by Rod Moss
Rain transformed the country. I loved how the moisture had brought out deeper greens and blacks in the spinifex, grasses and acacias; a vegetal varnishing. The ranges had a new clarity, washed of their customary curtain of dazzling magenta. Small, yellow-throated miners were repairing the storm damage. Grasses sprinted to maturity. Their sugar-heavy, sherry-scented heads swelled and swayed with the faintest push of air. In the park, a hundred galahs mined for seeds, genuflecting every which way in garrulous competition. At night they roosted in the salmon gums along the back fence. Each ruffling wind started them chittering. Otherwise, there was a great stillness. The drenching softened things. It was as if rocks and bushes, the very earth, sucked up sound.
THOUGH I HAD FOR SOME time been aware of an elderly single man who camped 15 metres from Xavier and Petrina, he remained a background figure to the more animated relationships with people of similar age to myself. During August 1986 I was formally introduced to Arranye Edward Johnson by his son-in-law, Dominic Gorey.
‘Good to meet you, sonny boy,’ he proffered his bony hand to greet me.
I had no idea just how important he would become for me.
During the rains, when I saw his meagre dwelling, I gave him the little one-man tent I’d brought up from Victoria. I said I’d talk more with him the following day. When I returned and stood with Dominic next to the tent, I asked why it was flapping on such a still afternoon. He replied, grinning behind his hand, ‘Arranye in there with woman. He been making jig-a-jig business.’
With respect, I hardly believed this possible, given his advanced years. But what else explained the canvas tremors? I chatted with Dominic for half an hour and postponed the catch-up for later in the week.
Our early talks were pleasantly courteous without divulging much. He knew a lot about me from the others, far more than I knew of him. Judging by his wartime stories, he was about my father’s age, born in the early 1920s. He had a stick to help him walk but was reasonably mobile. His sight was poor and his stick was also used to fend off objects in his track – plenty of dogs felt its impact.
Arranye had a broad English vocabulary and an easy approach to conversation. His confidence had been encouraged by moving over large areas of the Centre and working in different capacities that required him to deal with whitefellas such as stockmen, station owners, church leaders, teachers, truck drivers and police. He later worked as the community baker in mission and government settlements. In recent years these skills positioned him as a spokesman for the Whitegate families when dealing with lawyers over land rights. I gathered from him that he’d always been a forthright speaker.
‘I not sit around not speaking it like some other mob when whitefella be ask question. I talk it right back to them.’
He told me that he wanted to record some bush tucker stories.
‘People be come after me might want to be learn. Gotta keep story line rollin’, my boy.’
‘David, Noelly, Jamesy, Peter, they don’t be ask it. Want car but not toolbox,’ sighed Arranye.
While the Arrernte hunted meat and collected medicinal plants and tucker in season, the species, according to the old man, were not sung over as they once were. The stories related to particular sites (known as increase zones) that regenerated foodstuffs. Even the knowledge of the location of these increase places was complex and slowly absorbed. Why bother with acquiring the old survival stories when the supermarkets promised unchallenged, year-round availability? One of the immediate effects of introducing refined flour at missions was the cessation of laborious seed collecting and winnowing for breads. Few residents of Whitegate ventured further than tinned meat, bread, chops, potatoes, onions and eggs. One day when we were shopping together at the Eastside shops, Xavier asked me what peaches and avocados were. On the rare occasions when I offered dried figs, sunflower seeds, almonds and other rather innocuous foodstuffs, he would tentatively taste them and spit them out in the garden.
When I went on the Friday with a tape recorder, as planned, Arranye and Xavier were too far out of it to do anything.
‘Oh my son, we been havin’ too much that green suitcase,’ moaned the old man. ‘Can’t be talk it now. Sorry, my son.’
That green suitcase was the Coolabah cask wine, which people carted away from the town’s numerous liquor outlets.
Coincidental with Arranye’s interest in recording stories, Jude Johnson started to visit more frequently, almost daily. He was often sitting by my door when I arrived home from work. Jude was shy, slightly built and in his early twenties. Unlike Xavier, he never asked for food. He was drawn to the old Spencer and Gillen book and would sit with it, spending a long time soaking up its images.
‘Me want to see it how them old people paint up,’ he said.
I found it difficult to understand what he was explaining about initiation and ceremony. He pointed out photos of dances he had participated in. Quite a lot of them, he admitted, the families didn’t do anymore. He referred to these images of ceremony as the ‘time before shirts an’ trousers’.
He occasionally read the text adjacent to the photos aloud to me, haltingly, unaware it rarely matched the images. He only ever wanted to talk about ‘business’ or Arrernte Law, which he took seriously. I’m not imputing that others did not embrace traditional law; however, Jude’s focus was exceptionally singular. Although often accompanied by his wife, Iris, he mostly came alone. It was a few weeks before I realised that English was their common language. Iris was Eastern Warlpiri, and spoke ‘soft Warlpiri’, as she put it. Jude eventually borrowed the book; he kept it under his pillow.
OVER THE WEEKS I BECAME AWARE that Dominic Gorey stayed close to his tent, never moving far from it. When I asked Jude why, he said Dominic’s wife, Lizzie, lay sick inside. I hardly knew her but insisted on seeing her, as Dominic looked extremely anxious. Lizzie, Arranye’s oldest daughter, was small and frail. She had the stature of a twelve-year-old despite her real age of twenty-four years. She sprawled silently in the putrid roost of her blankets. I told Dominic she should go immediately to hospital. He said he had been asking her to go for weeks, but she was too afraid. I carried her to the car, where she lay across the back seat, panting for breath. Jude jammed up against me and sat on the handbrake, leaving the rest of the front seat for Dominic. Dominic went on and on about how relieved he was that I had taken charge.
‘I pay you hundred dollars or anything you been ask it. You my number one best friend,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry about it, Dom,’ I said, waving away his ridiculous offer.
We waited in Casualty while Lizzie was being cleaned up. Then she was designated a ward and pushed along on a roller bed by an orderly with us in tow. Her skin was blotched and lacking pigment in broad patches. She had infected scabies and general malnutrition, weighing a mere thirty-five kilos. She was promptly hooked into antibiotics and pumped with high doses of iron. She wouldn’t look at Jude or me. She mumbled something quietly to Dominic, then we walked out towards the lift.
Jude sniggered as we passed a ward of Ernabella petrol sniffers who were either on the floor or tied to their beds. If Jude had not spoken, I would have had no idea how to account for this room full of contorted bodies with limp heads and mouths in frozen rictus. Their emaciated bodies and vacant, dark eye-sockets made for one of the most pitiful sights I have seen. Jude glanced at me, put his hand to his mouth and gave a strangely embarrassed smile as he proudly claimed that Arrernte did not sniff petrol. I didn’t know if he was right about that. I’d heard about hardware shop break-ins around town, where paint thinners and glues for inhaling were stolen. Presumably Arrernte youths were among the culprits.
Years later I would see kids and young adults at Armata, in the Pitjantjatjara homelands, playing basketball, with cans of petrol strung around their necks. The harsh images from the hospital ward flashed before me.
We visited Lizzie in Ward 7 every
day for the six weeks of her stay in hospital. Dominic wanted me there to ask the nurses questions. He said he was ‘too shame’ to talk to the nurses and doctors himself. He was also ‘too shame’ to be near so many pregnant women in the adjacent maternity ward. Giving birth was ‘women’s business’, as far as Dominic was concerned. He began squirming as we walked through the transept dividing the two wards, wedging himself between the far wall and me.
Lizzie gave a big toothy grin one afternoon when Dominic brought in a biro and a crossword puzzle. Lizzie had put on a few kilograms and the glow had returned to her skin. Her teeth had been brushed and she combed her hair while we chatted, something she was incapable of on admission. As we got to the car park, Dominic suggested we go to my place and play guitar. He loved to strum away and tried to teach me his language through song. He stated that he did not speak the language backwards.
‘Only be speak it forwards, right through, but not in reverse. Only old people able to speak it backwards and forwards.’
On another visit, I chucked the latest edition of the Phantom on Lizzie’s bedside table, knowing its popularity in camp. She picked it up and flashed another grin. She continued scanning its pages as Dominic gave her the news on Whitegate. They chatted while I quizzed the nurse about her condition. The nurse made it clear that Lizzie would always require medication. She was weak and had suffered from malnutrition from early infancy. Her liver and kidneys were damaged. Her respiratory system was weak too. She really needed to be hospitalised every three to four months; there was no way she’d keep to her bag of medications while in camp or receive anything like the diet required to give her long-term health.
XAVIER ARRIVED AT MY DOOR one Friday evening in September to ask if I’d help shift his effects south of the dam. I helped him to scoop up his stuff in three armfuls and cautiously drove the track to the narrow creek bed, following his hand signals. Upon arrival, I could see that he’d hauled some of his belongings there already. The sight of his esky and his kelpie with its litter tickled me. His chicken – ‘chooka chooka’, as he called it – stood astride the esky defending the food within from the hungry dogs. After depositing his gear we went to the dam to fill his tin quart pot.
He broke the news of Johnny Stirling’s death. He was found dead by his wife, Melita. Xavier claimed that she had accidentally cut an artery in Johnny’s thigh during a drunken quarrel and awoke the next morning to the sight of her dead husband in a pool of blood. The story initially put about by her father, Joseph, to avoid paybacks, was that Johnny had poked himself in the leg. The payback system of obligatory reprisal killing would have made all the Johnsons vulnerable to an attack from one of the Stirlings. Melita cut her hair and wore a black scarf for the remainder of the year, keeping appropriately to herself. When she occasionally walked to the shops or to Tangentyere to get her pension cheque, she was accompanied by her sisters.
Another time Jude arrived with Iris and his older brother, Joseph junior, who’d recently been nicknamed ‘amulte’, meaning ‘arm’. His arm had been smashed in a rollover. These accidents were sufficiently numerous to confuse me about who’d been in what car, when, and who was driving. He showed me how his left arm dangled feebly at his side. He said he was going to hospital on Friday to have a plate put in his arm, and he produced an appointment card from his shirt pocket to confirm his claim. He added that he had already missed three previous appointments.
Iris showed me an egg-sized lump on her head. She then asked for tea, and to see the recently completed portrait of Jude. This was my second work depicting someone from Whitegate. I had developed it from a photo taken some weeks before. I tried to keep the sheen of the photograph in the graphite by gently rubbing the grey powder with a bit of tissue. Jude remarked that the sorrel strands of hair running through the middle of his chin were missing in the drawing.
‘That ginger part of my mother’s Dreaming,’ he said. ‘You gotta put that there.’
I’d never noticed them, and of course they didn’t show in the black and white photo. I got out a fine sable brush, mixed up ginger tone and painted over the drawing to his satisfaction.
Jude recounted how his father had been killed for some misdemeanour Jude had committed during his initiation. His father was made the sacrifice. He added that the custodians’ decision to spare him, the offender, was unusual given that he was accessible. This possibly explained his focus on the law. His father was brother to Arranye and had married a Pitjantjatjara woman. Jude was born in his mother’s country and that was where his calamitous initiation took place.
I could hardly begin to understand this in terms of my family dynamics. I was no stranger to my father’s occasional beltings as a kid, but my petty transgressions usually earned nothing more than a school detention, the withholding of pocket money, or being grounded. And our family crises never spilled into the public domain. People in camp openly discussed their bruises and cuts from partners and relatives sitting near to them.
Jude asked Iris to leave the room. Then he waited until he saw her pass through the back door. He told me that Iris had her tooth plucked by Warlpiri businessmen, indicating that she knew men’s business, or law. According to Jude, if men from other language groups discovered that Iris had this knowledge, both of them could be killed. She later came back into the room. I put saline drops in Jude’s eyes, which had swelled from infectious fly shit. Jude, Iris and Joseph agreed that Pintubi people of the Western Desert had dangerous magic.
‘When they go shooting, if you near kangaroo, you get shot. They be cannibal,’ said Jude.
Had this been verified? Or was it the popular refrain for demonising the unknown other group of people?
Neither Jude nor Joseph would cut their long hair now, as business time was coming up. Exceptional protocol was involved, all of it opaque to me. Jude said the grandfathers insisted that short hair would induce sickness. Initiation ceremonies galvanised the behaviour of everyone in camp and all contributed to the event.
A week later Xavier arrived drunk and I poured him into the car to get rid of him at camp. During the journey, I decided to tell him of my recent unsettling news. I would soon be transferred to a Perth college for the duration of 1987. Upon arrival I opened the door and he fell out, then dragged himself up the side of the car with fingers hooked on the partly opened window.
‘Are you going to be okay?’ I asked.
He was crying. ‘I’m sad for you. This my country,’ he said.
He sunk back on his haunches and fixed his stare on me.
My work colleague Iain Campbell and I had flippantly filled in forms for the TAFE’s lecturer exchange program. It was a new initiative and Centralian College management wanted the college to be seen to be in the network. A lot of lecturers, it seemed, wanted to come to Alice Springs. In the belief that we were ineligible according to the criteria, Iain and I randomly chose locations. Much to my dismay, the director called me for a brief interview to state unequivocally that I had no way out. I was chosen to go to Carine TAFE in Perth. How could I convince Elaine about making the move? We’d agreed to resume living together in Alice Springs when her training was over.
One consolation was an encouraging letter from Peter Schjeldahl. He said he’d felt he got some vital charge from Alice Springs, particularly the permanent, visceral image of the bush meeting the ugly flats, and from there, the threat of the purely wild. Elsewhere he felt Australia lacked ‘spiritual juice’. It was not an expression I was comfortable with, but I agreed with his perception of the flat dullness of the cities and towns. He was emboldened to repeat a request for a painting of the stone-slinging episode. I knew I had at least one very interested viewer outside the Whitegate audience.
A FEW WEEKS PRIOR TO THE CLOSE of the academic year, I took a carload of women and kids on the 200-kilometre track to the Johnson outstation at Little Well. Outstations were associated with the ‘back to the land’ movement of
the 1970s. Community leaders, like Arranye, took their families to live at sites where they had mythological connections. This did not mean returning to a nomadic lifestyle in any sense, though hunting and foraging were a necessity for the Johnsons, given the enormous distance that separated Little Well from town. Gregory, a younger brother of Arranye and Joseph, attempted to live most of the time at Little Well and lobbed up at Whitegate in between. It was a regular fact of life for Gregory and his wife, Janet, to depend on the personnel at Ingkerreke Outstation Service to remember to collect them every three or four weeks and take them to town to restock.
The red ranges flanking the road were warped and rent in abrupt cliffs. The grasses were bleached and thrashed by the wind. Gidgee and corkwood trees framed the Numery road with their twisted, aged limbs. I felt that if I were to spend a summer camped alongside this road and endure its heat, winds and driving rains, I might well resemble these trees. I was pretty tense too. I’d never been so far from town on an unmade road in such condition of ruin.
We were welcomed by Gregory Johnson who’d arrived back there earlier in the week. Eight tin sheds were clustered on pebbly ground. At the top of a narrow valley was a windmill that pumped water from the well to a tank set on a rise above the settlement. Gregory enthusiastically showed me the small cave that housed the sacred snake’s eggs, smooth rocks about the size of emu eggs, which were crucial to Little Well’s snake Dreaming. They were deemed to belong to the carpet snake, but were also associated with the Rainbow Serpent stories that swept the continent.