by Rod Moss
THE AIDS EPIDEMIC WAS STARTING to be prominent in the media. The first advertisement on the local TV station made it clear that AIDS was not confined to intravenous drug users and the homosexual community. It showed the skeleton of Death scything the heads of casual sex partners, a shock tactic that provoked much controversy. I started to hear from a friend in Melbourne of people he knew who had contracted the disease.
A clinic was established in Central Australia to educate Aboriginal people about the precautions necessary. I hadn’t heard of any case in the Arrernte community. There had been speculation that bloodletting in sorry business mourning and initiation ceremonies would increase the chance of the epidemic sweeping their community. I had learnt that the men shared in the drinking of blood when they circumcised their young initiates; and when ritual cuts were made to grieve for the dead, any piece of glass, tin or knife would be passed around for the job.
Would the TV images aimed at showing the risks of AIDS travel across the cultures? And would Arrernte have access to them anyway, given the absence of TV at Whitegate? I raised the question of condom use with Michael Stewart late one April afternoon as we walked to Whitegate. He quashed my concern.
‘Put one on your own cock,’ he blurted.
Months later I saw a comic strip poster at the hospital. Its hero, Condom Man, would have made explicit sense to Michael.
Blundering on into camp at Michael’s side, I watched Jamesy Johnson stir the coals to check his cooking.
‘What’s that you’re cooking, Jamesy?’ I asked, wondering if it was lizard or kangaroo.
He looked at me, then back at the coals, without answering. After five minutes he parted the ashes and raked out a tinfoil steak and kidney pie. These details stick somehow.
I talked about them with Steve Tucker, my colleague who was an émigré white Zimbabwean. He had his own stories on AIDS, cultural ineptitude and naivety. He had just recently arrived at the college to make up our three full-time art department staff. He was finding his feet as a lecturer but had an eclectic range of exciting ideas in photography, printmaking and video. His energy and enthusiasm were also a boost to me. He sometimes accompanied me on kangaroo hunts with the Whitegate men.
The men employed their inherent tracking skills, but the killing was accomplished with various types of guns. It was such a contrast, some Mondays, to come to work and deliver a slide lecture on early twentieth-century art, say on Picasso. The class would sit demurely in the dark room until I finished, then politely ask a few questions. The basic theme would be how western culture rejuvenated and re-invented itself, frequently raiding ‘other’ and colonised artforms in the process. I’d stare out the window during lunch hour, wondering what anyone in camp would have made of my talk on Modernism.
ANOTHER AFTERNOON, JUDE JOHNSON came to quiz me about the Supreme Court, which he had to attend as a witness the following week. I had less idea about any sort of court proceedings than most of the Whitegate men and only had a general sense of what Jude, in his quiet tone, was referring to. And this was further confused by his referring to the ‘Spring Court’.
None of the younger Whitegate men were as confident of their English as the women. Most of the males left school in their early to mid-teens once they were initiated through ceremony into manhood. ‘High school’ or ‘university’ for Arrernte men was what you learnt about Aboriginal Law in Aki/bush business camp throughout their initiation. This was nothing short of an induction into a world view, secular and spiritual. And attendance at the Santa Teresa Mission Primary School before that had been sporadic anyway.
Jude hoped the Aboriginal Legal Aid lawyer that he’d heard was arriving from Adelaide could help get Jamesy Johnson off. Jamesy had been charged with manslaughter after a recent car crash. Xavier was the only sober witness of the incident but, given his police record, there were doubts about his reliability. As I later learnt, Jamesy never served a prison sentence on this account.
Xavier was already inside my flat when I got in late one night, a little tanked, with Steve Tucker and a couple of female friends from the Folk Club. Xavier, who was sober, was amused at my insobriety. Form reversal!
‘You drunk, Rod.’
His grin, together with our cheerful mood, made it hard for me to chastise his intrusion. He stayed on and joined the party. Among other things, we talked about the Arrernte’s sense of being connected to country, how they identified themselves with it, to the point of speaking about particular totem trees and landforms as being them. The friends left after an hour.
After their departure Xavier and I took up the conversation. The Dreaming, as he gave me to understand, were the powers belonging to specific places that continued to affect his life. In one of those moments that fizz long after, he asked me where I came from. This was not the standard conversational trope of whitefellas rotating on how long you had been in the Territory and where you worked. What you did for a job was crucial information in establishing your place as a whitefella here, but it was irrelevant to Arrernte perceptions of character. Xavier had met my parents. He had met my brother. He had seen the journals and photos of my country in Melbourne’s eastern foothills.
‘Where you from, brother boy?’ he asked.
‘Xavier, I’ve told you about my family and the hills near Melbourne.’
This wasn’t sufficient. He held me by both shoulders and searched my eyes.
‘Where you really come from?’
His question seemed to have assumed biblical proportions and it silenced me.
‘I been show you my country. Some time you be show me your country.’
It took me a long time to work out what Xavier meant by brother, father, mother and so on. Xavier had four brothers still living that I would call brothers in the way I referred to Ian, and my younger brother, Colin. But there were quite a few other men he referred to in the same way. The proximity of our ages, although I am a little older than Xavier, determined my brother and penangke or skin classification. Skin names were a shorthand code to family relationships. My relationship to Xavier set the pattern for all other relationships I had at Whitegate. Mercia, his older sister, was my sister too. So too were his father’s brothers and sisters. I eventually came to understand that uncles and aunts, as I understood them in the European sense, shared the same name and status as your actual father and mother.
Despite all this, since I had not been initiated, for Xavier I remained a boy. For Arrernte, identity is a primary issue to settle before conversation can continue. Your social placing starts with your attachment to a specific conception site, and by association to inherited places of importance through your parents. Such kinship classifications were just as frequently used to address a person as a first name. These classificatory names came with behavioural expectations that altered through life’s stations. For example, a father could demand that a mature son give him the privilege of the choicest cuts of fatty meat. There would be no argument.
It was an enormous challenge for me to clarify my origins and connections with kinship and the country I grew up in, which I knew merely by place names. The populous city suburbs were especially impossible to describe to Xavier and the others. From time to time I rolled over in my mind the possibility of taking Xavier and Petrina to Melbourne, but on each occasion I felt exhausted at the prospect of being a chaperone for six weeks in the city. Having an extra couple would exacerbate the effort of constantly moving around, catching up with friends and cramping their lives for short stopovers. There would be the logistics of handling money, the homesickness, the cooler latitudes, and their volatile relationship. Perhaps I would do it one day?
XAVIER AND PETRINA REPORTED TO ME that a white bloke had taken a dog from a sack and shot it, just outside Whitegate. This distressed them. Soon after, I became aware that one of my students was dispersing her kelpie litter. I asked for one to give to Xavier and picked up the pup
from her house. Given the two dog-shooting incidents, I felt I was helping them through the trauma. Xavier was delighted to have the pup, though it cowered from him on the car floor. He gathered it up and rubbed his hand under his arms then smeared the dog’s snout.
‘Make it smell it me. Then it mine.’
At Xavier’s request, we set off for town to buy a leash and collar, the only ones I was to ever see at Whitegate. Coming back up Undoolya Road from town, we passed a bloke peeing in the scrub by the side of his car.
‘Hey, you white cunt,’ Xavier yelled. ‘What you doin’ pissin’ on my country?’
I looked away, hoping not to be recognised and thus implicated in Xavier’s abuse.
That evening Xavier came to my flat, wanting the police. The Dixon family, another large family living at Charles Creek camp, had chased them in a car and beaten Petrina over the head. Xavier had a swollen wrist. The Dixons wanted a baby, which was now at Whitegate with the Johnsons. They felt it belonged at Charles Creek. I rang the station and two constables came and questioned Xavier without much interest. Then we headed for the hospital to get stitches for Petrina. This time it was a longer wait before she emerged, her head wrapped in surgical dressing. She wasn’t at all fazed by the nursing staff and was more intent on getting her brothers to square off with the Dixons. I dismissed her pleas for my involvement and promptly dropped her and Xavier in the centre of town.
Not long after this Christopher came over one Wednesday afternoon with Bernadine and we all set off, as planned the day before, to a film night staged for Aboriginal people. Back to Our Country was being shown in the Gap Neighbourhood Community Hall. It was about an old Western Desert Aboriginal man who goes back to his country to visit some of its sacred sites. It was very touching to see the old guy eventually find these places again; he knelt and wept over them. I expected that Christopher would also be moved by the film. As we drove from the hall in the fading light, I suggested they share some supper.
Back home, over sandwiches, I asked him what he thought. He was only interested in talking about his own family’s country at Harts Range. Christopher had a childlike innocence that could unsettle me. His conversation jumped all over the place and his responses were so tangential that I wondered if his hearing was impaired. When he mentioned that he’d often drunk methylated spirits as a fifteen-year-old, I wondered if his brain had been damaged. Bernadine spoke to him in a patronising tone, telling him not to babble on so much. He said his nickname, ‘Whale’, was derived from the shallow hole in the middle of his nose, a birthmark. He added, in a matter-of-fact way, that he was waiting for another young man to finish his seven-year prison term.
‘Then I be stick knife in his neck and cut ’im across.’
There was neither threat nor malice in Christopher’s tone.
The jailed man and his brother were said to have retaliated after being taunted by Christopher’s youngest brother at a concert in the Santa Teresa Community Hall. They had stabbed and speared him to death with a star-picket. According to family custom Christopher was expected to atone for his brother’s murder, to effect a payback killing to set things in balance.
His talk switched to Bernadine’s health. Contrary to her belief, he insisted that she was ‘with baby’. Before I took them home, he asked me if they could see a doctor. I started out towards the hospital, but the doctor he wanted to see was Freddy Fly, who lived further down Gap Road at Little Sisters camp. Freddy was a traditional medicine man. We found him in the dark crouched over his fire, after several people from different campfires directed us to him. The old bloke pasted Bernadine’s breasts with some fat from a tobacco tin and confirmed Christopher’s claim. A promise was made to pay him with a six-pack of beer next pension day.
‘Green or blue can, all same,’ said Freddy.
He turned to me and asked for a cigarette. Christopher quickly interjected.
‘Him Christian bloke. He don’t smoke.’
My assumed conversion to the faith seemed based on a very flimsy premise.
They dropped by the next day and Bernadine confided that Freddy had removed a snake from her chest and that she felt much better. Really? Was this a metaphor for congestion? Christopher was jubilant about his imminent fatherhood although Bernadine did not share the emotion. He said they would name the baby after me, confident it would be a boy.
LATER THAT WEEK XAVIER and his older brother, Edward, got me to drive over to Larapinta Valley to visit their ‘mother’, old Wheelchair Harold Ross. Edward lived mostly at Harts Range and when in town would stop at Whitegate. He was a large, surly fellow in his mid-thirties, not someone you’d want to get on the wrong side of. He sported a preposterously high-crowned, black cowboy hat, as many occasional stockmen did.
Old Wheelchair’s tin shed was nestled near a startling quartz apwerte arlterre/hillock that looked set to launch into space. We got out and slowly entered the dwelling. I’d noticed how speedy, jerky body language by strangers could arouse concern. It took a few minutes to adjust to the shed’s dimness, and longer to adjust to its wallpaper. From dirt to ceiling, the humpy was pasted with centrefold pin-up girls. White bimbos in lewd, clichéd positions smiled seductively at us. Xavier and Edward watched for my reaction. The frail old man beamed at me from his wheelchair, his fingers arthritically curled, his whole body stiffened into the shape of the chair.
‘No jig-a-jig for me now. Me only old Wheelchair,’ he quipped. ‘You like it? White woman on wall, pretty sexy? Pretty nice chick, eh?’
‘Unbelievable stuff, old man,’ I said, trying not to dampen his enthusiasm.
Edward gave Wheelchair a plastic carry bag containing a shank of kangaroo and touched my arm to indicate he was ready to leave. He and Xavier had got a real charge out of that shed and their faces gleamed as we drove across town to Whitegate.
In response to Christopher’s excited and urgent plea I made an evening hospital visit to see Bernadine. Xavier and his other brothers were already there. They thought it was hilarious that Christopher had misheard the doctor’s report. Christopher had told the mob in camp that Bernadine had given birth to a baby boy. What the doctor had said was that she had a baby boil on her breast! Bernadine gave us a bemused smile. She was still months off having the baby, which turned out to be Lisa-Marie.
I asked Xavier if he needed a lift somewhere.
‘Let’s go see Petrina,’ he said.
‘Is she at Charles Creek with her mother?’
‘No. Long there. Other side,’ he said, nudging me down the duncoloured linoleum of the corridor.
I didn’t know until then that Petrina was in Ward 6 with infected head wounds. The duty nurse told us the room number. Petrina’s name was on a card slotted on the door. We crept past the other sleeping patient to Petrina’s window bed. She was awake but when she recognised us, she ducked under the sheets and kept her head under the pillow, allowing just the bandages to show. Xavier tried to press five dollars into her hand unsuccessfully. So he left the note next to the pillow and we filed out to the car.
THERE WAS A HUGE TWELVE-HOUR DOWNPOUR and Alice Springs became awash. Intermittent showers followed and for a fortnight the hills gurgled with thousands of tiny waterfalls. I wondered how Xavier and Petrina were faring. When I got to Whitegate, the camp was a shallow sea of water, filled by the dirt road which had become a running creek. Xavier had devised a small shelter of corrugated iron and planks.
‘I be carpenter now, Rod. You got hammer I be lend it?’ he grinned.
In spite of his frenzied building, he and Petrina had been drenched.
‘Rain been walkin’ all over me, Rod.’
He asked me to take him to the army disposal shop off the mall so he could buy a tent.
Surprisingly, the Whitegate mob wondered how the rain had affected me. Had I been kept awake by the lightning? Did the pelting of the storm damage my roof? Little lakes h
ad formed, I told them, and the culvert beside the flat was a roaring tributary to the Todd River, one continuous muddy bleeding.
As we returned from the army disposal shop, Xavier asked if I could help him with some extra tent pegs. We went to my home to collect them. He laughed at the two paw-paw trees growing either side of the back door step.
‘Husband and wife, you got there, Rod,’ he said. ‘Rain might make it come up baby.’
The rain continued for a week. Steve Tucker had a dinghy which, as the showers subsided, we took to the Telegraph Station, where the river appeared amiable. Though it was running swiftly, it was flat and free of floating logs and boulders. I gingerly helped launch the dinghy. We cruised into town, poking our pathetic little rubber oars at the curds of flotsam, and got out by the Riverside Pub. We could imagine ourselves sipping from long-stemmed glasses of champagne. Such a pleasurable jaunt!
We then decided, in the failing light, to repeat the journey further upstream and drove to Wigleys Gorge. The sky was varicose to the east and a blaze of turquoise in the west where the sun had finally emerged through the clouds. On low beam, it flashed across the white trunks of the gums. We slipped the dinghy into innocuous waters. But the placidity was deceptive. Within minutes we were in white water, ripping through sawn-off ti-trees and uprooted gums, dropping 3 metres in twenty, totally at the mercy of the gushing river. We veered past slabs of sheer rock wrapped in coffee-coloured bubbles. It was electrifying. Both of us were soon unceremoniously ejected. Steve cracked his knee against a boulder. It could have been his head. Our heads! Somehow we held the tube and, when the country flattened out, I squibbed it. I walked the remaining few kilometres back to town along the bank, too stuffed to even yell to Steve who stayed with the dinghy.
The river continued to rise overnight. A man drowned under the main bridge in spite of the efforts of a helicopter and sophisticated rescue gear. An Aboriginal woman whom I knew only as ‘Mad Alice’ was swept away to her death. She was notorious for walking naked in the main drag, ranting to passers-by. Once I saw her disrobing near the town pool, outside though, not inside. She then headed across Traeger Park Oval towards town, bearing only a handbag strung across her shoulder. Perhaps I read her epitaph a few months later. Scrawled across a fence facing a park she used to sleep in was the brief message ‘Mad Alice Lives’.