The Hard Light of Day

by Rod Moss

  ‘You have kept your sense of brotherhood,’ he said. ‘If you stay closely united you are like a tree standing in the middle of a bushfire sweeping through the timber. The leaves are scorched and the tough bark is scarred and burnt, but inside the tree the sap is flowing, and under the ground the roots are still strong. Like the tree you have endured the flames, and you still have the power to be reborn. The time for this rebirth is now!’

  There was a lot of distortion through the speakers but we did see the Pope raise his arms. As he did, the swirl of ink black clouds that had accumulated over the western range unloaded in a chorus of thunder and lightning. His homilies about brotherhood drifted east on the wind as thousands of people scrambled for shelter. Possibly not a lot of the congregation understood the ‘big fella’ Pope’s sentiments about the dignities of blacks, despite his clearly enunciated English. But they knew he had the power.

  SOME SUNDAYS I DROVE the family members and their washing to the dam. One time after walking to camp I found it deserted and twigged that everyone must have headed to the dam. I ran along the track to catch up then chatted with young Ricky Ryder as we walked a hundred metres ahead of the others. I followed him as he quietened into a crouch near the crest of the dam. He stood and threw almost at once, killing an unwary duck. He astonished me with his timing and accuracy. He ate the duck for lunch.

  I walked back to camp that same day with Christopher Neil and was invited to meet his mother-in-law, Glenda Johnson. She had recently arrived from the rural river city of Mildura, on the New South Wales– Victorian border. Sixty-year-old Glenda and her whitefella husband picked oranges and grapes there, and a few family members had since settled in a Mildura caravan park. She was sitting around a half carton of beer with a few other women. No sooner had I taken a few sips of beer and she slipped her arm around my neck. She pulled me closer.

  ‘You want it with black woman, darling?’ she whispered.

  I was alarmed and embarrassed, and tried to distract her with another can. Instead she ran her finger slowly along the inside of my thigh, in full view of the other women. Then she ordered Barbara Johnson (Petrina’s mother) to go.

  ‘He’s for me, this one. I like it whitefella way.’

  I immediately got up to go. She then thumped Iris, Jude’s wife, on the head with a nulla nulla/club, accusing her of interrupting her ambitions.

  Walking home from work one evening I could see, 50 metres distant, three dark bodies bathed in a cadmium cone of streetlight. I recognised Petrina’s cry as Xavier poked a knife into her back, then hurtled off up Undoolya Road into the dark. The other man, Johnny Stirling of the tai chi incident, had also been cut, by putting his hand out to protect her.

  I ran home for my car and we headed to the casualty ward at the local hospital. I’d never seen so many bandaged and bruised bodies, nor such a profusion of people on crutches. All were Aboriginal. Some were in civilian clothes. Most were garbed in hospital-issue, blue pyjamas. With such a conspicuous amount of blood, we advanced rapidly up the waiting bench. The nurse came to ask what had happened. Could Petrina stand by herself? As she dragged herself to her feet and removed her blouse, a tear fell to the linoleum. Her body was a carapace of wounds inflicted by Xavier. The nurse remarked that her file was six centimetres thick. Her back was taped and she reeked of disinfectant. Johnny had his hand stitched and bandaged.

  Though feeling sorry for herself, on the way home from the hospital she asked to stop at the bottle shop to get a cask, with the same ten dollars that Xavier had knifed her for. Johnny also took the event in his stride. He asked if I had a video they could come and watch at my place. So, having driven from hospital, the car hummed in the bottle shop driveway. Petrina waited on the attendant to arrive with a ‘cask of fruity’. As we rolled out of the bottle shop, Xavier lunged at the car from the darkness and tried to drag Petrina by the hair through the passenger window. I managed to free her and drove away, dropping Petrina and Johnny just inside Whitegate.

  Back at my flat, I was replaying these events in my mind when Xavier burst through the front door. He shook his finger close to my nose, shouting at me about not being his friend and siding with his wife.

  ‘Me finish with you!’ he said.

  ‘But you’ve just poked Petrina with a knife!’

  ‘Yes. This one.’

  He produced a penknife. There were tears in his eyes as he angrily waved it in my direction. For a moment I sensed him debate whether I was worth knifing.

  ‘You’re not my friend,’ he said before stalking out the rear door. He straddled the fence and was off into the bush.

  PEOPLE FROM WHITEGATE STARTED to drop in after dark on a regular basis to ask for a lift home, always with the story that they were too frightened to make the final leg because inentye or kudaitye men stalked the low range immediately before camp. Not knowing what the basis for this claim was, I usually had enough energy to make the ten-minute round trip.

  One evening after dark, while walking along the eastern hills, I came across Christopher staggering under the weight of half a dozen medium-sized rocks. I broke from the brush onto the road before him. He wavered and tightened his fingers around one of the rocks.

  ‘Werte, Christopher. It’s only me, Rod.’

  He recognised me and relaxed. ‘This for inentye man, Rod,’ he stammered.

  According to Christopher, he had seen a payback man lurking in these hills a few nights earlier. I watched him wobble up the road and disappear into the dark, and have never doubted the profundity of his fear, or that of the others, since.

  Several of the men in camp coolly admitted to committing retributive killings. Others had done time for killings they hadn’t committed, to protect those who had. There was honour in this, not shame. Frequently people in Whitegate told me of inentye who had walked near or through the camp at night time. Payback is exacted and a close enough relative can substitute for the actual offender at any time. Blood feuding Old Testament style. The family is the basic political cell of action. This was justice and thus an expected response.

  OVER A LONG WEEKEND I VENTURED OUT to the Yuendumu Aboriginal Sports Carnival, 300 kilometres north-west of town. 5 There were spear throwing events as well as the more conventional European athletics and team ball games. I gravitated to the Aussie Rules footy, the object of my only sporting passion. Aussie Rules was one of the few sports whose dramatic tension and mobile physicality gripped both cultures with the same force. But the style here was a distant permutation of its city cousin, with the emphasis on sharing the ball around rather than scoring. The long kick to set position was definitely out. Players from both sides favoured short, chipping passes to each other; possession football. I was transfixed by the willowy bodies leaning with prodigious elasticity to haul in the ball. The handling in the thick red dust of the ovular pitch was breathtaking. At the same time there was remarkably little bodily contact. I suspected skin relationships – the complicated system that determined communications between many of them – curtailed the heavy tackling that featured in most Australian football codes. When the ball was locked up on the ground, the men jigged in small circles around it, waiting for someone to reach into the melee of legs and flip it out. It was more of a dance than any football drill I had ever witnessed.

  A freezing westerly whipped across the playing field, which hugely advantaged the side kicking with it – the local Yuendumu Magpies to whose side I was immediately drawn. I have been a Collingwood Magpies fan since my childhood, committed to the black and white stripes. Docker River, their opponents, would presumably make their run on the scoreboard in the next quarter. I was standing next to a carload of Docker River supporters who sat silently. The car lacked a windscreen and a bonnet, not an unfamiliar sight in communities where the improvisations of bush mechanics were legendary. Fencing wire, elastic bands, plastic hosing and bottles were imaginatively re-deploy
ed, as spare parts were inaccessible and prohibitively expensive.

  Twenty minutes into the second quarter and there was no joy for the small and patient crowd in the car. Counting started. Not of goals and points stacked on the scoreboard. The women counted the players loudly. Yes, Yuendumu had the full complement of eighteen. Then came the outburst.

  ‘Docker River only be got fourteen. Hey. Docker River only fourteen men!’

  The one Docker River player wearing boots responded by first removing them and then himself from the ground. There was no discussion. Soon others filed off after him. The game was decided.

  ‘Docker River be sung by bad medicine,’ was the cry from the car next to me.

  The disgruntled driver passed a four-year-old boy holding a screwdriver through the gap which had once been the windscreen. He turned the ignition as the child charged up a spark across the starter motor. The car catapulted across the ground to pick up the last two straggling players and left the scene in a haze of dust.

  In the packed community hall after the game, I recognised the two players in the Docker River Band. They were easily identified as they were still proudly wearing their football guernseys. They were part of the community’s rock and reggae band, exclusively composed of men, but their success on drum and guitar far exceeded any football prowess they had shown that afternoon. They thrilled the throng of girls who sat on the floor in front of them. In the final seconds of each number, the girls rose as one and shuffled sexily before dropping to the floor in self-conscious silence. Their male counterparts eyed them coolly, standing in lines along the walls.

  I stood there, shouldered by two Warlpiri, absorbing the scene in the lowly lit dust of the hall. There must have been several thousand people from various Aboriginal communities. I had never experienced anything like it before.

  INTERACTIONS WITH THE FAMILIES at Whitegate had a compelling freshness, a vivid surrender to the present moment. These friendships made me feel enmeshed in the lives of the Arrernte people. Before these connections were made, living in a town where one third of its people are Indigenous, for me, lacked resonance. It wasn’t just the content. Their embracing of experience, wringing detail from each encounter, magnetised me. The laughter we shared offset what would have otherwise been a rather melancholic and lonely existence for me here.

  I could see the limitations of being monolingual at Whitegate and decided I should try to learn Arrernte, despite having no aptitude for languages. My French was so bad that my French girlfriend, with whom I had lived in Melbourne before coming to Alice Springs, refused to let me speak French to her.

  In the Centre, the inventory of bush life had been extensively accounted for by the Arrernte, and I was curious to hear what they had made of it – the place names, the birds, the types of wind, the foods which expressed the interlock of language and bio-diversity. It takes centuries of careful observation to understand and name the complex ecological relationships that maintain life. Even with this motivation, I had difficulty overcoming the blocks to acquiring the language. I had a poor ear for language. This was coupled with inadequate retentiveness.

  There was a prototype dictionary, an Arrernte word list, and tapes available from the Institute of Aboriginal Development, which I borrowed. The Institute ran a large variety of educational programs for post-secondary Aboriginal people. Workshops that were aimed at non-Indigenous employees in the growing Aboriginal industry and which introduced the various desert languages were also periodically conducted.

  Xavier and Petrina urged me on at every opportunity. When Xavier heard the tape, he went through explicit and elaborate gestures without verbal interpretation, his entire body performing the words. He danced around the lounge, touching the walls on the cue of certain words that referred to things beyond the house. The hallway had the patina of stencilled cave art. Some of this helped.

  Although Xavier and the others would repeat words for me endlessly, my stupid pride would often prevent me from asking for more repetition. I feared my newfound friends would see me as an inadequate fool. I cross-referenced, whenever possible, with John Henderson, the one white Arrernte speaker I knew. He was very close to finishing the compilation that became the Eastern and Central Arrernte to English Dictionary. He showed interest in the list of words that I had made and amiably taunted me about its phonetic shortcomings. When I tried speaking, he sympathised, telling me that the movements of the tongue across the roof of the mouth and behind the teeth of natural Arrernte speakers was at great variance from other desert languages, as well as English.

  Unwittingly, I was trivialising the Arrernte sound system into the English one. This worked both ways. I had frequently misheard Arrernte-English and still chuckle over Xavier’s naming of a significant hill near Pepperill Creek which he called ‘Native Pig Dreaming’. I thought it probable that pigs had been incorporated into the Dreaming stories. Over the months, whenever I was near the hill, I would look at it and try to work out from its shape where the pig might be. I had mentioned it to a few people, blackfellas and whitefellas. So it was left to an old man in camp, Arranye Johnson, to eventually correct me.

  ‘That not pig there, my son. That native fig, you been see.’

  Summer rains sometimes filled a pond below that hill. One afternoon the kids and I were hunting some black-helmeted ducks that had come to feed there.

  ‘Might be plenty billy can here for water, some time,’ said Ricky Ryder.

  I didn’t understand. We had our bottles of water. Ah! Pelicans, of course.

  Arranye once told me that ‘turtle’ sauce tasted just great on fried fish.

  ‘You know, that one you get in little bottle at supermarket. Turtle sauce?’

  I later twigged. Tartare sauce!

  ‘Rod, you gotta bum?’ Ricky asked one time as he stood breathlessly by the lounge door one Saturday afternoon, his bike dumped on the ground behind him.

  ‘Same as you, Ricky, stuck in the same place on my body,’ I said, thinking I was returning the humour.

  ‘No. Bump. You know it. For bike tyre.’

  Although my word stock has grown, fluency still eludes me. The blocks continue, even though I get the gist of most conversations. The Whitegate families talk to me mostly in English with Arrernte nouns mixed in.

  ON THE SUNDAYS WHEN GREGORY JOHNSON and his wife, Janet, weren’t at their outstation at Little Well, they would trek over the plains north of Emily Gap with the kids and the dogs in search of bush tucker. This was a grog-free day for most family members. I did not need any further encouragement when Gregory invited me along. They taught me to read tracks, what to make of the continuous swivelling in the sand of the spinifex snake, the intermittent arc of the carpet snake, the elegant spokes of atyunpe/perentie, the long toes of the long-haired euro, and the shorter ones of its larger cousin, the plains kangaroo.

  The stamina of the little kids impressed me. Three-year-olds walked all day without grizzling. We would walk from Emily Creek soakage to Emily Gap, a 5-kilometre hike. The kids constantly scrounged frogs in the sand, budgerigars in the trees, lizards, licking sugary apwerelje or lerpe scale from gum leaves, and eating coconut galls from bloodwood trees. They harvested whitebush tomato, banana and onion when they were in season. They’d rush to me with whatever they’d gathered and watch for my surprise, wanting to know what I thought of its taste.

  It took several treks for my eyes to detect bushfoods with anything approaching the skill of the kids. I was fascinated that the country looked so inhospitable and yet could yield so much food. These Sunday outings were great for improving my vocabulary and made me feel at home in a way I’d never dared to dream of.

  Whenever we walked the plains around Emily Gap, Gregory or Xavier would point out the soakages. All the adults were confident of the whereabouts of water. It was a survival essential given that there were often months on end without rain. To the uninstructed, ther
e is no visual clue as to where these water sources lie hidden under the dry and sandy riverbed. We’d carry a plastic cordial bottle of water when we hunted kangaroos. But this was a supplement to finding the soakages. I still found it hard to imagine just how thoroughly this country had been camped in and worked over by their ancestors. They said that by using the soakages they remembered ‘old people’.

  3The emergence of Santa Teresa’s art was encouraged and informed by the fame and economic success of Namatjira and his sons. At this time official politics were changing to the social experiment called assimilation. Not that Namatjira assimilated into white society or became Europeanised. But his landscapes came a long way towards European pictorial convention, and his art made serious money and was regarded in the market place as art rather than artefact. Ironically, the money it generated was a problem for government bodies and the mission on whom the Arrernte were still dependent.Back

  4Strelley Community had a history of united action for rights and justice against pastoralists, miners and governments. In 1946 a prospector, Don McLeod, had helped the senior men at Strelley resist the exploitation by the station owners who had employed them. The story of this is recounted in his book How the West Was Lost. Paul Roberts, who was the principal of the school at the time of my visit, also made an excellent documentary film with the same title. Though people still crawled out of old car bodies to greet their breakfast fires, there was unmistakable enthusiasm for the school they had created for themselves, and for the literature centre that produced books and a weekly newsletter. The determination and pride of the young cowboys who undertook the work on their cattle station was very evident.Back

  5Yuendumu is a community developed in 1946 by the Federal Government’s Native Affairs branch, and to which the Warlpiri people were the first to relocate.Back

  WELLCOME TO COUNTRY

  XAVIER (RIGHT) AND THE JOHNSONS ON THE TODD RIVER FLOOD-OUT