by Rod Moss
NOT LONG AFTER THE FUNERAL I spotted Jude in the middle of Undoolya Road attempting to flag down cars. I pulled in slowly to the kerb. He seemed in a daze and took a few minutes to recognise me. He was distressed.
‘You wanna jump in and come home?’
He hesitated. ‘Leg weak from sorry cut. Yesterday I been cut ’im. Too much thinking old Joseph and other old people.’
Some kids from Whitegate wandered past. I heard the taunts of three white kids.
‘Chocko frogs. Chocko frogs,’ they sang.
The black kids quickly retorted, ‘Vanilla milkshakes.’
Minutes later, a police wagon pulled alongside and two officers came over. Ignoring me, they asked Jude if he had been walking on the road. We both lied that he hadn’t. The police were annoyed at me butting in, asked who I was and what I was doing talking to this blackfella. They insisted that he was drunk, that someone had reported him. They said that they had better things to do than argue with him or me, and were taking him to the Drugs and Alcohol Services Association complex, known as the DASA shelter, behind Anzac Hill.
I was incensed. Jude was unjustly being detained. I arrived at the shelter half an hour later. The bookwork had been completed and the police had gone. What did I need to do to reclaim Jude? He was free to walk away anytime, the manager said. He went to find him, but Jude had fallen asleep.
Hours passed and at suppertime he turned up at our home. Xavier and Petrina arrived minutes later and told Jude to shove off.
‘Rod is my whitefella. I been find him first.’
I insisted that Jude stay and we spread the food around more thinly so as to feed everyone. Jude rarely ate more than a thimbleful anyway. Elaine and I felt protective of him. His lack of assertiveness was the direct opposite of Xavier’s temperament. We enjoyed Xavier’s humour, but he exasperated us when he teased Ronja to tears. We would implore him to cool it or piss off.
Now, with Xavier more subdued, I read them The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen and The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde. The English was simple, not ‘big English’, as Petrina put it, but they were stories I grew up with and could read with feeling. Xavier appreciated our efforts and carefully cleaned the spilled food from the table with a sponge. As we sat chatting around the table, Xavier kept cutting Jude out of the conversation. I got so frustrated with his rudeness, I asked him to put his plate in the sink and to go. I walked him and Petrina to the door. Instead of welcoming the space that I had created for him, Jude took this as a sign to be on his way as well. He stood and exited quietly from the opposite door, across the lounge room.
A FEW MONTHS LATER, Elaine broke news of her decision to separate. She confessed that she was having an affair with Ruben. Throughout our marriage she had insisted that their relationship was platonic and ridiculed me for raising suspicion. Now the truth of the duration of their acquaintance was revealed to me as pre-dating our marriage, which also shed light on Ruben’s visit to Alice a year earlier. Although he was also married with children, Elaine felt that her feelings for him impaired her involvement with me.
At Elaine’s request I moved out. Then, two weeks later, I decided to move back and she subsequently moved to a nearby granny flat with Ronja. It was a disturbing and painful process, a cooling-off time in which we were counselled not to form new relationships. On the two occasions when I responded to invitations to supper from women friends offering a sympathetic ear (both of whom had partners who were also friends of mine), Elaine was frantically onto me the next day. I became confused about her position of favouring polygamy, which I now understood only applied to herself.
By late November we decided to give it another go. Elaine urged for another child the moment we reunited, which I felt was too hasty, especially since she’d admitted she was still grieving for Ruben. But I endured the tide and the unreconciled issues in our relationship. I was fighting to keep my relationship with Ronja as healthy as possible and to nurture a family environment. I had so much to lose. I didn’t want to be a background father. And yes, I was still hopeful that Elaine and I would come to share the same focus and enrich one another’s lives.
A week prior to leaving for the annual southern exodus to Melbourne, Ronja contracted whooping cough. We tossed up whether or not to go, but decided that the cooler climate might be easier on Ronja. By the first night, camping in Port Augusta, we realised this would not be the case for any of us. We shared several weeks of broken nights, constantly whacking Ronja’s back to keep her breathing. It was a Christmas, replete with car ailments, I’d rather forget.
By the new year, Ronja was over the worst of her illness. The day we left Melbourne Elaine looked up Ruben. He had remained a presence in her imaginings. Soon after this, Elaine resumed therapy and was buoyed when told by our counsellor that some of her projections had diminished, to the extent that she could recognise when she was projecting, though he estimated they remained at some four fifths. It seemed like a sophisticated game to me.
Ronja turned two, and not long after I received news of Bernadette Turner’s death. She was in her early twenties when she died of an epileptic fit during the protest over Junction Waterhole. I never knew the details other than that she died being rushed from the protest camp to hospital. The Junction Waterhole, just north of Wigleys, accessed only by 4WD track, was a sacred women’s place for menstruation. Developers and government were bent on transforming it into a recreational holding dam for flood mitigation. In January 1991 the Territory government succeeded in desecrating the site, before the Federal Government’s Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Robert Tickner, overruled their decision. 10
APART FROM TRIPS TO LITTLE WELL, Arranye took me on numerous one-day outings, east and south-east of town.
When I first killed a perentie by whacking it on the back of the neck with his walking stick, he inspected it, pressing his fingers into its fatty hind legs. ‘You be proper desert line man now, my son.’
He was as pleased with me as I was with myself. Every time we passed this spot on our way to his homeland in the Simpson Desert, he reminded me of the pleasure those fat legs and tail had given him.
Our first weekend trip was to Bitter Springs Creek. He knew the place rock by rock – the itinerary of their shadows and when they morphed into particular images. For me, the ranges appeared as an extensive spine of impassive minerals, changing colour entrancingly throughout the day. As we passed Emily and Jessie gaps, he mentioned that there were three caterpillar groups that contributed to Alice Springs’ stories, not just the ayepe-arenye, whose crinkled thorax formed the MacDonnell Ranges.
‘Two type come from west, my boy. Come through Honeymoon Gap. Another mob come from east, N’Dhala Gorge side. That Theresa Ryder’s country now. They cross over at Emily Gap. That painting you see at Jessie Gap is caterpillar one again.’
We forked north from the Ross River Highway, ten minutes along the Arltunga road where, high above the road, the mythological story of the headband Dreaming is scoured into the hill. The old man called the place irrkerteye. There were grey outcrops of limestone which created jags on the skyline. Sandstone and siltstone combined in the rounded profile of the headband. From Arranye’s perception, the form of the land was a result of events made by mythological ancestors. This shallow 10-metre depression was more saturated with richer reds, ochres and whites than anywhere in the vicinity, a spectacular spot inviting my attention.
The water at Bitter Springs ran through you like Epsom salts, he said, because the women’s Dreaming there was about how the young girl had been ‘damaged’ by the rough sex of a man. The headband that the mythological man was wearing attracted attention to his rude, ‘flash’ behaviour.
Arranye instructed me to climb up to see for myself, while he remained by the salt encrustation that gave the creek its name. When I came back down, I joined him where he was sitting comfortably in the creek bed.
‘What you see there?’
The velvety treacle of stains close up were composed of hundreds of noduled, jutting clay fragments that were rough to touch. I thought the crenellated surface looked like the residue of some magnificent insect colony. These were in fact the mud nests of fairy martins. Had we visited at dawn or dusk we would have seen them hawking around the cliff. Arranye said that ceremonial paintings had the same kind of dotted texture, to communicate their connections to places like this.
‘The moon curve here like curve of creek. You paint this one, my sonny boy. I been thinking long time you photo this one in morning light. Old Afghan camel camp, this place. Big ngkwarle arwengalkere [sugarbag place] too. Honeybee do hard work. Sugarbag on top of tree. We be clear honey out and that be hard work too. Fill up billycan or bark and then take ’em back.’
We slowly returned to the car.
‘You got the picture, my son?’
I nodded politely, unsure of how the story continued north of where we were. I was hungry and thought of lunching at Ross River Homestead, only a further thirty minutes’ drive east. Once there, I ordered a couple of lusty hamburgers across the bar. While I waited, I flicked through an old coffee table book published in the early 1970s. I recognised Myra Hayes’s husband, Simon Toby, who featured on one of its pages. In still life he was about to hurl a boomerang for the tourists. This was one of his duties of employment, along with cooking damper and handling the trail rides. Boomerang throwing was still being demonstrated at the homestead, but the only Aboriginal presence at Ross River now was the photograph of Simon in the book.
I returned to the car to eat with Arranye. He fumbled for a few minutes with the napkin folded around his hamburger.
‘My son, I too much grog sick for this one. Might be I keep it for suppertime.’
I recommended yoghurt for his sensitive stomach. Not that we could buy any from the homestead, but maybe he’d recall it for future reference.
‘Oh I know that one,’ he said. ‘We boil up that nanny goat milk. Mission time. Number one, that goat. More better than rich cow. Then we hang that milk in a tree, my son. That’s my good tucker you been tellin’ me.’
‘Do you want a soft drink?’
‘No. Can’t drink it when we drivin’. Might be stop and pee all time.’
We continued on and looked quickly at Ross River’s carpet snake Dreaming. Arranye pointed out the ‘porcupine’ place in N’Dhala Gorge, and then the perentie at Corroboree Rock. He said nothing about the places; he was tired and, perhaps, he sensed the limits of my capacity to absorb what he was saying. He slumped into sleep as I shielded my eyes from the sun, cruising to its evening appointment in the western ranges.
BLONDE TENDRILS OF CLOUD COMBED THE SKY at rare altitudes. I felt elated as I studied them one night after supper. It was late October 1991 and Elaine had just told me that she was pregnant. We were both happy. I thought that an extra child would extinguish any remaining doubts about our relationship. I broke our news at Whitegate before proceeding to college the next day. The men were charging up again on the sweet Coolabah in the convivial blush of morning light.
Dominic told me he’d ‘think up boy’. ‘Call it Eyeglass,’ he suggested, ‘after Gregory’s nickname.’
Eyeglass Moss, I thought. It had a certain resonance. But, no. ‘I don’t think so, Dom.’
Dominic was ambivalent about alcohol. ‘This whitefella poison. Not blackfella. Belong it you mob.’ But he was happy enough to drink it regularly.
Five women huddled around the breakfast fire, sharing wine from a large tin and exchanging baby stories.
‘Elaine be atnerte-atnerte now. Arrernte call pregnant woman “two stomach”. Two stomach she be got to feed.’
‘Charmaine never been have Formula 26,’ said Jennifer Johnson. ‘Only this one,’ she added, propping her breasts with both hands. ‘This one, proper number one formula.’
‘Theresa been keep me goin’ all night. I dry by mornin’. Formula real good,’ said Melita, pointing to the can’s label as the drink was passed to her.
It was the very Formula 26 she was espousing.
SUMMER HAD SET IN and I visited Little Well. This was the first occasion on which Arranye taped his bush-tucker stories. His niece Theresa Ryder and two of her sons accompanied us. The premise of taping enabled us to use a Toyota from the Institute of Aboriginal Development (IAD). The Institute had some funding to help build its Aboriginal language library for educational and publishing programs. However, it was under-resourced for the quantity of recording and translating that might secure the local knowledge in literature.
Our first stop was 15 kilometres east along the Numery track. We pulled into some shade and I got out the IAD tape deck. It had worked in the library, but the buttons wouldn’t depress now. Back we went the 50 kilometres to town. Another two hours of run-around. Then our second pausing, sitting under a desert oak by the kerb, with the Red Range rolled at our backs. Nearby was a patch of ashen ground from a recent fire, upon which a carpet of black cockies quaffed the sprouting burrs, their red tails flicking in the shadows.
‘ Irrarnte mob there, my son. Firestick, we call it, that one. Tail feather, you know it? Can take it with him to light up country.
‘This the main place for seed, early days. Kids liked to eat those seeds, not only kids. Men and women. Whole lot. And every seed, the acacia, and the artetye, they put them out to dry. When they get dry, they grind them and cook it in ashes. You know why they been do that? To get all the skin out. And they get atnyeme, or big wind might be come. Let all the skin blow away and clean it.
‘We be call it Ararlakerte, that place. Our countryside. Place belong it Ryder mob. Right up to Williams Well and N’Dhala Gorge. Seeds taste just like peanuts. Our perlaperle [father’s mothers], old nannies, they used to go and work on that one. All the young girl go get ’em own tucker. Work all the time. That why all the kid never get sick.
‘Aboriginal people you see today, they dying all the time. Why they dying? They die just because they drinking whitefella’s thing, you know, that poison spirit grog. We never been look around for grog all the time; we look around for sugarbag or ngkwarle athengarlperle [ironwood resin], arlepampwe [acacia], and atnyerrampwe [supplejack]. They soak them in water. Sweet now. Then eat it. Proper nice. Sugarbag never make old people sick or make ’em die. Just like medicine.’
He paused after this recitation and leant back on his elbow, swivelling his head to fix me with a glossy, black stare.
‘What you think now, my son? Good story I been tell you?’
‘Good story, Arranye.’
‘You can say that again and again, my boy.’ He grinned and looked down to his sockless feet, crossed before him in frayed sneakers.
We replayed the tape to his satisfaction. He giggled at the sound of his recorded voice.
‘That old Arranye in there. Him know all that one.’
He stored his butt in the tobacco tin and groped for his shirt pocket. He made a catarrhal clearance and pelted a gob of phlegm on the sandy ground as he swung his frail frame back into the cabin.
Arranye guided us through Todd River Station, past Possum Bore, Camel Flat Bore and on to Little Well, where Gregory was lodged. That first night Theresa’s son Shane made a direct hit with a lump of limestone on a perentie. We ate it with our damper. My first lizard, a bit like fish, but the bones were in different places. Isn’t that what we likened all unfamiliar flesh to, chicken or fish?
I was exhausted and would have slung the swags down anywhere by the track. Arranye insisted we push on in the dark to a patch of gidgee, which grew in the softer red sands. The night was ant-interrupted. I finished in the utility tray. In the morning I asked the old man if the ants had bothered him.
‘No. Only time when you be move ’em to truck an’ break down that fence you been make ’em be
tween sweet gidgee sap they been huntin’. Gidgee seed is proper poison one. Whitefella might be call ’em 1080. But sap, oh, really sweet one.’
The ravishing melody of the kwepalepale/bellbird directing the dawn chorus washed our ears. A wafer of gidgee smoke nestled languidly in the crowns of these low trees, giving a pleasant acrid scent. Gidgee provided shade, windbreak, and the supreme firewood. Its curlicueing limbs beckoned me.
A glare in the previous night sky, directly below two bright stars, told Arranye we were in for a hot one. It was infernal. As we approached Wallaby Gap mid-morning, the cloud had cleared and we were getting full-bore sun.
Arranye told me he was the owner of the native cat Dreaming in the cave we stopped at. A wire fence ran from the rocks clustered at the eastern base of the gap, marking the border between Todd River and Ringwood stations. Doolans owned this site, he said. The nearby coolibah tree formed part of the story.
‘Old half-caste bloke, Paddy Doolan know this place. Aggie Abbott know it too. That their storyline. Atyelpe an’ kangaroo rat camp here. Patrick Hayes can look it, but can’t be speak it.’
Over lunch at Camel Flat bore we taped again. The back of my neck grilled in the heat. Throughout, we were wooed by a pair of pied butcherbirds. Young Shane circumnavigated the tank and caught eight pigeons perched on its rim by hand. Some buffeted off nearby to safety and watched Shane stuff their companions in his t-shirt. He planned to sell them in town. They expired within ten minutes.
It was preposterous to drive in the heat, so we napped. Another pair of smaller birds roused me, busily chirping around Arranye’s head.
‘What are these plains birds?’ I asked him, as he broke several butts to fill new papers.
‘I boss fella for this one. They akerntenye [pardalote], be come an’ talk it me. Pay respect to old Arranye. Want to tell me rain might be comin’. “Oh. That’s all right, my little friends”, I been tell ’em.
‘Olden times we been dig pencil yam, in the creeks. Old people got yalke [onions] and mash ’im to make soft for kids and old people with no teeth. Used to look after old men and woman really careful. Nowadays, they eat lolly and drink cool drink. In olden days they used to eat wild honey and aperaltye. They didn’t eat the whole lot. They save it for eating after meat. They never get sick in early days.