As an Aboriginal NT Government MP fights others in the government, including the Aboriginal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, about the freezing of funding for outstations as part of a plan to develop some of the larger communities into ‘proper’ towns, I go to Ipolera outstation with schoolchildren from a nearby community, one of the ones designated to become a town.
Class 5/6 from Ntaria School is actually going to Ipolera to learn about its history, as part of this term’s theme for their Indigenous Language & Culture classes. The NT education department currently allows Language & Culture lessons for half an hour each week for each class, with a one-day workshop a term the only official planning time for the teachers. Ntaria School is lucky to have a principal who is happy to support some Language & Culture bush trips.
We stop a couple of times on the forty-minute drive, along a gravel road then a dirt track, to look at plants. The linguist, a tall thin, grey-haired man who worked on bible translations until the Finke River mission laid him off, makes sure the children know the Western Arrarnta names for the plants: ‘arrkapa’ (desert oak), ‘nyama’ (witchetty bush) and ‘tjaapa’, the fat, edible grub in the roots of this bush. These plants and moth larva are common and well-known and children in most remote communities in central Australia would not hesitate over their names. However, Ntaria is only 125 kms from Alice Springs and was set up over 100 years ago, by German missionaries, and the language is disappearing more quickly here. The linguist, who is married to an Aboriginal woman, gets paid for 9 hours a week to work on preparing Language & Culture lessons and help the Arrarnta teachers – mostly assistant teachers, with certificate qualifications.
Ipolera is a stand-out outstation. Mavis and Herman Malbunka set it up around 30 years ago, at a bore on Herman’s country, native cat, atjilpa (a-chil-par) dreaming. Mavis tells the children that she and Herman travelled around with cattle before that, but decided to set up a place where their children could stay and work when they grew up. A quiet place with no alcohol, away from the drunkenness – although it’s theoretically dry – and fighting at Ntaria. (In parts of the 80s and 90s, family feuding and grog led to a number of murders there.)
The young, white teacher says to me that the first thing she noticed at Ipolera was the lack of litter. The habits of living and working on stations and missionary-run communities have stayed with Mavis and Herman, and here they don’t depend on anyone else – like a work-for-the-dole program – to collect the rubbish.
Mavis talks about how she and Herman and their family came here and lived in humpies and makeshift shelters, so that they could persuade the government to give them some money to set the place up. She points out the tiny huts, which they brought here, and the houses they lived in after that – more like small sheds. Around ten years ago, they got a large house built. They’ve set up a camping ground for tourists. Mavis points out cleared areas, fire-places and toilets.
She shows the children the solar panels which now run the old bore. They share a new bore, set up for major roadworks, with Transport & Works. Land Council wanted them to charge for the sinking of this bore on their land, but Mavis and Herman decided on an arrangement with no payment, with the bore becoming theirs when the roadworks are finished, in a number of years. She talks proudly about the school (which used to service other outstation children but is now rather low in numbers), and the sophisticated cattle yards built as part of a training program.
After sandwiches, Mavis demonstrates making a damper in a camp oven, not the traditional damper – flattish cakes made from ground wattle seed – but the white flour and baking powder damper that is still a staple in remote communities. While it’s cooking, she takes us to Atjilpa Valley, a couple of kilometres west along the dramatic, dark red ranges that are Ipolera’s backdrop.
We stop near the range, at a rock with a dot painting on its vertical face: three concentric circles in a row, joined by lines and surrounded by dots, bordered by several more circles. This, Mavis explains, is a map of the valley, the atyilpa dreaming country. The clusters of different-coloured dots represent different foods. The circles must represent particular atyilpa story sites, possibly geographic features, but I don’t catch what - most of the talking is in Arrarnta, with occasional summaries by Mavis in English, for the benefit of me, the white teacher and a youth worker.
Mavis emphasizes to the children – most of them would know this – that all country has its owners and caretakers. She says that beyond the borders of the country represented by the painting is other people’s country and should not be ventured into without permission. A clay model of an atjilpa peers down from another rock.
The painting was, I think, done for tourists but is a good teaching tool for the children. Now we go on a very unusual walking trail along the side of the rocky hill. There are sculptures along this track made, assumably in consultation with the Ipolera family, by an eccentric whitefella artist, who spent some time in Alice Springs and died a few years ago.
First we come to a two-headed snake, with a man’s head in its mouth, intertwined with an atjilpa. Mavis explains to us whitefellas that the people here believe that humans are born from a snake like this. I don’t catch how the serpent and the atjilpa are linked, but they obviously are. Maybe it’s something to do with totems, because Mavis now talks to the children about these. Every Aboriginal person has a totem, related to the country a mother is in or something she sees when she is carrying a child, especially when she first feels the child moving. Mavis asks each child what their totem is. They all know.
Next is a cat, the non-native kind, with a rat in its mouth and blood – red paint – dripping down a boulder. The rat is a sticknest rat, now only found on a few islands of the WA coast, which builds a nest made of sticks stuck together with resinous dung. These nests are longlasting and, more than 50 years after the rat disappeared, can still be found tucked away in rocky caves and crevices in the Centre. One of these nests is in a crevice under the boulder, ‘blood’ dripping on to it. Mavis talks to the children, I assume about how feral animals have eaten many of the native animals, and some have disappeared altogether.
We walk on. The linguist, walking next to me, comments that the children ahead are calling out that they’ve seen a rock-wallaby, a little wallaby, relatively uncommon now, that lives in the hills. It turns out to be another sculpture, not a real wallaby – the children knew this of course. A bit further on there’s a fox with an indeterminate animal in its mouth, possibly a wallaby.
At the end of a trail there’s a little platform overlooking a ground painting, the same design that we saw on the rock at the beginning of the walk. Traditionally these ground designs are made with ochre and parts of plants and are not permanent, but this one seems to be at least partly painted.
A little further on, a beautiful horse’s head is carved out of a rock. People here are often descendants of stockmen and love horses, and there is no reference here to the damage feral horses do trampling the country and drinking up and polluting waterholes.
We all squeeze on to the platform, surrounded by a rail, looking out on a beautiful pound, around a kilometre across, surrounded by a dark red plateau. Mavis talks to the children about the kinship system – dreaming stories, like the atjilpa one, belong to particular kinship groups.
Used by all the language groups in the Centre, except for Pitjanjatjara, the kinship system regulates relations between people, including whom a person can marry, and links people across families. There are two moieties, or halfs, with 4 kinship groups, or ‘skins’ in each. The kinship of parents determines their child’s kinship. If they are married ‘wrong skin’, their child will have two kinships, one from each parent.
I’m used to this system from when I first lived in another, more remote, Aboriginal community in the Centre, 22 years ago. People still usually married ‘right way’ then, or at least ‘second choice’, both distantly related kins, from the other moiety. I realise that Mavis is asking the children who their parents are, in order to work out their kinship group. Most of the children don’t know what group they’re in. I’m shocked by this, tell Mavis later, but she just says if she knows who the parents are she can work out the child’s kinship.
I wonder what will happen when her generation is gone. I don’t know everyone at Ntaria but I haven’t met any people there who know as much about this country or talk about it with as much spirit as Mavis does. Some families there don’t spend much time out on country at all now. That’s partly why the school came on this excursion, because of Mavis’s knowledge and inspiration.
Back at Ipolera, the damper is just cooked. We eat it with margarine and jam.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
The other reality
It’s good to go back into that other reality for a while. Arriving at the school with kids running around; the camp male teacher who is straight; the acting head teacher who chats to herself to keep her anxiety at bay; the new teacher, with long grey plaits, who yells and blows a whistle a lot, says there are strict rules in her class but they have fun, we aren’t sure.
We head out bush with a troopie full of old ladies armed with crowbars. Drive, not far, to where there are witchetty bushes by the roadside – we are taking the little kids on an excursion. The ladies look around for grub casings, brush the leaf litter away, sit down and dig expertly, one hand digging, the other shuffling dirt away, a rhythm this country has known for thousands of years. They cut into fat roots, always around the grub. The kids watch and run around, clutching one or two grubs or a little tin with a few curled up in the bottom.
Then we drive to a creekbed, and soon there are a couple of fires going, a billy on, grubs singeing in the ashes. I show a Big Book we’ve made about collecting witchetty grubs and everyone looks closely at the kids in the pictures, those fat grubs they got at Mt Allan.
The camp teacher has had his worse day in two years, says he’s going to resign, but no-one takes him seriously. Some of the boys have been really acting up. Having kids right across the spectrum – aged from 12 to 16, some reasonably literate, some a little, some not at all – this year doesn’t help.
The next day, out with the senior primary kids, we drive for three quarters of an hour on smaller and smaller tracks, til we’re following faint wheel tracks through the bush. I don’t know what we’re looking for. People in the other cars saw the tracks of a huge snake, but us whitefellas didn’t notice. The ladies see a pile of fresh dirt beside a hole, stop the cars. They test for soft and hollow ground with gentle crowbar prods. One woman says that goanna might come out, run up someone, all the kids run off, shrieking, come slowly back. The ladies dig the hole out with a can, then find I’ve got a shovel, dig down a little way from the hole, keep prodding, finally decide the goanna has gone.
We stop in a creekbed for oranges, ‘Emu waterhole’, dry now, but one of the teachers finds emu tracks. The kids go over to look, the ladies collect some ininti seeds, bright red ‘beans’. There are beautiful, huge bean trees here. The head teacher chatters on about how lovely it must look with water in it, asks questions no-one answers.
Two ladies head off on foot with crowbars. We drive on along a winding ‘track’ to the langwa – bush banana – forest. If I stare at a dead finish or prickly wattle long enough, there’s a vine in almost every one. The kids climb trunks almost as thin as their legs, gingerly, to get to the fruit, always high. I’ve never seen anything like this number of vines in one place. The kids peel the fruit and chew the green seeds, arranged like tiny corn, and white fluffy plumes, or eat the whole thing. Some take them back to cook on a fire – ‘they go really soft, taste really good’ – everyone has a couple, or maybe a few held in their Tshirts, the bottoms pulled up to make a pouch.
We drop them back at school and head back, to that other reality, the town.
We head out bush with a troopie full of old ladies armed with crowbars. Drive, not far, to where there are witchetty bushes by the roadside – we are taking the little kids on an excursion. The ladies look around for grub casings, brush the leaf litter away, sit down and dig expertly, one hand digging, the other shuffling dirt away, a rhythm this country has known for thousands of years. They cut into fat roots, always around the grub. The kids watch and run around, clutching one or two grubs or a little tin with a few curled up in the bottom.
Then we drive to a creekbed, and soon there are a couple of fires going, a billy on, grubs singeing in the ashes. I show a Big Book we’ve made about collecting witchetty grubs and everyone looks closely at the kids in the pictures, those fat grubs they got at Mt Allan.
The camp teacher has had his worse day in two years, says he’s going to resign, but no-one takes him seriously. Some of the boys have been really acting up. Having kids right across the spectrum – aged from 12 to 16, some reasonably literate, some a little, some not at all – this year doesn’t help.
The next day, out with the senior primary kids, we drive for three quarters of an hour on smaller and smaller tracks, til we’re following faint wheel tracks through the bush. I don’t know what we’re looking for. People in the other cars saw the tracks of a huge snake, but us whitefellas didn’t notice. The ladies see a pile of fresh dirt beside a hole, stop the cars. They test for soft and hollow ground with gentle crowbar prods. One woman says that goanna might come out, run up someone, all the kids run off, shrieking, come slowly back. The ladies dig the hole out with a can, then find I’ve got a shovel, dig down a little way from the hole, keep prodding, finally decide the goanna has gone.
We stop in a creekbed for oranges, ‘Emu waterhole’, dry now, but one of the teachers finds emu tracks. The kids go over to look, the ladies collect some ininti seeds, bright red ‘beans’. There are beautiful, huge bean trees here. The head teacher chatters on about how lovely it must look with water in it, asks questions no-one answers.
Two ladies head off on foot with crowbars. We drive on along a winding ‘track’ to the langwa – bush banana – forest. If I stare at a dead finish or prickly wattle long enough, there’s a vine in almost every one. The kids climb trunks almost as thin as their legs, gingerly, to get to the fruit, always high. I’ve never seen anything like this number of vines in one place. The kids peel the fruit and chew the green seeds, arranged like tiny corn, and white fluffy plumes, or eat the whole thing. Some take them back to cook on a fire – ‘they go really soft, taste really good’ – everyone has a couple, or maybe a few held in their Tshirts, the bottoms pulled up to make a pouch.
We drop them back at school and head back, to that other reality, the town.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The circle and the knife
I walk the route I have taken for hundreds of sunsets, follow my own track through the bush. I pass through a clearing around a tall, dead tree. Its bare branches were once a popular lookout for birds. Now they’ve been broken off for firewood for drinking camps. These camps have proliferated in the bush since dry-town and Intervention laws made it illegal for people who live in town camps – leases held by Aboriginal trusts with groups of houses – to drink both at home and in parks and other public areas in town.
I pass through a thicket of prickly young ironwoods, cross a ribbon of sandy creek
next to two big old mulgas and walk up a wide gravelly slope to large bloodwood tree. This tree, with its big sprawling limbs, mosaics of pink bark, is often the turning point on my walk. There’s a dirt vehicle track beside the tree but I’ve rarely seen anyone on it.
Crimson is draining from the tall ridge to the south; fans of mulga are black against pale pink in the east. The white rocks on the slope below me glow like moonlight. I look at them carefully.
It was around five years ago that I saw the stones: angular chunks the size of a fist, much the same as others here, but these rocks stood out slightly in size or from the pedestals of red dirt worn around them over the decades, or centuries. They made a circle, a few metres across. I’d never seen anything like it. Maybe the tufts of green grass from the rain showed it up.
For whatever reason, I glimpsed into another world, one where this place, only a generation or so ago, was filled with people and ceremony. Now it was deserted, this slope, where you could see a long way west, to the blue rim of the ranges, wavy against gold sky.
Later I remembered I’d seen the circle years before, but had somehow forgotten it. Was I meant to forget? An old Aboriginal friend told me these hills were a special men’s place, and I thought of not coming here anymore. But people often walk on a dirt road nearby.
I took a few friends to see the circle. One found a stone knife nearby: a pointed shape of pale grey silcrete almost as long as my hand. It was rounded on the upperside, beautifully carved underneath. I’ve often seen stone chips at old camping sites, but not a knife like this. My friend thought of taking it, but thankfully decided to leave it where it was.
After that, each time I came here I checked on the circle and the knife. Sometimes I picked up the knife, placed it gently on my open hand, and then returned it carefully to its mould in the dirt, hidden among other stones.
A year or so ago, tyre marks appeared near the circle. At first they went around it but then they started to cut right through it, coming from the east where there’s a town camp, to link up with the track passing the bloodwood. Did people not know what they were doing? Was it people from out bush, other country doing this?
This time, my first visit for a month or so, I see there’s an established track passing through the circle, it’s beginning to disappear. Then I look for the knife but can’t find it. Sometimes it takes a while to locate, but I know what dead bush it’s nearest too. Finally I find the empty mould of dirt. The knife is gone.
Has someone I’ve shown this implement to taken it? Did someone else stumble across it? That seems unlikely, I’ve never seen anyone else walking along the bloodwood track. Maybe the traditional owners for this site have taken it, but surely if they were going to do that they would have done it years ago.
I make my way homeward sadly. I realise the knife and the circle had become tokens of hope for me, signs that the strength and knowledge of those people in the past had not been totally destroyed by what’s happened since.
I pass through a thicket of prickly young ironwoods, cross a ribbon of sandy creek
next to two big old mulgas and walk up a wide gravelly slope to large bloodwood tree. This tree, with its big sprawling limbs, mosaics of pink bark, is often the turning point on my walk. There’s a dirt vehicle track beside the tree but I’ve rarely seen anyone on it.
Crimson is draining from the tall ridge to the south; fans of mulga are black against pale pink in the east. The white rocks on the slope below me glow like moonlight. I look at them carefully.
It was around five years ago that I saw the stones: angular chunks the size of a fist, much the same as others here, but these rocks stood out slightly in size or from the pedestals of red dirt worn around them over the decades, or centuries. They made a circle, a few metres across. I’d never seen anything like it. Maybe the tufts of green grass from the rain showed it up.
For whatever reason, I glimpsed into another world, one where this place, only a generation or so ago, was filled with people and ceremony. Now it was deserted, this slope, where you could see a long way west, to the blue rim of the ranges, wavy against gold sky.
Later I remembered I’d seen the circle years before, but had somehow forgotten it. Was I meant to forget? An old Aboriginal friend told me these hills were a special men’s place, and I thought of not coming here anymore. But people often walk on a dirt road nearby.
I took a few friends to see the circle. One found a stone knife nearby: a pointed shape of pale grey silcrete almost as long as my hand. It was rounded on the upperside, beautifully carved underneath. I’ve often seen stone chips at old camping sites, but not a knife like this. My friend thought of taking it, but thankfully decided to leave it where it was.
After that, each time I came here I checked on the circle and the knife. Sometimes I picked up the knife, placed it gently on my open hand, and then returned it carefully to its mould in the dirt, hidden among other stones.
A year or so ago, tyre marks appeared near the circle. At first they went around it but then they started to cut right through it, coming from the east where there’s a town camp, to link up with the track passing the bloodwood. Did people not know what they were doing? Was it people from out bush, other country doing this?
This time, my first visit for a month or so, I see there’s an established track passing through the circle, it’s beginning to disappear. Then I look for the knife but can’t find it. Sometimes it takes a while to locate, but I know what dead bush it’s nearest too. Finally I find the empty mould of dirt. The knife is gone.
Has someone I’ve shown this implement to taken it? Did someone else stumble across it? That seems unlikely, I’ve never seen anyone else walking along the bloodwood track. Maybe the traditional owners for this site have taken it, but surely if they were going to do that they would have done it years ago.
I make my way homeward sadly. I realise the knife and the circle had become tokens of hope for me, signs that the strength and knowledge of those people in the past had not been totally destroyed by what’s happened since.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Sympathy not fear
I’m driving to work, the narrow road following the curves of the river with its wide sweeps of sand and leafy gums. There are a few people stirring after a night in the creek, getting a little fire going. I like this road, because of the river and how you can still see bits of the old Alice Springs on the other side of the road – big grassy blocks with ramshackle fences and odd-shaped houses of fibro or stone, on the far end away from floods.
I’m getting near the town camp. This is one of around 20 areas, in or on the outskirts of town, with longterm leases owned by the Aboriginal groups that live on them. They were originally camps of fringe-dwellers but now have a handful to a few dozen houses. The town bigwigs want to get rid of the camps. It’s true many of them are very rundown, but people have a kind of autonomy in these ‘ghettoes’ that they wouldn’t have if they were ‘integrated’ into the rest of town like many Aboriginal people are. Many of the people in the camps grew up out bush and don’t live in houses the same way whitefellas do. They often live around the houses – cooking and sleeping outside – more than in them.
The camp along this road has an official Arrernte name, but it’s usually known as Abbott’s or BP camp – it’s near a BP garage. Not without its troubles and litter, the camp is open to people and the river in a way the new flats with tall colourbond fences will never be. These days, as with all the other camps and remote communities, there is a huge sign out the front proclaiming ‘No grog, no pornography’ in large letters, with details of the Federal Government’s recent Intervention requirements underneath. The Government has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars putting these humiliating and useless signs up all over the Territory.
There’s a woman sitting, with her head in her hands, in the middle of the road outside the camp. Cars are driving carefully around her. If I was in a hurry, I might too. But I’m not today. One of my friends from another camp has just killed herself – accidentally or on purpose – by driving a car into a tree. For her memory, at least, I decide to stop and help.
The woman is not in any real danger, but something’s obviously up with her. I walk over and ask what’s wrong. She says her husband left her last night, and starts crying. I say that I’m sorry, that it’s hard when things like that happen. I had a relationship end recently and I can relate to how this woman, maybe in her early forties, is feeling. She continues to sob. Many people’s lives are so much on the edge, with poverty and violence and deaths and drinking, that any new trauma can make someone flip right out – that’s probably what happened with my friend.
I hold the woman’s arm and tell her she needs to move off the road. She shakes her head. Cars keep driving around. Then one slows down. Some help, I think. I can’t move the woman by myself. The bloke winds down his window. ‘You’re better off calling the police in situations like this,’ he says. This makes me angry. ‘I don’t need the police,’ I say, and he drives off.
I notice a couple of blokes hanging around nearby, on the river side of the road. The woman tells me they’re her brothers – maybe cousin brothers. I yell out to them to help me move her, but they shake their heads, say they can’t. They’ve probably tried talking to her but don’t want to drag her off, it’s not their way.
I tell the woman I’ll give her a lift somewhere. Or does she want to come and have a cup of tea at my work? Sympathy helps, as it would with anyone. Eventually the woman agrees to come with me. She wants to go to the bank, but the banks are not open yet. Then she asks me to take her over to the men – her brothers have walked off into the river, about a hundred metres wide here. I don’t know why they’ve walked off. Maybe they thought the police were coming and wanted to keep out of trouble. We drive around to the other side of the river. The woman tells me her name and the community she comes from. I know this place a bit and we talk about families there.
When we get to the other side, we can see the men are walking back towards the camp. It’s alright, the woman says, they’re going back. You can take me back there. She’s smiling now, chatting happily. When we get back near the camp, a police car drives by. I can see the woman is thankful not to have to deal with them. We part warmly.
I’m getting near the town camp. This is one of around 20 areas, in or on the outskirts of town, with longterm leases owned by the Aboriginal groups that live on them. They were originally camps of fringe-dwellers but now have a handful to a few dozen houses. The town bigwigs want to get rid of the camps. It’s true many of them are very rundown, but people have a kind of autonomy in these ‘ghettoes’ that they wouldn’t have if they were ‘integrated’ into the rest of town like many Aboriginal people are. Many of the people in the camps grew up out bush and don’t live in houses the same way whitefellas do. They often live around the houses – cooking and sleeping outside – more than in them.
The camp along this road has an official Arrernte name, but it’s usually known as Abbott’s or BP camp – it’s near a BP garage. Not without its troubles and litter, the camp is open to people and the river in a way the new flats with tall colourbond fences will never be. These days, as with all the other camps and remote communities, there is a huge sign out the front proclaiming ‘No grog, no pornography’ in large letters, with details of the Federal Government’s recent Intervention requirements underneath. The Government has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars putting these humiliating and useless signs up all over the Territory.
There’s a woman sitting, with her head in her hands, in the middle of the road outside the camp. Cars are driving carefully around her. If I was in a hurry, I might too. But I’m not today. One of my friends from another camp has just killed herself – accidentally or on purpose – by driving a car into a tree. For her memory, at least, I decide to stop and help.
The woman is not in any real danger, but something’s obviously up with her. I walk over and ask what’s wrong. She says her husband left her last night, and starts crying. I say that I’m sorry, that it’s hard when things like that happen. I had a relationship end recently and I can relate to how this woman, maybe in her early forties, is feeling. She continues to sob. Many people’s lives are so much on the edge, with poverty and violence and deaths and drinking, that any new trauma can make someone flip right out – that’s probably what happened with my friend.
I hold the woman’s arm and tell her she needs to move off the road. She shakes her head. Cars keep driving around. Then one slows down. Some help, I think. I can’t move the woman by myself. The bloke winds down his window. ‘You’re better off calling the police in situations like this,’ he says. This makes me angry. ‘I don’t need the police,’ I say, and he drives off.
I notice a couple of blokes hanging around nearby, on the river side of the road. The woman tells me they’re her brothers – maybe cousin brothers. I yell out to them to help me move her, but they shake their heads, say they can’t. They’ve probably tried talking to her but don’t want to drag her off, it’s not their way.
I tell the woman I’ll give her a lift somewhere. Or does she want to come and have a cup of tea at my work? Sympathy helps, as it would with anyone. Eventually the woman agrees to come with me. She wants to go to the bank, but the banks are not open yet. Then she asks me to take her over to the men – her brothers have walked off into the river, about a hundred metres wide here. I don’t know why they’ve walked off. Maybe they thought the police were coming and wanted to keep out of trouble. We drive around to the other side of the river. The woman tells me her name and the community she comes from. I know this place a bit and we talk about families there.
When we get to the other side, we can see the men are walking back towards the camp. It’s alright, the woman says, they’re going back. You can take me back there. She’s smiling now, chatting happily. When we get back near the camp, a police car drives by. I can see the woman is thankful not to have to deal with them. We part warmly.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
A stolen painting and solanum wars
On my first day back at work, I clean my section of the office, wiping two months of dirt from the computers, printers and desks, replacing maps and photos stained with gecko dung on the pin-up board, de-webbing the windows. Under a bench, I find the dot painting which has hung on the walls of this dusty rammed earth office since before I came here, ten years ago. It was a kind of storyboard for a video made here on local Aboriginal land management.
It’s been ripped off the strips of wood that framed it and rolled up. The woman running the new training business in the office explains: an older bloke from the nearby town camp pulled it down when no-one was around, and walked off with it.
He was found a little later sitting down pulling the canvas off the frame, no doubt hoping to sell it.
This man has come to the office regularly in the last year looking for lifts into town for himself and his lame wife. The training woman felt sorry for them. For a while she made special trips to drive them into town, then got busier and decided she couldn't take them anymore, but the bloke kept coming to ask for lifts. So that story has come to an end, not a good one.
I think maybe it wouldn't have been such a bad thing it that painting had had a new life on some tourist's wall. I wonder what story the man would've made up for it. I wonder if he needed the money for food or for grog.
When I've had enough of cleaning, I wander over to the nursery, just across a dirt yard from the office. This nursery has staggered on through periods of ATSIC (national Aboriginal body) and Community Development Employment Program (sort of work-for-the-dole) funding, and trying to make a go of it as a business. In two decades of this, the nursery has supplied most of the trees for remote communities right across central Australia, often free of charge til the federal government axed ATSIC a few years ago.
Last year the boss was going to close the nursery down, the nursery manager didn’t come to work for weeks because he felt unsupported and depressed; the trickle of down-and-out CDEP workers weren’t helping much. The stalwarts were a woman and man in their fifties, who pricked out and potted up thousands of seedling over the years they worked in the nursery, despite drinking themselves to oblivion several times a week.
The man got sick last year and stopped coming for a while. Then both of them lost their jobs when the federal government axed CDEP, as part of their intervention to reform communities in the Northern Territory.
While I’ve been away, CDEP has come back, so our organisation now has it and ‘work-for-the-dole’, the program set up by the government, I thought, to replace CDEP. My boss tells me people in communities join up with whichever one is best run, although theoretically, I think, they have to be on work-for-the-dole for a while before they can move on to CDEP.
This year the nursery has a new lease of life. The boss has seen the light with bush tomatoes: native solanums, more like pale yellow opaque sultanas with a sweet tangy taste. Aboriginal people love them, and they’re good for you, have always been eaten a lot.
About 10 years ago, a woman in Sydney decided that bush tomato chutney would be a great business idea. She only used one or two tomatoes in each jar, because the taste is too strong for whitefellas. She managed to get one of the big supermarkets to take it on, and the chutney sold, especially as it said on the jar that buying it supported Aboriginal communities.
Because the supply chain for wild-harvested tomatoes is erratic, because of unpredictable rain and fire – both of which the plant needs to grow well – and wholesalers struggling with an uncertain market, this woman has decided to push for people to cultivate bush tomatoes, preferably in Aboriginal communities, to keep the connection and market strong.
She’s not the only person to think of this. A bloke who runs a big nursery down south got onto the same thing some years ago and made his own bush tomato chutney – ‘outback pride’, as opposed to the woman’s ‘outback spirit’. Our Aboriginal organisation was the first he approached, and worked with him to set up his first horticulture plots on communities. I won’t go into all that, but it didn’t end on good terms. The profits for communities were minimal, maybe because they ate too many of the tomatoes themselves, but not just because of that.
This is only one battleground in what I think of now as the Solanum Wars. Aboriginal people don't have much say in them, they're run by whitefellas. The federal government-funded Desert Knowledge research centre, based in Alice Springs, is now bemusing everyone by spending millions on trial bush tomato horticulture plots, so the nurseries will know how to do it. (At least one nursery has already done it, many times.)
Anyway, the last year or two there have been virtually no bush tomatoes to harvest out bush, because there hasn't been much rain. The woman in Sydney got down to her last tomato and, according to my boss, has had to stop making the chutney. The bloke with the nursery down south is sitting on tons of them but his asking price is rumoured to be through the roof.
So the Sydney woman has got into the ear of my boss, maybe given him a bit of money, and he’s got the nursery growing thousands of bush tomatoes. The nursery manager has a proper, if part-time, offsider. Two giant plastic and shadecloth green houses have been ordered. A huge slab of concrete has been laid in the work area – rather bigger than was needed, but these things often happen without much discussion.
It’s not entirely clear yet what will happen to all the bush tomato plants, but it seems there’s a community farm business interested in some of them. And some will be planted in plots on town camps – although this didn’t make any money last time our organisation tried it.
It’s been ripped off the strips of wood that framed it and rolled up. The woman running the new training business in the office explains: an older bloke from the nearby town camp pulled it down when no-one was around, and walked off with it.
He was found a little later sitting down pulling the canvas off the frame, no doubt hoping to sell it.
This man has come to the office regularly in the last year looking for lifts into town for himself and his lame wife. The training woman felt sorry for them. For a while she made special trips to drive them into town, then got busier and decided she couldn't take them anymore, but the bloke kept coming to ask for lifts. So that story has come to an end, not a good one.
I think maybe it wouldn't have been such a bad thing it that painting had had a new life on some tourist's wall. I wonder what story the man would've made up for it. I wonder if he needed the money for food or for grog.
When I've had enough of cleaning, I wander over to the nursery, just across a dirt yard from the office. This nursery has staggered on through periods of ATSIC (national Aboriginal body) and Community Development Employment Program (sort of work-for-the-dole) funding, and trying to make a go of it as a business. In two decades of this, the nursery has supplied most of the trees for remote communities right across central Australia, often free of charge til the federal government axed ATSIC a few years ago.
Last year the boss was going to close the nursery down, the nursery manager didn’t come to work for weeks because he felt unsupported and depressed; the trickle of down-and-out CDEP workers weren’t helping much. The stalwarts were a woman and man in their fifties, who pricked out and potted up thousands of seedling over the years they worked in the nursery, despite drinking themselves to oblivion several times a week.
The man got sick last year and stopped coming for a while. Then both of them lost their jobs when the federal government axed CDEP, as part of their intervention to reform communities in the Northern Territory.
While I’ve been away, CDEP has come back, so our organisation now has it and ‘work-for-the-dole’, the program set up by the government, I thought, to replace CDEP. My boss tells me people in communities join up with whichever one is best run, although theoretically, I think, they have to be on work-for-the-dole for a while before they can move on to CDEP.
This year the nursery has a new lease of life. The boss has seen the light with bush tomatoes: native solanums, more like pale yellow opaque sultanas with a sweet tangy taste. Aboriginal people love them, and they’re good for you, have always been eaten a lot.
About 10 years ago, a woman in Sydney decided that bush tomato chutney would be a great business idea. She only used one or two tomatoes in each jar, because the taste is too strong for whitefellas. She managed to get one of the big supermarkets to take it on, and the chutney sold, especially as it said on the jar that buying it supported Aboriginal communities.
Because the supply chain for wild-harvested tomatoes is erratic, because of unpredictable rain and fire – both of which the plant needs to grow well – and wholesalers struggling with an uncertain market, this woman has decided to push for people to cultivate bush tomatoes, preferably in Aboriginal communities, to keep the connection and market strong.
She’s not the only person to think of this. A bloke who runs a big nursery down south got onto the same thing some years ago and made his own bush tomato chutney – ‘outback pride’, as opposed to the woman’s ‘outback spirit’. Our Aboriginal organisation was the first he approached, and worked with him to set up his first horticulture plots on communities. I won’t go into all that, but it didn’t end on good terms. The profits for communities were minimal, maybe because they ate too many of the tomatoes themselves, but not just because of that.
This is only one battleground in what I think of now as the Solanum Wars. Aboriginal people don't have much say in them, they're run by whitefellas. The federal government-funded Desert Knowledge research centre, based in Alice Springs, is now bemusing everyone by spending millions on trial bush tomato horticulture plots, so the nurseries will know how to do it. (At least one nursery has already done it, many times.)
Anyway, the last year or two there have been virtually no bush tomatoes to harvest out bush, because there hasn't been much rain. The woman in Sydney got down to her last tomato and, according to my boss, has had to stop making the chutney. The bloke with the nursery down south is sitting on tons of them but his asking price is rumoured to be through the roof.
So the Sydney woman has got into the ear of my boss, maybe given him a bit of money, and he’s got the nursery growing thousands of bush tomatoes. The nursery manager has a proper, if part-time, offsider. Two giant plastic and shadecloth green houses have been ordered. A huge slab of concrete has been laid in the work area – rather bigger than was needed, but these things often happen without much discussion.
It’s not entirely clear yet what will happen to all the bush tomato plants, but it seems there’s a community farm business interested in some of them. And some will be planted in plots on town camps – although this didn’t make any money last time our organisation tried it.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Cow country
The pastoralist – when I finally manage to get him on the phone, after a couple of months, he never replies to my messages – tells me it’s OK to take the schoolkids to the waterhole, but there’ll be cows there. He doesn’t say the cows are dead.They aren’t all dead, of course. Some of them are still alive, hides hanging over their ribs.
When a teacher and I go to check out the waterhole the evening before the excursion, one cow is sitting down on the bank, obviously unable to get up. We think it might be dead by the next day, but it’s still sitting there, holding its head up sadly. How long does it take for a cow to die, we wonder. The teacher jokes we could ask the little kids to count dead cows.
The cows are dying from lack of food, not water. The roos we see bounding towards the waterhole look alright. We suppose these locals can survive much longer without green food. It hasn’t rained to speak of for many months.
The main waterhole, which probably only dries up in bad droughts, still has plenty of water but it’s putrid with cow dung, and a dead calf. Luckily there’s a beautiful platform of rock – gneiss with swirling stripes of dark and light minerals – up behind the waterhole. Cattle can’t get up across this platform. We can take the kids to the rockholes further up.
As we drive out the next day, a new teacher chats to me about bush food. He’s a chef and is excited when I tell him the seeds of all the different wattles we see were ground and eaten as a paste or cooked as damper.
He goes on about how he used to cook warrigal greens, from down south, and bush tomatoes and witchetty grubs at five-star hotels, as though bush foods consist of a handful of special plants. I tell him that almost every plant here is a food or medicine and a lot of them are still used, but I don’t think it quite sinks in.
The people in the local community don’t collect much bush food because they’re scared of the pastoralist, whose cattle roam through the community, on a small excision from pastoral land. Legally, this community have a right to hunt and gather on their traditional land, but pastoralists are often not keen on supporting these activities – they worry about gates being left open, cattle being disturbed (or eaten), fences being damaged.
I can understand this, to an extent. But it doesn’t seem right that when the women here go out to collect honeyants, they run off into the bush if they hear a car coming.
The teachers say the kids are even more excited about going to the watehole than they are when they go into Alice Springs. It takes us nearly an hour along dirt tracks (maintained by the pastoralist, it’s true), with the little school bus and two troopies crammed with kids, to get to the creek.
We walk several hundred metres along the bouldery creek bed. Many of the children, some as young as five, are barefoot. The kids are excited to find emu tracks, point them out to me. This place is emu dreaming. We detour up on the bank to pay our respects to the emu egg, a lump of white quartz on a cairn of rocks.
Now we are getting to dead cow territory and keep our distance from bodies as much as we can. The pale sand is strewn with cattle dung; we pick our way around that too.
Finally we get to the little rockholes, and the kids splash around with the nets I’ve brought.
As usual, they soon get an eye for the water insects and other creatures scientists use to monitor waterholes, and there’s a rush on to find a new critter. Soon I’m being besieged with spangled grunters (fish), diving beetles, water striders with long spidery legs and fly larvae that look like armoured worms.
One particularly persistent boy finds a dragonfly larva – good, now I can talk about how dragonflies need clean waterholes. We take a specimen or two of each type of animal to look at under microscopes back in the classroom. Then our hot but happy party troops back past all the dead cows to our vehicles.
When a teacher and I go to check out the waterhole the evening before the excursion, one cow is sitting down on the bank, obviously unable to get up. We think it might be dead by the next day, but it’s still sitting there, holding its head up sadly. How long does it take for a cow to die, we wonder. The teacher jokes we could ask the little kids to count dead cows.
The cows are dying from lack of food, not water. The roos we see bounding towards the waterhole look alright. We suppose these locals can survive much longer without green food. It hasn’t rained to speak of for many months.
The main waterhole, which probably only dries up in bad droughts, still has plenty of water but it’s putrid with cow dung, and a dead calf. Luckily there’s a beautiful platform of rock – gneiss with swirling stripes of dark and light minerals – up behind the waterhole. Cattle can’t get up across this platform. We can take the kids to the rockholes further up.
As we drive out the next day, a new teacher chats to me about bush food. He’s a chef and is excited when I tell him the seeds of all the different wattles we see were ground and eaten as a paste or cooked as damper.
He goes on about how he used to cook warrigal greens, from down south, and bush tomatoes and witchetty grubs at five-star hotels, as though bush foods consist of a handful of special plants. I tell him that almost every plant here is a food or medicine and a lot of them are still used, but I don’t think it quite sinks in.
The people in the local community don’t collect much bush food because they’re scared of the pastoralist, whose cattle roam through the community, on a small excision from pastoral land. Legally, this community have a right to hunt and gather on their traditional land, but pastoralists are often not keen on supporting these activities – they worry about gates being left open, cattle being disturbed (or eaten), fences being damaged.
I can understand this, to an extent. But it doesn’t seem right that when the women here go out to collect honeyants, they run off into the bush if they hear a car coming.
The teachers say the kids are even more excited about going to the watehole than they are when they go into Alice Springs. It takes us nearly an hour along dirt tracks (maintained by the pastoralist, it’s true), with the little school bus and two troopies crammed with kids, to get to the creek.
We walk several hundred metres along the bouldery creek bed. Many of the children, some as young as five, are barefoot. The kids are excited to find emu tracks, point them out to me. This place is emu dreaming. We detour up on the bank to pay our respects to the emu egg, a lump of white quartz on a cairn of rocks.
Now we are getting to dead cow territory and keep our distance from bodies as much as we can. The pale sand is strewn with cattle dung; we pick our way around that too.
Finally we get to the little rockholes, and the kids splash around with the nets I’ve brought.
As usual, they soon get an eye for the water insects and other creatures scientists use to monitor waterholes, and there’s a rush on to find a new critter. Soon I’m being besieged with spangled grunters (fish), diving beetles, water striders with long spidery legs and fly larvae that look like armoured worms.
One particularly persistent boy finds a dragonfly larva – good, now I can talk about how dragonflies need clean waterholes. We take a specimen or two of each type of animal to look at under microscopes back in the classroom. Then our hot but happy party troops back past all the dead cows to our vehicles.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
An ending
As we set up our campsite at isolated springs, we see a dark shape at the base of a tree. It could be a garbage bag filled to plumpness, except few people ever come here.
As we get closer it’s not plastic we see but feathers, with a head resting awkwardly.
It’s an eagle. I’m used to seeing this bird floating high overhead or flying off haughtily from road-kill with its huge, dark wings.
Now it’s curled up on the ground. My friend picks it up and gently unfolds it. The body isn’t stiff yet: the bird died today, as we were driving here.
My friend puts one hand under its breast – black, which means it was at least 10 years old – and with his other hand pulls a wing above his head. The breadth of the wings, hanging beside his height, is easily longer than his six feet. I try this too, can barely hold the weight.
We arrange the head, with its imperious beak; the sturdy body; the wings, that look like they belong on a flying horse; the thick-spined black and brown feathers, a foot or more long, on the ground, to take photos. This dark, beautiful creature does not look right on the ground.
This bird would normally only tread the earth to pick at dead roos, other animals. It should be way above us. A great black shape with a distinctive wedge of tail which means death to the animals scurrying below.
Now it is dead, and the world seems somehow tipped upside down. Finally my friend finds a broken leg. The bird must’ve crashed into the tree or the ground as it zoomed down on a rabbit or some other animal, it’s not unusual, he says
He folds the eagle back up and returns it to the base of the tree. But what has opened in me, as I surveyed this dead bird, I can’t close, and walk around with the eyes of an eagle as it lands on death.
As we get closer it’s not plastic we see but feathers, with a head resting awkwardly.
It’s an eagle. I’m used to seeing this bird floating high overhead or flying off haughtily from road-kill with its huge, dark wings.
Now it’s curled up on the ground. My friend picks it up and gently unfolds it. The body isn’t stiff yet: the bird died today, as we were driving here.
My friend puts one hand under its breast – black, which means it was at least 10 years old – and with his other hand pulls a wing above his head. The breadth of the wings, hanging beside his height, is easily longer than his six feet. I try this too, can barely hold the weight.
We arrange the head, with its imperious beak; the sturdy body; the wings, that look like they belong on a flying horse; the thick-spined black and brown feathers, a foot or more long, on the ground, to take photos. This dark, beautiful creature does not look right on the ground.
This bird would normally only tread the earth to pick at dead roos, other animals. It should be way above us. A great black shape with a distinctive wedge of tail which means death to the animals scurrying below.
Now it is dead, and the world seems somehow tipped upside down. Finally my friend finds a broken leg. The bird must’ve crashed into the tree or the ground as it zoomed down on a rabbit or some other animal, it’s not unusual, he says
He folds the eagle back up and returns it to the base of the tree. But what has opened in me, as I surveyed this dead bird, I can’t close, and walk around with the eyes of an eagle as it lands on death.
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