, thousands of them.

  *

  Back in Karilwara that morning, things moved fast. We pulled in. The dog-packs gathered, yelping, howling; the desert men and women jumped out. Soon the community was lost in its habitual, busy-seeming somnolence: families sat on their concrete verandahs, cross-legged; children tossed a half-inflated football here and there. After a decent interval, the community adviser drove down from her wire-screened house. The little shop opened. A line formed. I was taking in this symphony of remote life when a dust-plume became visible on the road out to Mipiltjarra junction and the old Gunbarrel.

  “That’s Mister G. coming up,” said Mrs Giles, standing beside me.

  “How do you know? It could be anyone.”

  “That’s his car; I know.”

  “But I thought he didn’t have a car at the moment. Isn’t that the key question of his life? Not to say his entire conceptual universe?”

  “Not really his car,” Mrs Giles explained with an air of great, long-suffering patience, “he’s just borrowing it, from his cousin, in Kiwirrkurra.”

  And she was right. Some minutes later, a dust-caked red Land-cruiser of striking antiquity lurched up, and shuddered to a stop. Hands waved in greetin
g from behind the cracked, dirt-spattered windscreen. Slowly, with elaborate choreography, a collection of dogs and children emerged, followed by a few young men, and, last of them all, clad entirely in black, with black Akubra, his long hair and flowing beard both also dyed a vivid black, was Mr Giles. He came over, Starboy padding beside him like some hellhound from a medieval illuminated manuscript.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  “Here, in the sand?”

  He sat close in front of me, and took my hand.

  “Going away,” he said. “Going away!”

  He kept my hand in his, and studied it, pressing the long nail of his index finger lightly, repeatedly into my palm, and shaking his head.

  “Danger,” he said.

  “I don’t know about that, Mr Giles,” I said, rather intimidated by the atmospherics of this encounter.

  “Danger,” he repeated, several times, in a soft voice, diminishing, until the syllables had tailed away.

  “I must say I wish I knew what you were talking about,”

  I said.

  His sons and grandsons, sitting near us, listened to this exchange with an air of obedient interest. At that point, the Land Management Toyota drove up, and the community adviser jumped out.

  “Here you are,” she said to me. “I’ve been looking for you.

  There’s a message from the Kintore police station. In trouble again!”

  “It’s so hard, isn’t it, Christine,” I said, “to keep on the straight and narrow in life. What does it say?”

  “They took a call from your editor: he wants you to go to the Middle East for a year. I don’t know I’d agree, if I were you.”

  I looked over at Mr Giles. He stared sternly back.

  “Yurltu!” he then said.

  “You can’t be serious! I thought you were worried about me: about my wellbeing.”

  “He’s worrying for you – and for a car as well,” put in Mrs Giles, who had sat down to monitor events.

  “But what’s wrong with that yurltu?” I asked, pointing at the red Toyota. “It looks fabulous. Anyway, the last one I bought you wasn’t a great success, was it? How long did it survive? Two weeks?”

  “Another one,” said Mr Giles.

  “Another one! Maybe the best thing to do would be to buy a whole road-train full of Toyotas, and bring them up to Karilwara, and then you could work your way through them, so whenever one broke down or crashed, there would be a new one immediately ready to go.”

  “Good idea!” said Mr Giles, with great enthusiasm.

  After this, the hours passed: the shift of life’s tectonic plates began. Without making a call, without deep thought, I understood that I would be leaving the desert, and that things there would not be the same when I came back.

  The light began to lengthen. The men and women who had been out on the bush journey were sitting in a loose group between the square of houses, close by the public telephone box that marks, in all its dilapidated grandeur, the heart of the community. The anthropologists were there, explaining their intentions and the tasks ahead, the gathering of evidence and the reports still needed for the claim. Deep discussions were under way, in desert language; the camp dogs stretched out and gazed up with eager eyes. And then a second dust-plume showed on the horizon: it came nearer, gained resolution, turned towards us – and at last a Telstra Countrywide Land Cruiser, white, immaculate, with tall aerial masts waving gently from its bull-bar, drew to a halt beside this impromptu native title meeting.

  A technician got out: he was wearing a blue work-shirt, blue shorts and work-boots. From his neat belt, equipment and instruments dangled. Without undue haste, or hesitation, without the merest nod or greeting, he strode up towards the centre of the seated crowd and took up station by the phone-box, where the receiver was hanging limply. For some while, from behind the clear plastic protective canopy, small sounds of electronic test equipment beeping and clicking were audible, as I watched this cameo from a distance, with the thought that I should seek to preserve it: the red scatter of the hills, the sun reflecting on the powerlines, the old desert men and women, huddled close together, the phone technician, like a herald in livery, bearing news from another time.

  A NOTE ON PHOTOGRAPHY

  Early this dry season, while headed down the Buchanan Highway, a dirt track of variable quality that runs between Dunmarra Roadhouse and Top Springs, I fell into a detailed conversation with my companion on the journey, the photographer Peter Eve. By that stage we had worked together off and on for several years, but it had never occurred to me to question him about the ideas that lie behind his work, which radiates a particular quality of coherence and calm. A set of his photographs of Northern and Central Australia illustrates this book: they were selected because we felt they answered to, or amplified, some themes within the essays and memory fragments that make up much of the text.

  Peter’s vast reticence on the subject of his own image-making seemed, that afternoon, to have been briefly vanquished, perhaps by the roughness of the track, which required his concentrated focus, perhaps, too, by the sheer implausibility of our discussion, which was precise, and often technical in nature, and seemed to form a sharp tonal contrast with the primeval lancewood scrub we were passing through.

  Gradually, many of the things that had already struck me about his photography fell into clearer relief. Though he would never have told me this in explicit fashion, as I listened I came to realise that he was at work on a project of visual understanding which almost required the suppression of self. For him, the individual was the enemy of pure image-making, and only in the effort to overcome personality could one’s true character come through, and disclose itself in the camera’s eye.

  Often, Peter said, he felt the temptation to discard, without further review, the archive of 80,000 images of the bush which he had compiled on his various long quests through the North and Centre in a succession of ill-starred four-wheel-drives. It might be for the best to start again, to begin with nothing – and when he made remarks of this kind, it was hard for me not to see my companion in the role of a romantic, possessed of a boundless love for country: a love he himself wished would never end. Recognition was quite unimportant to him. His occasional impulses to show others what he had captured in photographic form had nothing to do with seeking praise, or even response: indeed, if feedback came, he found it vaguely embarrassing. What he wanted was simply to share the flash of insight when a landscape’s form confessed itself, or its components came into balance in the lens.

  Much like the well-known street photographers of Paris in the 1920s, or New York in the 1960s, who would never have dreamed of raising their cameras until they had walked a city with obsessive thoroughness, so he believed that the bush needed to be understood before it could be seen. One needed to have a grasp – not just scientific but emotional – of how it worked as a space. His method, in pursuit of this goal, involved plunging for hours on end into the stringybark forests of Arnhem Land, or camping over days and weeks in the furnace of the remote East Kimberley during build-up months. As a result, I found my reserves of patience and tolerance were routinely tested almost to the limit on my various bush expeditions in his company. But those long spells passed together obliged me to give some thought to how he saw the landscape.

  I learned that he did not feel easily at home there: he was devoid of the presumptuous, sentimental attachment to the remote world that one so often encounters in those who claim familiarity with the deserts or the savannahs of the tropics. Rather, his bid to find the code of the country called to mind a detective’s repeated, advancing investigations. He was aiming to find out nothing less than how the system hung together: how, in each frame, the light moves.

  “I still remember,” he told me, on a subsequent drive, “the first time that I set out from Oodnadatta, up onto the desert plain of Central Australia, which is, of course, a much easier landscape to comprehend than the North. That was the first time I had encountered the flat, st
ill landscape – the stillness in sight: the panorama you can see out there when you stand on the roof of your four-wheel-drive. I did feel a sense of connection then, a sense of wishing to plunge into that landscape, to dedicate myself to it. And often now I wonder how much of my life will be spent in trying to stay true to that impulse.”

  More of Peter Eve’s images of desert and northern Australia can be seen on his website, .

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to express my gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief of the Australian, Chris Mitchell, for his support of my writing endeavours; and to my editors and colleagues on that newspaper: Stephen Romei, Stephen Matchett, Miriam Cosic, Patrick Lawn-ham, Murray Waldren.

  To my agent, Margaret Connolly.

  To Morry and Anna Schwartz.

  To Peter Eve.

  To Dhangal Gurruwiwi, to the Nocketta sisters, and to my friends in Darwin and in the Western Desert.