by Rod Moss
WITHIN TWO HOURS OF RETURNING to Alice from the yearly Christmas holiday in 1994/5, I was taken by Robbie and Aloitious Hayes to sit with Arranye. They were singing ceremonial songs for the final night of Derek Johnson’s initiation. Bernard Neil, separated from Arranye by a guest from Uluru, interpreted for me at the conclusion of each verse. The Pitjantjatjara guest, in his fifties, lifted his hand at these junctures. He made a bird-like trilling with his tongue, and repeated several times in English, that he was ‘Mr Law’. Then he made a faint mosquito song by flattening the base of his throat and pressing his exhalations over the remaining space in his larynx. He projected this towards me, some 10 metres away, swirling it around my head, so that at first I thought I was being lassoed by insects. He noticed me swerving my head, then smiled and ceased singing. Bernard asked me how I thought this man knew about their ceremony taking place.
‘You might be think it telepathy?’
I looked expectantly at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘No. He be stranger and see it, us mob with ochre in hair at Yeperenye shop. He been follow us in taxi when we go to taxi rank.’
Unperturbed, the old men were pressed together around their small fire. Their intermittent conference determined the process. The fine powder scuffed up by the dancers throughout the previous night settled over their hair, clothes and skin rendering them in dun, statuesque solidity.
In addition to being circumcised, Derek had been receiving instruction over the preceding three weeks in the fundamental story lines of his ancestors. Each time during the final night, when Derek was paraded around, escorted by Jude, the women cried. Each time Bernard berated him in a mocking tone.
‘Fuck off, back bush. You don’t belong here. You still myall [know nothing]!’
Derek was brought in for the final time just before sunrise. Arranye turned to face the eastern side of the circle for the final verses. Derek sat covered by a blanket, unable to see, facing the singing men, his back to the women. The blanket was then smoked on the small fire next to him. The women came in turn and ran their fingers down his back, again crying. These women were lamenting the cessation of their role in his childhood. Hereafter there would be cultural restrictions between them.
Jude then led Derek to a freshly formed line of senior men. He introduced them, getting the initiate to sit on each of their laps in turn, east to west, telling of the responsibilities each of these four ‘fathers’ now held. If he wanted more law, he should consult them. Then he was led back to bush camp.
Jude added that Derek would have to stay in the area until he had killed a kangaroo. This would enact payment to the senior men who had orchestrated the event. Then he was free to go. He mentioned that these four senior men used a broken beer bottle when a razor blade was not at hand. Arranye knew that Derek would be the last Johnson that he would be responsible for bringing into manhood. Xavier seized the opportunity to remind me that I had not been through yet.
When I visited camp days later, Jude joked about Derek’s failure to get a roo on his first initiated day.
‘He come back to camp carryin’ only his own cock.’
But Derek got his kangaroo the next day. Then only days later he rolled a car near Hidden Valley.
‘I get out of that car with one half cask an’ one full cask and chuck match on it,’ he said, arrogantly dismissing the event as if it were part of his arrival into manhood.
I SAW JUDE AMBLING TOWARDS our place late one afternoon as I returned from college. He was looking for a lift to Whitegate. He was unhappy about another initiation for one of the Rabuntjas so close to the last. Apart from the demands of tending the young man in the bush camp, it siphoned off the specialty of the occasion.
‘Spoil it, too much business, I suppose,’ he said.
When I dropped him off, Mervyn Rabuntja rushed to the car. I had never seen Mervyn at Whitegate before, as he resided at Mt Nancy camp.
‘Time for my son go through business. Gotta be get my father, Wenton, to bush camp. Him sittin’ at Mt Nancy.’
On the trip across to Mt Nancy camp, Mervyn declared that rock’n’roll was not culture.
‘Bush camp proper culture. Powerful one, that one. Snake be catch it you if you wrong way for it. You might be go to Melbourne, or might be in plane to United States. Snake still travel in that plane an’ get you.’
Wenton was out the front of his house with several children surrounding him. When Mervyn approached him, he remained sitting on the ground dotting a painting with a thin brush. Mervyn wanted his father’s authority at the initiation. But there was no sense that he shared Mervyn’s urgency. The youth was being pushed through because Mervyn felt that manhood would curtail his drinking and trouble making. Mervyn assured his father that the ceremonial ground had been prepared; firewood and food were fully arranged, grog would stop at five o’clock.
Sombre, sober Wenton chucked the paintbrush into a paint tin, then retrieved it and continued painting. Mervyn gave up on him and pushed other family members to my car.
‘Free lift this one. Hurry you mob.’
A few women and children crammed into the Commodore.
As we drove to Whitegate, Mervyn said Wenton had given him custodial responsibilities for the country of central Alice Springs. As we passed through the gate I could see his son being led away from the bough shelter into the bush. Mervyn asked us not to look. The women jammed down behind the seat as we rolled in, pressing their kids’ faces to their breasts. It was twilight as Mervyn opened the car doors and stood blocking the women’s view of his retreating son, then ushered them to a huddle of women relatives. He thanked me and hurried off into the bush.
Xavier came to the window and asked me to be one of the four ‘fathers’ who cradled the newly emerged men. This completely threw me. Did I have the status? I said I had to go. Then he asked me to wait. He came back to the car and rubbed red ochre over my face. The handful of people sitting by the fire were painted the same way. He said to come back. I told him the family was committed to a friend’s farewell party, and I was already running behind schedule. Somewhat sadly I removed the mud at home. I felt very honoured by Xavier’s gesture.
At the party a whitefella droned on his didgeridoo while a mate belted out tribal rhythms on his African drums. The arid Centre processed whitefellas; it attracted them, gave them something and then after three to five years spat them back to the coastal cities. That was the duration of the romance with the place. You could live in sophisticated modern comfort, surrounded by breathtaking nature and have a sense of a profoundly different culture simultaneously – a sublime form of tourism. Those who stayed, as a friend said, ‘had been sung’. But there were many farewells for friends. They were little deaths, as frequent as the actual deaths of Arrernte.
THE COUNTERPOINT TO INITIATION CEREMONIES were funerals. By 2009, I had been to about sixty funerals of Aboriginal friends, considerably more than had I remained in Melbourne. I’d never been to a service at a burial ground before coming to the Centre. My introduction to funerals was at Santa Teresa with Lizzie Johnson, though other Johnsons followed her quite regularly. The stark reality is that all these funerals were for friends who, in the main, were under the age of fifty. Alcohol abuse and extremely poor diet promoted these early deaths, manifesting in various disorders and chronic diseases. 13 As part of this tireless orchestra of deaths, Gregory’s demise struck a deeper chord in me. I’d shared greater intimacy with him than with the other deceased Johnsons.
During the recent initiations, Gregory/Eyeglass had a walking stick. One drunken night he lost his glass eye in the Todd River. The sand was sifted over the weeks to no avail. Now, at the age of fifty, he could no longer see through his remaining eye. Noelly Johnson joked that Eyeglass could only see when he was drunk.
I visited him in hospital. He seemed to rally despite complaining of painful lumps near his kidne
ys. By late autumn, he was readmitted with bleeding from the rear left of his brain. Clouds severed into long cocoons that hugged the Eastern Range and brought a spiky rain. Gouts of ochre water twisted through the many-throated gullies. I ran daily reports into camp to save people the 10-kilometre walking trip. The east wind had a ticket straight through camp where Arranye, Myra, Jude and others sat glumly glued to the reedy vapours of their small fires.
Gregory was propped in a chair by pillows on one visit, barely aware of his surrounds. Two physios had helped him walk the ward and the nurse reported that he had eaten some oats. But really there was no improvement. I urged relatives to visit to help pull him through. Some didn’t want to risk being blamed for his illness and had minimal contact, including his wife, Janet. Kangaroo meat was slipped to him, concealed in shopping bags. It had been chanted over with a healing song. His few Arrernte visitors came to accept the skeins of tubes taped to his wrists and nostrils, the bladder bag with tannined fluid, the tags and clipboards. That was whitefella way. But in Arrernte thinking, if he had kidney stones, someone had put them there.
Peter was back in Ward 1 where all manner of mental disease was monitored. Away from the grog, he was looking healthier, though he grinned abstractly at everything. David had said he had been mad since being hit on the head with a rock in the Todd River. He walked all night randomly.
‘His brakes don’t work,’ added David.
After a week Gregory was on the floor next to his hospital bed, fumbling with his pyjama cord, mumbling in Arrernte. His lips were swollen and bleeding. I picked him up and put him on the chair. All I understood was that he wanted to go to the river. I was so pleased at this articulation that I was emboldened to reply that I would escort him there when he could stand on his own feet. It was pleasure feeding hope.
Peter had just returned to camp from Ward 1 when David confided that his brothers were ‘all fucked’. He had pressed the words out quickly, disdainfully, as if to be rid of them. Peter had been tracked and relocated from a night ramble near Emily Gap in the early morning, when the sun cast long shadows. His footprints were easy to see in the sandy creek beds among the drag of roo tails and the delicate suturations of mice and lizards. He held his ‘company line’, his cassette, addictively to his ear. Relatives debated tethering him at night or locking him in one of the sheds. But no one wanted to treat him like a dog. So, many days were spent looking for him.
Gregory relapsed and went from Ward 7 to Intensive Care. When the nurse told me of this shift, I bit my lip and felt the heat welling behind my eyes.
‘What’s happening to him, so I can tell his family?’
‘His poor old body has really just packed in. It’s tired. He’s given it a bit of a hammering,’ said the nurse.
I proceeded to camp with Ronja and Raffi. I arranged to take David the next morning to sit with his older brother. The kids and I drove out of camp to nearby Snoggers Hill to light a twig and absorb the panorama of the silhouetted town. Old Magdaline and her daughter Joany McCormack’s wailing trailed us. Other women’s grieving soon amplified their ululating. The ground dust stilled with tears. Below us the town dozed naively in its neon geometry.
In the morning I collected David and, as we entered Intensive Care, we caught Gregory’s last breath. His chest flattened and his head moved fractionally to the right. It was all too brief. We placed our hands amid the tangle of tubes attached to his torso and arms, and savoured his waning warmth. David’s face crumpled in pain. Janet and Eileen, who were already there, shrieked and laid their heads against his chest. I cried and put my arms around David. He immediately wanted to go and tell old mother Magdaline back in camp.
‘You tell ’im. She believe it you tell ’im. See you there, brother,’ he called over his shoulder as I retreated along the scuffed linoleum corridor to the elevator.
I made my way to Whitegate. Two kites pounced on a plastic carry bag that fluttered along the connector road. The dry fingers of the coolibah trees ached into greyness. I wiped tears with my sleeve as drizzle fell. The dogs seemed to respond to the collective melancholy, slumped among the blankets and flour drums, for once uninterested in my arrival. Peter cradled my hand, inspecting it as if discovering a relic. He gripped a chop in his other hand, looking goggle-eyed and glum. I walked over to Myra and Simon. Next door, Arranye was still in bed in the single men’s quarters.
‘He’s gone.’
Arranye called me by my nickname, ‘Snake. Apmwe, I feelin’ terrible sorry.’
We hugged against his pillow.
‘Do you need something?’ I asked.
‘Cup of tea,’ he whispered.
Simon took one of his pannikins from the wash-up bench and dipped it in the simmering drum.
Over the following days, I grieved with the Johnsons and Hayes in camp, embracing and crying afresh as relatives arrived to convey condolences. A week past, I sat alone. On my lap was a photograph of the families at Little Well taken when Ronja was six months. It had been hidden on the upper bookshelves, prone in respect to Christine Johnson for the seven years since her death. The photo bandaged shards of story that had entered my skin.
I noticed Gregory’s mouth: a glint of white where it parted to tell his nightly campfire stories. How I luxuriated in that smiling face, with its marvellous, even teeth. It was hard to discern him in the photo as Christine blocked him, near right. My stomach bit before it. There were eight people, dark and dust compacted, except for the baby on Petrina’s lap. Their leaden presences lumped together to form a unified protection against the ambush of the rock-riddled spaces beyond. They languished in the foreground, suspended in personal reveries.
Memories lingered as nightly I watched the immortal procession of stars. For many days, I seemed to be peering from inside twilight, glimpsing Gregory’s gait, the way he canted forward slightly, favouring his one eye, his gliding momentum so distinct from Janet’s stride 5 metres at his rear.
My nights were drenched, dreaming past days. I’d be walking over groins of rugged gully in the Arookaba Range near Gregory’s abode, as David guided me along. In one dream, closer to town, Bernard extracted a needle from my cheek, liberating my sinuses from the congestion of a lifetime. I dreamt I heard birds, then recognised that David was singing me. I panicked. I was being absorbed into his body and kept waking from this repeating dream, as I tried to maintain my individuality. In another dream David came to the house and embraced me, allowing both of us to cry more. I woke in tears.
A couple of weeks passed and I ambled up Undoolya Road to camp. It was chilly. Jude Johnson wavered towards me, arms flailing about for balance, furling and unfurling. His halting English made his pronouncements profound and quaint. He was quitting the sorry camp.
‘Too much cutting,’ he said. He paused and moved closer. ‘Dangerous cutting.’
He laboured as he spoke, inhaling deeply, as if the air would join his thought to his tongue, searching for inspiration.
‘They’ll be makin’ long cuts soon.’
Silence wafted off him with an intimation of pain.
Old Magdaline, Joany and Janet cut their hair. When visitors came to touch hands with them, they erupted in a redoubled moaning referred to as arlwerre, arlwerre. Thighs, biceps and chests had been cut with razors, knives, tin lids or glass. Men and women made cuts. Some people would get infected wounds and lose enough blood to need hospital attention. At Little Well, Gregory’s effects would have to be destroyed. The dwelling area would be off limits for a few years until his spirit quit. But first it would be smoked with arrethe, the native fuchsia. Arranye switched to menthol cigarettes, the ‘cleansing smoke’, in deference to the passing of his younger brother. There was a neuralgic air of waiting for the families to gather again for the funeral.
The week of the funeral brought raging icy winds that surfed the nights and briefly lulled before sunset. Only the bigger birds busily knitted t
he rinsed air. David, Joseph junior and I drove to Hidden Valley after dark to pick up Peter and return him to camp. David told me that Janet would get a bashing for not visiting hospital enough. I was angry and frustrated with all these Johnson men the same age as me dying. As the men sat silently with the additional, impassive Peter, I vented my sorrow and distress.
‘Aboriginal way,’ offered Joseph from the passenger seat.
Such a blithe acceptance of the haemorrhaging present, far from whitefella obituaries that lauded the deceased’s achievements. For Gregory there would be a suppression of all details of his existence, a quickening to dust and air. The regular death knells in camp didn’t allow family lingering over particular losses. But the appalling mortality rate of Aboriginal people was no arid statistic for me.
THE FUNERAL WAS AT SANTA TERESA. I arranged for David to pick me up from college mid-morning. We went to Coles for flowers and St Vincent de Paul’s to get some black slacks and white shirts. The frequent deaths provided a brisk turnover of this formal attire. I chauffeured the crew in a Tangentyere Toyota. At Santa Teresa, the men changed in the community hall.
Did I come here only for funerals? The place with its three hundred or so Arrernte living in cinder block houses was becoming stigmatised as such. The squat mission church, with its whitewashed exterior and blazing cobalt-glassed chapel, seemed an aggressive venue for holy work. Its arched facade gave a Hollywood Western ambience to the place. The unhurried men in big cowboy hats and braided belts, holding to the few trees surrounding the church, augmented the feel.
The women whispered together in groups. The kids, with little sense of the occasion, somersaulted on the splices of lawn in front of the building, where we waited for the cortege to arrive with the coffin. Six young men lifted it from the utility tray of the truck and carried it across the threshold. The dogs, heads bowed, traipsed into the darkened space with us. As we entered, the men removed their hats. Some of the men my age still had some rock’n’roll in the combs they produced to lick up their duck’s tails and kiss curls. Without their baseball caps, the younger guys’ crew-cuts, earrings and pigtails were prominent.