by Rod Moss
To our dismay, Jenny told us the dancing happened late when the southerly subsided.
I asked Arranye about the table-topped mountain in front of us, the one photographed to feature in my painting Funeral at Santa Teresa. He mentioned Utyerrke akerle/the wild fig, which grew on the hill, and then moved into song about it. Jack responded from his shed. They proceeded into song about the beefwood trees, reconnecting their links to the place. It was a great moment. Jack’s voice echoed in his tin chamber providing a springboard for Arranye’s scratchy tenor.
We doddered over to Agnes’s house to pick up the women to take out to St Anthonys Rockhole. Agnes provided the picnic food – rib bones, lettuce, tomato and bread. Arranye’s tuckerbox, a 4-gallon flour drum, included tea, flour, powdered milk, an old damper and two bags of sugar, forbidden now that he had diabetes. I loaded this along with a jerry can, also kwementyaye, as a relative called Gerry had just passed away.
Arranye had no money and asked his mother, Magdaline, for ten dollars to get lemonade at the community store. He told her he had given up grog and party now that he was diabetic. She passed him a blue note but heckled him for neglecting her.
The Santa Teresa store was better stocked and presented than in most communities. The boutique prices for elemental produce packaged in cans or cardboard were a challenge to its impoverished clients, and an insult to the palates of the small bands of urban sophisticates who held brief administrative posts in the community. Some communities had taken ownership of their stores, although they still depended on white employees. Despite extensive credit adjusted to the fortnightly pensions, the stores generated hefty profits through massive mark-ups.
I queued behind an old lady with her granddaughter who clarified the complications of the transaction and insisted on an icy-pole reward. There were often embarrassing confrontations across the checkout counters in Alice Springs where less patience was extended than in stores like this one. Ignorance of the value of specific bills or of how much change might be expected made for humiliating experiences for many Aboriginal shoppers. The company of a numerate twelve-or-so-year-old was a sensible solution.
We arrived at St Anthonys Rockhole after a twenty-minute drive. A fire was started. The taping began. Arranye sang a few lines, then paused to dig out a small plastic hospital dispenser containing lanolin from his overcoat. He sang over it and smudged the paste on our palms. We rubbed it up our arms as he indicated. Rubbing in the other direction, he said, would weaken us, make us thin and drain off our power.
Asmin, Kemarre’s eleven-year-old grandson, sat on a log several metres away and shaved the icing from a biscuit. Arranye was right into it, thrusting his arm into the air, enacting the wasp. Asmin mimicked Arranye, smearing the icing up a bough of gidgee bark. Such was the archaic Arrernte language that the song comprised, the women present did not readily understand its meaning. Arranye translated particular parts to them.
The song was replayed. Arranye was pleased and boasted of his encyclopaedic memory, not just of Arrernte songs but those of Alyawarr, Warlpiri and Luritja.
‘When I be listen with one ear, story never travel out other ear like some other mob. I be hold it, all time. That song I been have it long time.’
Other senior men and women would not record healing songs. Indeed, some had expressed anger or resentment about collaborators such as Arranye. Singing into a tape for whitefellas was not deemed appropriate. But Arranye wanted to have the songs kept by any means and regretted the lack of interest by his younger relatives.
Later, he gave me a translation of the song. When the yellow-bottomed wasp, arntinye, came to the rockhole to suck water out of the mud, it relieved infections swollen with pus. It absorbed the sweet sickness and let the power penetrate, like wind making the leaves of the fig tree stand up and then pass into the ground. Singing the sickness made a person into wasp pupae, reborn. The sickness was then broadcast like the swirling leaves of the fig tree whistling in front of the nearby mountain.
Hunger set in and I was asked to butcher the rib bones against a nearby stump with a tomahawk. The tea was stirred and bread wrapped around the lettuce and tomato.
On the return to Santa Teresa we looked at the citrus orchards. The fruit trees once supplied both the community and Alice Springs prior to the population surge of the 1970s and 1980s. There was a recently converted building to house the Keringke/kangaroo footprint Women’s Art Centre. Keringke was set up under the aegis of a white art adviser in the 1980s to trade art products with Alice Springs souvenir shops. Artefacts, clothing, bags and paintings were decorated in their distinctive symmetrical patterns with bright, minute dots.
The Cavanagh men made belts and hatbands in a dim leatherwork room next to the centre. Old Jack was passing on his skills to his sons. Arranye was interested to see the room. It had once been the town bakery where as a younger man he was master cook. Each Christmas he would speak of making one of his famous puddings and recall winning prizes at the Royal Melbourne Show. He taught his trade in other central desert communities, and it was this shifting around the communities that had exposed him to ceremonies that widened and deepened his song repertoire.
THE PROMISE OF AN EXCURSION to Alkerreyelpe Rockhole gave added impetus to one trip to Little Well. Our first hour was circuitous, as David had topped himself with a six-pack. He and brother Peter, Joe Cleary and Leena Hayes lay in the back among the swags and food, and swilled the beer before it warmed. They were lagered to the gills. Consequently, David misdirected us around the fence lines of Todd River Station during sunset hour. We reversed and plunged back into the plumes of our own red dust. David thumped the cabin roof whenever he recognised a track. We came back on the Numery road near Bastard Bore, appropriately named, given my anger, instead of heading down past Uyitye Creek and Utnerrengarltenge/Wallaby Gap.
At Little Well we were greeted by Gregory and Janet. We supped on roo provided by Aggie Abbott, who had come in on the Santa Teresa side. Arranye’s house had yet to be smoked since his daughter’s death, so we men trooped off to the single men’s shed on the eastern edge. I was thankful Arranye lent me a foam mattress. David and the others had sat on mine in the tray and it got drenched from the casks of Coolabah they had tapped after the beer was finished. Peter stayed up and partied with Gregory, but the rest of us hit the sack.
Some hours later Peter came stumbling in, lighting matches, looking for a place to sleep. He lunged between Arranye and me, blanketless and in need of bodily warmth. I fell back to sleep to the gentle oscillations of his sour breath. Gregory, primed on the piss, stayed up and stirred the women throughout the night.
In the morning, David accompanied me to the flood-out for gidgee firewood. He motioned that the wood pigeon’s song meant the proximity of kangaroos.
‘That must be useful,’ I said.
‘No. Him tellin’ aherre [roo] us mob here, same time, he said to put me straight. See artityerrityerre [willy wagtail] there.’
A small bird flitted and fanned the turf before us.
‘That be winter thipe. Old people tell us not to kill that bird when he come with cold weather. Might make it all freeze up.’
During the weekend we tried to make Alkerreyelpe, meaning the red ochre water reflecting a narrow strip of sky. Trapped in a deep cleft of the red rocks, it was the only reliable water in the Arookaba Ranges and part of Arranye’s mother’s country, in the sense of being its traditional owner. The bone weed was so verdant we overshot the turnoffs at several junctions. Gregory leant forward from the back seat to advise me about driving over dunes.
‘Try for that creek,’ he motioned with his chin, simultaneously training his eyes above his sunglasses so that he seemed to be looking at the roof. Then turn up creek to Alkerreyelpe. You gotta go straight up sand hill, Rod, very steady. An’ watch for root stickin’ up.’
We quilled a tyre several sand hills shy of the site. I discovered the
jack behind the back seat but when I turned to share my relief, saw the last of the party disappearing over a nearby dune. I was left to change the tyre as the others hunted anteater. Air still hissed from the tyre. I heard the rumble of a southbound jet as I placed a length of four-by-two wood on the warm red sand beneath the jack. Where was that silver speck in the endless cobalt?
Within the hour, the spare was on and an anteater had been caught. Since we had no more spares I decided to turn back without discussion. Though hungry, we deferred eating the anteater until we were on the Todd side of the range, under the plentiful shade of the river redgums. It was supplemented with cream grubs, or ingwenenge, that Janet and I hooked from their holes in redgum trunks with stems of grass. Unlike the grubs we snared from the roots around Emily Gap, these grubs were hooped with light magenta. Aggie’s young niece confessed her love of them.
‘I love it too much that one. I so greedy for it I be eatin’ face of grub and all.’
While the anteater baked, Aggie joked about a Sydney tourist who, when looking at an anteater retracting its tongue, had thought that it was eating a snake. Peter chipped in with a droving incident when he was paired with a young white guy. They’d been pushing horses from Limbla towards the yards at Loves Creek Station. During the afternoon he’d dismounted to take a pee beside his horse. His whitefella offsider ogled his dick with unusual interest. After supper and a shower, the ‘guy’ let her hair down from under her hat.
‘It be properly shamin’ me,’ said Peter.
Shaming seemed to be a controlling feature among the families. I often heard the expression. Any behaviour that drew too much attention to one’s self was a ‘shame job’.
Arranye and David also spoke of ‘chick chockies’, who thought always of riding women.
‘Ride horses and ride women jus’ the same.’
I’d heard the expression ‘chick jockeys’ used by whitefellas and assumed they had misheard white drovers. ‘Chick chockie’, Arranye now explained, was the sound of the penis stirring the broth inside women. He lamented the lack of a woman on these cold nights.
‘Good to polish me balls on. Might be chick chockie meself.’
He spoke of man having three parts. He drew a stick figure in the sand.
‘Bottom part for dancing. Top part for singin’ and thinkin’. Middle part for shakin’.’
I noticed Gregory had some beef left in his tin tuckerbox. He munched on it slowly. It was quite undercooked.
‘This be meat still eatin’ the grass,’ he said.
That evening I slept in short chapters, each punctuated by the single-noted shrilling of crickets. The fierce dot of Venus floated alone at sunrise. David warned against looking long at the atengarrampeke/morning star. It might return and fix your facial expression. He scavenged for tiny sticks and ripped grog casks to ignite the breakfast fire. We studied the small struggling flames in silence.
‘You know that star, whitefella call Dog Star. An’ next to it those two milky star clouds?’
I was ignorant of the constellations and clusters.
‘Them two is eagle eyes. Big one is mother an’ little one her son. Dangerous when you got initiation. That mother got to try an’ stop the little one from crashing down to earth an’ makin’ trouble. You don’t fry meat in oil pan during initiation, or little star might get past its mother, cause it bush fire, or something like that.’
After breakfast we refuelled our jerry cans at Kevin Pick’s and obtained a spare. We used our vehicle to pull-start his truck as its solenoid wasn’t working.
Kevin slept in a caravan, a very minimal bachelor existence. He wanted to build a little house, but his uncertain tenure made him hesitant. He grumbled about the lawyers not wanting him at Pinjee. I tried to clarify Arranye’s intent for him to stay. Again I noticed the big thumbs tucked into his belt.
Not long before, men from the Campbell family of Ilpeye Ilpeye had rocked up to try to push Kevin off his place. He’d cleaned the lot of them up with his fists and taken the .303 from the Toyota to warn them away. The Campbells referred to the ballistic impact of Kevin’s fists as that of a kicking horse. There had been no trouble from them since.
Arranye reaffirmed to Kevin that he wasn’t going to be ousted. Kevin had misunderstood. It was fine for him to keep operating his horses from Pinjee Pound. It was a good arrangement, really, for the Johnsons. He was better resourced and the only neighbour in times of need. And he kept an eye on their sheds when they were absent.
‘He just hang there like alangkwe, poor bugger. Like it on vine ’round other tree,’ said Arranye as we were leaving.
A sombre mood prevailed when we returned to Little Well. We spoke of the rapes and a recent stabbing of a young girl in town. Aggie cited the kids on the streets in the early hours of the morning, young night-time drunks. Peter, Gregory and David slugged, in turn, at a bottle of Mylanta, a magnesium concoction, to quell their gut aches.
On the final morning, I climbed the range above the houses, said to be the writhing snake. Though it was chilly, the rapid ascent darkened the declivity in my singlet with an island of sweat. Several hundred metres above the flood plain, I stood shin-deep amid the ptilotus lanterns and heard the thump of roo tails swatting the ground in transit. There was a shuffle in the scrub way below on the valley floor as three beasts bounded away. On this terrace, all phenomena were bequeathed acoustic equality. The clank of cups by the campfire below to the west, the cawing hawk a few metres above my head and the jumping roos clamoured at my ears simultaneously. Distance could not be reliably assessed out here in the desert.
I snapped a ptilotus and carried it between my teeth down the hill. I needed both hands for balancing in the loose gravel, and curled my toes inside my boots to clutch the shifting surface.
‘What do you call this one, Arranye?’
The old man dipped a Weet-Bix in his tea.
‘That one is urreye-urreye. Boys an’ girls tease each other with that one. Cheeky one, that grass. Sometimes dance it with that one. Young uninitiated boy.’
I could see the flower head’s phallic shape.
David and Peter stayed on to do some fencing for Kevin. Before we set off, Gregory came to lean through the window to remind us to contact the Ingkerreke Outstation Service, so he and the women would not be forgotten.
ONLY HOURS AFTER RETURNING, I was recuperating when Xavier rapped at the door. He was dizzy from a head wound caused by his brother Edward, who had beaten him with a shovel. I drove him to the Little Red Store to get some kangaroo tails from the freezer. In the car, he swore to take legal action against Edward and sue him for four thousand dollars in damages. How he’d fixed on this amount I had no idea. Nor did Xavier, when I asked him. He wanted Petrina as a witness, but she had been drunk. When I dropped him at Whitegate he produced a paper bag containing a bottle of wine. He held it before my eyes like a trophy.
‘Doctor been warn me not to drink Coolabah. Now I’m drinking Yalumba.’
He wasn’t joking around. Did he really think he had just bought immunity by switching brands?
I saw Edward two days later. His head was scarfed up to cover the rock wound Xavier had inflicted during a second round of fighting. Xavier had come off second best and was now in hospital. Did I need reminding that the most fearful rivalries were family ones? I tried to imagine how disfigured Xavier would be after tangling with the formidable Edward. Then a few nights later he knocked on the door, with Petrina a few metres behind him in the dark. He had a limp and his lips and eyelids were swollen. It was very late. He asked for a lift.
When we got to the car, I asked where they wanted to go. When Xavier said ‘Whitegate’, Petrina began yelling. Without a word, he shoved her into the back seat, slammed the door and jumped in the front. Halfway there, Petrina started screeching while wrenching his hair with all her might. Xavier did not wince, did not speak, nor did
he protect his head from her. She was protesting about returning to where certain fighting would occur.
‘I be fighting man. I be die fighting,’ Xavier said as he got out of the car when we pulled up at their humpy.
The endless liquid hex of family brewed again.
Malcolm Hayes and Valentine Palmer, both young teenagers, visited one afternoon and asked if they could sleep over. They’d stunned a kingfisher with a sling earlier in the day, and Ronja wanted to revive and nurse it. They insisted it had to be taken and killed in the nearby hills. If not, according to Malcolm, the bird would turn into an inentye man.
The boys showed Raffi how to make slingshots and gave him one of theirs. They had scrounged the piles of rubbish chucked in the nearby bush. Old boot tongues provided the leather for shrapnel pouches. Copper wire from dumped cars bound the rubber bands to the forks. The ground around the sandpit puffed with dust motes as the boys practised their shots.
Our mulberry trees wearied under their abundant fruit, and the boys sweetened up on them. Before long, they smeared their bodies with the juices, feigning sorry cuts.
‘Look me. Look me. We jus’ been in fight, Rod,’ said Malcolm.
Eyes, noses and lips oozed mulberry. Raffi followed suit. Yellow-throated miners were hastened from the trees with rounds of cedar berry fire. The white pigeons, chequered crimson from mulberry fire, now perched in the upper branches.
I dropped Malcolm and Valentine back to Whitegate the following day. At camp, Robbie Hayes wanted a lift to get his Community Development Project cheque from Ingkerreke Outstation Service. Adrian Hayes sat in the back with Ronja. He asked for ten dollars. When I replied I had none, he pulled a twenty from his shirt pocket and handed it to me.
I slowed the vehicle at the place where the rollover that killed his uncle, Alphonse, had occurred. Though several years had elapsed, Adrian said quietly that we should still show respect in this manner. Robbie pointed to the scar on his wrist and spoke of rolling three times in that crash. He had lost consciousness.