The Hard Light of Day
Page 13
‘You see that food called alyeka merne with the prickles that pierce your foot? Well, the root is food, like potato. You get a lot and then take them back to cook. Over at Truckin’ Yard and Tangentyere side we been get them. In rain time we’d go to sand hills, over Amoonguna sand hill side, and get merne urrkennge [truffles]. And kangaroo they been get. Spear it. Get the guts an’ squash it with hands and all that water would flow. Lifesaver, that water. Keep old people alive.’
We got back in the Toyota and struggled over the heavy sands of the Todd River flood-out. The cream-crowned bloodwoods were in full blossom. Shane shot two kangaroos from the cabin just before the Little Well gate. Gregory greeted us affectionately after sunset. He broke from a dark clump of figures. His sunglasses flashed in the headlights. He wore them to conceal his glass eye. Lady, an improbable hybrid of great Dane and greyhound, vied at window level with Gregory’s welcoming grin. Had we brought meat, he wanted to know? Yes.
AN HOUR LATER JANEY ABBOTT arrived with some other women from Santa Teresa in their women’s bus. Arranye sat next to me. He liked the idea of a gender-dedicated bus.
‘Men too rough with car,’ he said.
The women made a round of plaintive wailing as Janey told of a relative killed by a crocodile in the Katherine River, a day’s drive north. The wailing lingered in the endless depth of the night. I slipped into my swag, easing my body from the long crouch over the wheel. Then singing began, each verse interspersed with giggling, explanation and confirmation of phrasing. These songs, summoned from Arranye’s prodigious memory, relieved their grief and wound their way rhythmically to the flicker of the long shadows cast by those propped around the fire. The singing got me out of my swag, and I joined the circle.
On that warm night, so far from any place I had called home, I was immersed in the ethereal beauty of language formed from the very country I was lying on. I lacked such historic reach. This was the Johnsons’ centre.
My musical heritage centred on the mid-1960s with Bob Dylan and The Band. Both had fossicked around folkloric traditions. Dylan sang about family breakdown, about distrust of the corporate world and the duplicity of political systems. He introduced a sense of the epic into pop culture. Whether tender, angry or bitter, his pastiche of Beat phrasings and the Blues expanded my feeling of the world through his imperfect tone. It was this novel tone of empathy and vulnerability that seduced me. His political allusions mostly flew above my head until I experienced the disenfranchised state of Indigenous peoples in Central Australia. His songs became my anthems. That night, I sang a few of his ballads to the appreciative Johnsons beneath the diamond-studded sky.
In the morning Gregory got me to drive half an hour south, to a low hill crusted with amethyst.
‘Might be make it lot of monies, Rod. Might be millions dollar. What you think?’
Nearby, David had apparently also discovered a reef of semi-precious stones, black ones which they intended to sell. These were clustered on a ridge by a fence – easy surface pickings. Someone Gregory had met inside the Gem Cave shop in the mall had shown interest in them. It was pocket money, really. Not the folding stuff.
Nearer midday, Arranye asked us to move from the others to continue taping.
‘Too much think ’bout woman if we be camp close that mob.’
Each time I asked if he wanted a rest he said, ‘What you think we come here for? You want to rest yourself? Come on, my good boy, let’s tell another lie.’
‘Should we continue now?’ I asked throughout, concerned about the heat.
He mocked the indecisiveness of an old drover boss.
‘Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. That how he talk. Anyway, time we make it talk now, my good boy.’
We lay side by side in the latticed shade of a corkwood, shifting with its movement every fifteen to twenty minutes. Even with the protection of my hat, I could feel my face burning from the sun reflecting off the quartz-strewn ground. At one point during the recording, lulled by the old man’s lilting voice, I nodded off, letting the microphone wilt to my waist. Arranye seized it in a flash.
‘Not until that track be laid.’
We replayed it. I glanced at the swarms of budgerigars and thought of the proliferation of dots in my paintings, likening their slowly accumulated marks to the softly landing flocks of finches.
At lunch, Arranye joked about me, telling the women about the mike going limp like an old penis, and how he had stroked it back straight. I retold the story of the young boy who told his mother he had an erection.
‘“What will I do?” the boy asked his mother. “Go and sit next to your father and I’ll run out and fetch the jumper leads,” she said.’
The women sniggered and Arranye nudged me gently in the side. He was keen to get on with the recording.
‘Young mob should be listen old people. Should be go school and learn it too. Read and write ’em. Not jus’ run round make it trouble for parents, run round town shop. Should be listen. What right? What wrong? Make it own mind. When I young fella, might be play with Ian Lovegrove, Sergeant Jack Lovegrove’s son. Father Lovegrove might say it. “Boys, clean up that yard. Stack ’em soft drink bottle, then you can pick it, grapefruit or orange.”’
On this trip I sensed the urgency, the tension underlying the old man’s project. He was clear his material was going to be retained somehow for people who would follow. I couldn’t understand why he chose me as a collaborator. There were professionals, much better equipped anthropologists and linguists. I wondered where the queues of people were who would have revelled in his company. The tarry campfire smoke, that blue waft of mulga vapour, these resins stained my lungs and clothes. The fires and gossip made for intimacy against the scale of the unimpeded night sky. His confiding in me made me feel less inconsequential. Apart from having kids, it was the greatest privilege.
At sunrise, as I frosted some Weet-Bix with milk powder, David broke the news of our vehicle’s tyres. They must have punctured as we scoured the flood-out and slowly leaked during the night. The IAD maintenance mechanic hadn’t done the routine check of the car we had borrowed. There was no pump and no jack, essentials for remote area driving.
Arranye said Kevin Pick would help us and lent me a bicycle. It turned out to be useless in the heavy sand and I abandoned it within ten minutes. I walked two hours for help. I could sense the ends of my fingers going numb as I became dehydrated. My pulse throbbed in my lips. The backs of my eyes burned. Birds had stopped singing. Hopefully, I’d chosen the correct track. I was the only thing moving besides the flies at my ears, eyes, nose and lips. They queued at each opening for sustenance. By ten, it would have been well over 45°C. I was swigging the last drop of water from my bottle, when Kevin’s windmill came into view. I trudged past the calcined architecture of horse ribs that had not made it to the troughs.
Kevin sat on the caravan steps, waiting. He’d seen me in the distance. He looked older, less poised without his Akubra to conceal his baldness. He pointed to the fridge and said to help myself to water. One of his vehicles had a compatible spare. There was a repair kit in the glove box. The jack was under the seat. I was in good hands, spades of hands that swallowed the steering wheel on the drive back to Little Well. Hands that had sunk bores, twisted fencing wire, and felled trees for joisting and hanging gates, hands that would brandish the .303 at bull camels. I clasped my uncallused pair between my thighs. Kevin was more garrulous when he discovered I had nothing to do with the Central Land Council. He fixed the tyres, gave Arranye a cursory hello and returned to his caravan.
We packed for town and made several stops along the way. Theresa wanted to gather some pituri leaves for her mother, Nancy, who was Arranye’s older sister. I’m not sure why they made a custom of gathering the plant at Pinjee/Ringwood gate. Arranye, though a user of the stimulant, never used leaves gathered here, and I assumed they were especially cherished by his sister.
On Christmas Eve, Xavier arrived again with mud-coated locks of ‘business hair’ and reminded me that if I learnt more ‘lingo’, I too could have this knowledge about business. Ushering me into the bedroom, he whispered in my ear that a little razor cut would do the job. Again he unbuttoned to show he had been cut twice, circumcised and sub-incised. Edward Neil, Jude and he would sing me, he confided. They would cut my inner arm for blood. I wondered if I wanted to learn more language.
‘If you have little boy, we can teach him.’
That point made, we returned to the lounge room where he joked with Ronja. She laughed at his high-jinks, and he insisted her responsiveness was due to her grasp of Arrernte. We all bedded down early for celebrations the next day.
The following morning I drove him into camp. There was a lot of spirit at Whitegate, spirits feeding the spirit. Casks and cans. Arranye sat outside his humpy and blubbered his season’s greetings to Ronja and me. He wanted me to take him shopping but I explained that we had to get back for family Christmas preparations, and anyway, it was unlikely that any shops would be open.
Old Lesley Driffin detained my arm. He was visiting Arranye and sat on the ground by his brother-in-law’s fire. I stood to return to the car.
‘You been got it, Jesus?’ he blurted.
He wondered at my presence in camp. Whitefellas at Whitegate either worked for Aboriginal councils, the health services or the church. It was hard for anyone at Whitegate to think I didn’t believe in some form of church business.
‘I don’t think about Jesus. I don’t follow the Bible line,’ I told him.
‘I been got him,’ he added. ‘Him be inside this one.’
He pointed to the two cloth-bound hymn books he fondled between his legs. They were written in Western Arrernte, probably by old Carl Strehlow, the Ingkarte, or Father/teacher, from Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission early in the twentieth century. Before this time, there had been no Arrernte orthography.
‘I know it, God in heaven. Not lizard God. God in heaven.’ He stabbed the air above his right ear with his finger. ‘God love poor people like Aboriginal mob. He not love rich people same way. No one cry when rich people finish, like Aboriginal people cry. Money don’t cry for them.’
Gregory had come from Little Well for the Christmas celebrations. He moved in front of Lesley and told me that the strawberry birthmark on Ronja’s neck was the copperhead snake’s Dreaming. The pattern was the scaly one of a carpet snake’s skin. Her mark verified her connection to Little Well. The snake had apparently risen from the well and kissed her on the neck on her initial visit when she was six months old. Every child, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, born in Alice Springs was part of the caterpillar story and placed in its power. To this Ronja added her consort with the snake.
WHILE SUCH BELIEFS WERE PART AND PARCEL of their Dreaming, the Arrernte have also taken on board the Christian teachings of the missionaries. The Lutherans arrived in 1877; they were the first in Central Australia, and their mission was some 130 kilometres west of Alice Springs, which wasn’t even a concept at that time. And the Catholic mission at Santa Teresa, already an influence prior to World War 2, was established in its present location in 1952. Though the institutions have now withdrawn from active control at both Hermannsburg and Santa Teresa, their influence remains. Arrernte Catholics practised their faith alongside and interwoven with their inherited traditions.
‘Goodnight and God bless you’ remains a common expression of friends when I drop them in camp at night.
Ceremonies usually occurred during summer. The nights were balmy and the hot days in camp were best spent in siesta anyway. The ceremonial finale consisted of three to four all-night vigils. I was excited about my family participating in one of Whitegate’s celebratory events in the not-too-distant future.
ONE AFTERNOON AFTER WORK, Elaine, Ronja and I went out to the final night of Trevor Johnson and Michael Drover’s initiation. I stood with the young men who flanked the eastern and western perimeters of the circle and joined in the rhythmic chanting, which supported the older men’s song verses and the dancing of women and kids. An older woman in the front row of women held a red hot burning stick, which Dominic told me represented the tortured penises of the newly made young men. Throughout I asked several young men what we were doing. The unanimous reply was, ‘This law, Rod.’ To them, it was self-explanatory.
Flickering flame separated bodies and faces from the night. Their shunting, driving bodies drummed the earth. The ceremony presented another dimension of Arrernte life that to date I hadn’t seen. It was nothing like the demonstration dance snippets I’d seen at schools or art galleries put on for whitefella audiences. This was for and by the Whitegate mob and I felt very invigorated.
Later that night, when the high energy part of the proceedings ceased, Elaine and Ronja went home. At dawn all was quiet. Some women were standing in formation, though they looked asleep. Children were waking. The younger boys had gone to sleep. All the old men were huddled together and awake, facing the direction of the imminent sun, rising through Emily Gap’s caterpillar Dreaming. Their dogs stirred and re-settled in the fine dust.
Gregory rustled up the younger men and directed them to sit, knees tucked under their bodies, three or four to a column. They remained like this, silent and introspective for twenty minutes or so until the sun raked long pale shadows behind them. Then Gregory went to the women and instructed them to disperse. The men then rose and filed after them for breakfast.
Arranye asked me to look for his sunglasses, which had been lost during the night. I returned to the nearby ceremonial ground and found them, snapped with a lens missing. As I passed the plastic pieces to the old man, Gregory joined the fire. He held my hand.
‘Rod, you still got that old green Bible at your camp? Old Mr Spencer Gillen’s turnout? Same way we do it here. Same way here today as in that picture. That old Spencer. That my grandfather. He know law. Law is footprint for us mob to follow.’
Later in the day I had to return to camp to tell Arranye that IAD’s language program was not able to give him any further help to tape his stories. I had a cheap pair of shades from the petrol station for him, together with the bread he’d asked for. He was not perturbed by IAD’s lack of support.
‘That all right, my son. We find it. Nother track be somewhere.’
Betterboy rose weakly from the shade of the humpy and tossed his mandatory bark at me. Scungy atolls of fur clung to the pleats of his polished carcass. He swung me an apologetic eye and rejoined his brood. All the men remained blood-smeared and bare-chested, either sleeping or propped around Arranye’s campfire. Jude asked about the Iraqi war.
‘That Saddam might be Satan, I suppose,’ he said.
Arranye castigated him for taking his mind away from the ‘business’. The conversation turned around to old times, how things used to be. Ceremony made the old man reflective.
The family genealogy kept expanding in my head. I jumped in the car, disturbing the kids who had promptly commandeered it. Betterboy and his currish cousins had sprayed the tyres, laying claim to my ‘little white taxi’.
9This small body of water trapped in the Todd River was the original Alice Springs. It was mistaken to be a spring but is actually a waterhole that dries up during a long dry spell. The town Alice Springs was originally gazetted as ‘Stuart’ by explorer and surveyor David Lindsay in 1888. The rail link from Oodnadatta was completed in 1929 and soon after the town was proclaimed as Alice Springs.Back
10Tickner appointed Hal Wooten QC to conduct an inquiry and the outcome was that the sites around Junction Waterhole would be protected for twenty years, effectively preventing construction of the proposed dam.Back
THE BOY CHILD
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RAFFI AND PATRICK
AT MT UNDOOLYA
OUTSTATION
AS ELAINE’S PREGNANCY STARTED TO SHOW, Ronja excitedly told us she also ‘had a baby in her leg’. She was tugging her rubber boots carefully over her calves one afternoon as it started to rain. Like many Alice Springs kids, Ronja adored rain. It was a novel event and she romped around in it whether it was hot or cold, her little naked body drinking it in. I too was excited about the little lump starting to push out Elaine’s front.
Ronja and I biked down to take a dip at the waterhole on the confluence of Charles Creek and Todd River, the sacred site of Tyurretye. Summer rains had flushed fresh water through the waterways. While I rested the bike against a tree and we slipped into our bathers, a commotion from seven or eight Aboriginal women erupted in the centre of the riverbed where the water was a mere trickle. Two women were exchanging blows and verbals, as hot as the day. Both were bleeding from scalp wounds inflicted by river stones. They removed their t-shirts and convulsed along the river course 40 metres before dissembling. We skirted the argument to reach the pool and waded in, leaving our towels on the shaded grass knoll, where a comatose couple sprawled. Young Indigenous kids were swimming, using the inflated foil bladders of empty wine casks as ‘floaties’. The kids rollicked with Ronja and nibbled at her toes, pretending to be crocodiles. She was in water heaven.
Across the joining creek, half a dozen young men were teasing a mate who was dressed ‘proper flash’. They wrestled off his cowboy boots and hat, then dispatched them to the murky water. He broke free and promptly jumped after his gear while his mirthful mates applauded. The women from the fight ambled past, except for the protagonist, who lagged behind to pick up and replace her bra. She studied the remains of her blouse, cursing them in English, stopping before us to wash the gash on her head. The blood skeined across the warm pool. She stood up and swore to put her foe in hospital. In the opposite shallows another man, his left arm bandaged at the elbow, swung his strong arm at a bigger woman identically bandaged. Inebriated in thigh-deep water, they choreographed a pathetic comedy of mishits, too feeble to result in further injury.