A friend from England sends me an email. Our little town in the centre of Australia has made it into The Times: ‘Child rape dossier may force U-turn on law for Aborigines’. I don’t read the ‘catalogue of atrocities’ that follows. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s in it.
I know some of the difficulties in my Aboriginal friends’ lives, have heard about the problems for years from friends who are probationer officers or lawyers or work with petrol sniffers. I see the court reports in the local paper every week: accounts of rapes, stabbings, murders using shifting spanners or axes are interspersed without comment with stories about the local races and whether or not we’ll get the service of two airlines.
The crown prosecutor, a woman who’s been a lawyer in this town for a long time, has written a report documenting murders and rapes and saying the law isn’t hard enough on offenders, partly because of cultural issues being taken in to account. That’s made a good story for newspapers all over the world.
I can’t talk, I’ve sometimes joked about the commonly-quoted fact that our town has a higher murder rate than New York. I don’t have to be scared about this – it’s not us whitefellas who are the main target. Not yet anyway.
Just don’t walk near the river at night, I tell visitors. The broad, gum-lined strip of sandy creek divides our town in half.
I like the river, seeing smoke rising from little fires, people sitting around them. I don’t wonder what they’re doing there, why they’re not in houses. Sitting around a fire on the ground seems just as natural to me now as being shut up in a house. More natural really.
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The following week I’m at a writers’ festival in the the only city in our state. I’m on a panel called ‘The writer as outsider’. I say that I can’t write as an outsider, I have to belong somehow in a story or poem to write it.
I read a poem about when I first lived in Aboriginal communities, how I struggled to understand people, to speak the language. How the world had turned, with black people at the centre and me on the fringe, it wasn’t easy, I didn’t feel good a lot of the time.
The poem talks about how people laughed with me when they could, taught me how the country connected people across families, about the ancestor creatures in the rocks, the ground. How it felt like I was really seeing the country for the first time, even though I didn’t believe everything I was told.
And how it felt like I’d known this desert country and its people before, but had forgotten. Maybe my family, who were early settlers in the mid-north of South Australia, wanted to forget.
somewhere I know in my bones, the poem concludes,
this is the continuing of a story
of two peoples
and their love for this dry country
a story that went wrong somewhere
and is finding its way again.
When it’s question time, an Aboriginal writer in the festival audience slams a copy of that day’s Australian on the table. It’s open at the cartoon with two Aboriginal men saying ‘We give them some culture, and what appreciation do we get?’ There’s a battered woman in the background. It’s a comment on the catalogue of atrocities from my town. The Aboriginal writer angrily demands a response from us.
I feel like I should say something. I say the cartoon makes me feel sick. I say there are weird whitefellas too, but their acts are more hidden.
I don’t talk about the violence by Aboriginal men, because I can see from this bloke’s point of view the racism of the cartoon is more of an issue than the abuse it comments on. And maybe he’s right. The two are probably connected anyway.
I know the cartoon’s supposed to be a joke, but it’s like a cartoon about the Bali bombings that makes fun of people who got their legs blown off. What are those whitefellas over east thinking?
I find myself saying that if you want to change the people you have to start with where they’re at, listen to them. I’m talking about the cartoonist, I doubt anyone realises this.
The Aboriginal bloke with the paper talks scathingly about the crown prosecutor’s comment that the abuse was ‘beyond the range of normal comprehension’. He describes a massacre where Aboriginal children were buried up to their necks and left to die and asks whether that was beyond the range of normal comprehension.
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When I arrive back in town from being away, it always hits me around the time I drive through the Gap, the break made by the river in the great slab of range that borders our town to the south.
A railway line and two road lanes are jammed in beside the sandy creek bed. I work near the Gap and a politician’s secretary, all suited up, once asked us if it had always been there or was man-made.
It’s about 10 kilometres from the airport to the Gap, but you don’t start seeing Aboriginal people til a kilometre or so before it. They’re walking from town camps – groups of houses on special leases – towards town or back from it, or sitting in the creek or on its banks, maybe on the railway line. If they’re in the creek, there’ll be a little fire going.
Young men in flanelette shirts or jumpers, girls in skirts mostly, like the old women. All of them with footy beanies. Sometimes the old men have battered cowboy hats and old suit jackets.
The young men will be sauntering along, shiacking as my dad would say, and the young women too – although they’ll often have a baby or a toddler in a stroller or on their backs. Sometimes there’ll be drunks wobbling along, often with the hardened faces that it’s hard to put an age to.
You don’t see whitefellas walking around the streets much, except in the town centre – we all have cars. So it’s when I get near the Gap that I start thinking about Aboriginal people. I don’t see them much in the cities down south.
Part of what I feel when I get near the Gap is a familiar pleasure at seeing these people who never spend their days stuck behind a desk, and know so much about this desert country I love.
But there’s something harder too. I remember things aren’t so good for this mob, and I can’t pretend it’s nothing to do with me. People go to a funeral almost every week. The young men could well be dead by the time they’re fifty, the girls too – drinking, car accidents, diabetes, just not enough good food. The old women might be looking after their greatgrandchildren because their children and grandchildren are drinkers, or dead, or in jail.
I know these people can’t walk into most shops in this town and hold their heads up – the security will be keeping an eye on them, the shopkeepers not very friendly or outright rude, the tourists staring.
Not that all those single whitefellas in cars going to and fro through the Gap have the best lives in the world. But there aren’t any headlines in the local paper saying: ‘Town’s Shame. Get lonely people out of their houses.’
It was different coming home when I lived in a community out bush. Families would be sitting around outside their houses, walking down dusty streets. People would be laughing and calling out to each other. People looked at home, they weren’t second class citizens there.
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Next day I drive out to the community where I work with a school. Tuesday, a bad day, because the men on CDEP get paid on Monday. So there’s lots of drinking Monday night. ‘People were knocking on my door all night,’ says one of the teachers, ‘I couldn’t sleep’. She goes home, feeling sick.
Even the whitefellas couldn’t sleep with the screeching cars and yelling til the early hours. Everyone says that mob should get paid at the end of the week, when the dole and pension money comes. Then there’d be a few days of peace.
The kids are jumping around as usual. I give them a dew and frost lesson, get them to add salt to cans of ice, to lower the temperature, so the ‘dew’ on the outside of the cans freezes.
It doesn’t work at first, and I think maybe we did something wrong. I give them some sentences to write, forget about the cans. But the kids keep a close eye on them, the boys’ one freezes first and they come and show me, excited. Then the others frost up too. I think that now they probably think that salt causes frost, but at least we had fun.
There’s a stabbing that morning. We find out at lunchtime. This man got his kneecap sliced off. Could be payback, or just a drunken fight.
That afternoon a local teacher and I talk with a class about a trip we’d taken them on, to a circle of hills, a couple of kilometres wide, that stands out on the plain west of the community. One of the traditional owners for that country is a wonderful teacher. This elder told the children how special the place was, how they had to look after it, which of them were the the owners, and which the caretakers for that country.
The elder told the children the story for the circle of hills: star women were dancing in the Milky Way and one of their babies fell in his coolamon (a shallow wooden bowl) and made a big hole in the ground. The baby’s coolamon became a wall of rocks around the hole. That baby’s parents, the elder said, still come down and look for him – the father is the Evening Star and the mother the Morning Star.
The elder told the children how much tourists respond to this story when she tells them, how it means more to them than the whitefella story about the comet. I think that this woman’s so full of the spirit of this place that anyone would have to see it, no matter how blind they were.
Now, back in the classroom, we get the children to draw pictures of the crater and the stories about it. One boy just sits by himself staring at his drawing paper. I think maybe he doesn’t like drawing and ask him if he wants me to start it off for him. He shakes his head. I go over and ask the local teacher what’s up with him. He’s just sad, she whispers, it was his father that got stabbed.
The boy sits there for a long time staring at his paper. Then the other local teacher goes and sits with him, draws a picture of the massacre that the woman told us about – a long time ago hit men from the south came and killed a whole family living in the crater. I wonder if this is the right story for this boy now, but trust this teacher to be thinking about him.
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On the weekend I go for a walk with a friend at the claypans just south of town. After rain these pans are like enormous plates of coffee-coloured water, decorated with orange ranges at sunset. But they’re ususally dry like they are now, open spaces surrounded by shady coolibahs. People go and walk their dogs there. Young men hoon around on motorbikes or cars. Conservationists worry about the fragile ecosystem.
My friend and I walk around the two conical hills overlooking the biggest claypan. These hills, Arrernte people say, are two travelling sisters being followed by unitiated men. One of the hills has a curving, white scar near its summit, a four-wheel-drive track cutting through the limey soil. It always hurts me to see that.
We walk past the claypans through spinifex and salt bush, past gnarled corkwood trees, witchetty and eremophila bushes covered with pale purple bell flowers. The spicy leaves of these bushes are a popular local medicine for colds and flu.
It seems to get dark quickly and we get a bit lost on the way back. We finally find our lone car on the edge of a claypan. My friend makes a tiny fire with some pieces of mulga she’s carried since dusk. We sit on deck chairs on the claypan and eat our picnic tea by the fire-light, a comforting glow that pushes back the darkness for a few metres.
My friend loves singing and tells me she and some older Arrernte women from the Catholic church have been meeting to sing hymns in Arrernte once a week. She says how lovely it is doing that. They’ve been talking about doing it for years – my friend used to be a schoolteacher at the community some of these women come from.
Then my friend talks about being at a teachers’ conference in Sydney recently. People asked her about the troubles up here, the abuse in communities that’s been in the news.
She says she didn’t say much to people except for two who she knew were really concerned and wouldn’t take it as a licence to rubbish Aboriginal people. She told them that it was all true, that there was lots of abuse, social systems had broken down, people didn’t know what to do.
My friend comments now that up here we all know about these troubles. We carry them with us, some of us anyway. But it’s so hard to see and think about how difficult things are for many people that we don’t talk about it much – with each other or with people from the cities down south. It’s like a secret.
Maybe those of us whitefellas who know and care feel too guilty and confused to talk. We don’t know what to do either. Or maybe we do and it seems too hard.
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I read a poem to a close friend. It’s the one about getting to the Gap when I come home after being away. Seeing Aboriginal people and my heart sinking when I remember how hard things are here, with them and us.
The friend listens attentively as always, but I can see that she is a little disappointed. She says something about the poem being grim. I know what she was expecting. She thought that seeing Aboriginal people would be a comfort for me, would lighten my day not make it heavier.
That seeing them would remind me of wonderful times out bush, people with awe-inspiring knowledge, who can see so much, are so real, so warm, so human. In contrast to all the abstractions and unawareness of the academic world in which this friend now works here.
And I wonder whether I am being too grim. I do love living here, because of the people as well as the country. And I want to go and write a poem about that side of things straightaway.
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I’m involved in a project at some springs near a community southeast of Alice, with custodians, the land council, a landcare agency and an aquatic ecologist. It's an encouraging example of different organisations working together – there can be a lot of competition for funding – with the lead of a custodian. Veronica, the custodian, took a friend from Land Council to the springs and showed her how they were being polluted by wild cattles, horses and camels. Then land council got a grant to fence the springs.
They ended up building the fence in the extreme heat of summer, with a mob of CDEP blokes from the community: carrying long poles into the gully, mixing concrete, welding cables to poles. This is a serious fence, designed to keep out large, determined animals.The guy from the landcare agency had done this sort of work before but the young land council bloke looks the bookish type and says he’d never worked so hard in his entire life. Maybe the young community blokes hadn’t either. But they pulled it off, camping out here for a week, and you can see there’s a camaraderie between them all, jokes and respect.
There’s a calm around Veronica, who has a mass of white hair – she’s had that since she was a young woman, her Arrernte name means ‘cloud’. When I arrive at the springs, she’s sitting under a gidgee eating lunch, wearing a spotless, pale pink shirt and grey slacks. I’m always amazed at how neat she manages to keep out bush, unlike me.
Veronica’s family used to come to these springs in her grandfather’s country during breaks from work on cattle stations. Her grandfather was a rainmaker. He’d bring the family to the springs, walking with his camels, and they’d live on wattle seed bread, bush fruits, yams, kangaroo.
Now Veronica and I walk with the others along a track across the red stony ground, almost pulsing with heat, into a rocky gully, like many in these hills. But this one has water. Veronica can’t remember the Arrernte name for the springs but says old Bobby will know, and he does: Mpartwenge. Veronica tells me later that Bobby is the same age as her, around 60 I think, but he looks much older – he’s a drinker.
We climb through the fence into a shady thicket of tall paperbarks, not something you see often in the desert country. Beside this grove, among rusty rocks, are the pools. Two pools, one above the other on the east of the gully, have clear water. Another pool has bright green reeds but almost black water, fouled with cow dung. The pool below it is completely filled with cow dung, which is also scattered across the bare ground under our feet.
The American aquatic ecologist – we tease her for calling the gully a ‘cair-nyon’ – tells the custodians and the young CDEP blokes that she is like a doctor for water places. She wants to diagnose the condition of these springs, at the time of fencing and again in six months’ or a year’s time. If the scientists can document the improvement in the springs, there’ll be more chance of other people getting funding to protect areas like this.
That’s not all the ecologist’s excited about of course. She wants to see what’s here – scientists know very little about springs in this part of the world. She and Angus, the other scientist, more the droll type – he shows the kids how he’s recording densities of cattle dung – start sketching the layout of the springs.
Then we spend a couple of hours dipping hand nets into the pools and emptying them out to search for beetls, bugs and fly larvae. It’s very hot in this little gully and by then the custodians and CDEP blokes have gone back to camp for a cuppa.
The two scientists sit down to fill out survey sheets. Veronica talks about the plants and birds she’s seen. She knows nearly every plant: most of them have some use, for food or medicine.
At sunset, the last of us emerge on to the stony flats. The fencing crew have got the campfire set up. Swags are laid out beside Toyotas, in the back of a ute, in a group on a rise. The chops are cooking.
The CDEP blokes are playing a game: one of them goes and puts a cigarette lighter 30 or 40 metres away, on the ground or in a bush, and the others have to spot it. They play this game til it’s almost pitch dark. Us whitefellas, not brought up to see like this, wouldn’t have a hope.
Not much later, I stretch out on my swag, look up at the sky, full of stars. As I go to sleep I recite in my head the names of plants in Arrernte : arrankweye – bush plum, irlperle – paperbark, arrutnenge – passionfruit. In my dreams yellow-spotted beetles
dive in clear pools; dragonfly larvae like dark, squat bees hide in waterweed; backswimmers paddle their tiny oar-legs back and forth; soldier fly larvae, like armoured maggots, do slow acrobatics in open water.
Next morning I head off to get the secondary class from the community school. The kids get into the netting but rather reluctantly fill out the simplified survey sheets I’ve prepared. Only one or two of the eight can read and write much, so their teachers and I help them. After a few hours I take them back to school. The camp is moving on to another lot of springs, but I won’t be coming back for that.
I don’t envy everyone the heat and surveying til late at night – there are a dozen pools at the next springs – but I’m sorry to leave. I’ll miss the poring over rockholes, discussing insect larvae, listening to Veronica. This little community with Aboriginal custodians and youngfellas and a handful of whitefellas seems to make a lot more sense than the one I’m going back to.
I wonder if coming to these springs has been more like medicine than anything else maybe for us all – the custodians who have got to spend some time out in their country, finally got whitefellas to do something useful; and us whitefellas who know as natural scientists how much this country lost in the wake of our people’s arrival, and as local townsfolk how confused and violent the legacy of this arrival continues to be. Maybe even the American, who’s new here, has gained something she wasn’t expecting.
It’s like the spirit of Mparntwenge is in us all now. As Veronica would say,
‘That’s how we think about things, my people’.
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The two Aboriginal women at my work are talking about another murder at a town camp. The last murder, only two weeks ago, was in the camp next door to our workplace, or maybe in our grounds. The suspect this time is the son of a woman who recently came to one of the back-to-work training courses we run. She and her son come from a bush community.The victim is a young woman again. ‘That’s what happens to those young women who drink with people on town camps,’ says Helen. ‘It’s not safe.’
I mutter something about banning grog in Alice Springs altogether, it seems like the only way. I know it will never happen. There were people writing to the local paper complaining about the loss of their rights because Listerine had to be taken off supermarket shelves when ex-petrol sniffers were getting into it.
Helen says that what an elder had to say at the march last week was good. The march, on the anniversary of Aboriginal people getting the vote, was to support the town camps’ decision not to accept the $60 million dollars to improve their housing offered by the Federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister in exchange for the leases to their land.
The elder Helen is talking about is a mixed descent woman who is quite prominent in Aboriginal affairs in town. Helen is mixed descent too. She tells me this elder suggested that Aboriginal people from out bush should have to get permits to come into town. Helen obviously thinks that it’s these people who are causing most of the trouble.
‘But that’s going back to the old days when full-blood Aboriginal people weren’t allowed in town!’ I scoff at the elder’s idea.
Helen says there were allowed here, but there was a curfew. I say that it’s not going to work making people stay on communities, they’re not really viable economically.
Helen says the government should support people more to set up businesses. She tells me her family wanted to grow vegetables on a community they have connections with and sell them to neighbouring communities. But you had to give the government a share of the profits so it wouldn’t work. She said everyone has to give money to the government if they set up a business on a community.
I don’t think this is true, and I try, gently this time, to tell Helen this. (I remember later that businesses on communities have to be commmunity-owned, so you can’t have private businesses.) People here often have stories like this, rumours of injustice abound. I guess Aboriginal people here grown up expecting whitefellas and the government not to look after their interests. The last massacre in the Centre is still in living memory. I suspect the stories now are often based on misunderstandings, but I’m not sure. Certainly exploitation of Aboriginal people by corrupt bush community administrators is rife.
I feel bad about my outburst about the elder’s idea. I tell Helen I’m sorry I was so forceful, I can be like that sometimes. She says, that’s OK, she can be too. But I still feel like a typical whitefella who thinks they know everything, and obviously knows so little.
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The old man across the road and his social worker have written a book about the old man’s life. He was taken away from his family near Katherine when he was three, grew up in institutions – if you could call a few sheds that – in Darwin, Pine Creek and the infamous Bungalow at Alice Springs.
Apart from the mind-boggling inhumanity of taking such a young child away from his family, there are two things that particularly strike me about the old man’s story. The first is how he was left on his own for months at a soak, when he was a young boy of eleven. He had to keep digging it out so the cattle could get water during a dry period. The boy’s pastoralist ‘employer’ left him with some flour, a week’s worth of meat and a fire. He was supposed to hunt for his own food, but having grown up in institutions he didn’t have much hunting experience. When the fire went out overnight he didn’t know how to get it going again (he wasn’t given matches), and started to slowly starve.
In a very moving scene, a group of old Aboriginal people, two men and a woman, arrive. Perhaps they knew the boy had been left like that. They are still travelling around the area east of Alice in the 1930s, living off the bush and caring for their sites. These old people feed the boy, keep an eye on him, eventually teach him their language and country. To them he is a boy like any other.
After I’ve read his book, I see Alec in his front yard – he’s often there watering – and go over and thank him for sharing his story, and say I’m sorry about the way he was treated. He has tears in his eyes as he tells me how he worked for that pastoralist for 11 years – until he escaped into the army – and didn’t get paid a cent. The hurt is still that strong for him after all these years.
The other thing that strikes me about the book is that life in town for Aboriginal people in the 1950s, for mixed descent people who were allowed to live in town anyway, sounds a lot better than now. Aboriginal people were mostly poor but they could get jobs, better and better housing, things were looking up.
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Suddenly there’s a national emergency. The report on child sexual abuse, commissioned after the local prosecutor publicised her report just over a year ago, is released. The Federal Government decides it needs to take control – or maybe uses this report as an excuse to do so.
A number of the new ‘emergency’ measures don’t seem to me to be a lot different to what’s supposed to be happening already. Grog is banned in all Aboriginal communities in central Australia.
Years ago I was at a Liquor Commission hearing at a bush community which had applied for drinking licenses. All the women and older men voted for no grog. All the younger men were for it. The application was denied. It’s just incredibly hard to stop all the grog-running.
Some communities manage to keep people drinking at the boundary of Aboriginal land, often around 15 minutes’ drive from the community itself. The communities that are more than 400 kms from town don’t see a lot of grog. But like many young men everywhere young Aboriginal blokes are determined to drink, and there’s a kind of death wish that comes with that. Being mainly unemployed, at a loose end and without a clear future doesn’t help.
All the community clinics try to do regular health checks of everyone: to keep track of the kids from babies to teenagers, and the adults who almost all have chronic health conditions of some sort. But the clinics are severely under-staffed: one or two nurses, a few health workers. A lot of clinics don’t have full-time doctors. The staff spend a lot of time dealing with the results of violence and other emergencies, don’t have enough time for basic health care.
The schools struggle to fund and maintain breakfast and lunch programs, buses and staff to pick up kids. Aboriginal staff attendance is erratic, because there’s so much happening in their lives, their families – illness, births, deaths, jail, drunks, no sleep.
White teachers, even the best, struggle to discipline kids from a different culture who don’t speak a lot of English, especially in the early years. By middle and upper primary, they have to deal with at least half the class – more boys usually – who can’t read or write, and at most half the class who are progressing, slowly, with literacy. Still the staffing for English as a Second Language classes (that’s what all community school classes are) is one fully-trained teacher for 15 kids. (A friend tells me it’s one for 8 kids in New South Wales.)
Of course the kids who go to school regularly generally do better. But linking attendance to welfare – who is going to feed the kids? And what kind of nightmare is it going to be for welfare staff explaining to someone that they didn’t get their payment because their children didn’t go to school a few weeks ago? I remember the long inquests over Aboriginal staff payslips, at the community school where I worked, because people were getting paid for the days they worked 6 weeks ago.
An Aboriginal researcher tells me that many Aboriginal kids feel shamed about doing well at school because it mean putting themselves forward, and that’s against their culture. The same way white kids feel shamed if they don’t learn to read and write, because that’s against their culture.
Now we have the melodrama of police, army and bureacrats landing in communities, all it seems in reasonable spirit. Of course people need more houses, more Toyotas, more services. Is the government prepared to take on board how much is really needed? And will it help peoples’ spirits? Will they find useful occupation, will the pain lessen, so they don’t have to drink so much, can look after their health, their families and look forward to their future? Will the whitefellas in town open their hearts and minds so there can be a future for us all here? Will enough good things happen that people on both sides can see a way forward?
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We meet again on the stony rise near the springs: the custodian, the ecologist, the land council bloke, the landcare one and me, here to bring the schoolkids out again. Old Bobby is here too, the old man left for these springs. We found him at the drinking place at the boundary, twenty minutes from the community. He has his own camp, where he’s cooking roo tails from the community store on a roaring fire.
The rest of sit round our campfire, drinking tea. We talk about how the fences are standing up, how the pools that the community CDEP blokes dug out on our first visit are now a metre deep with water instead of cowshit. The ecologist talks excitedly, as always, about water beetles and backswimmers.
Veronica, the custodian who got this project going, asks about jobs for the young CDEP blokes who worked on the fences. She wants to get a community ranger group set up here. The land council bloke says he’s been told to work with a ranger group at another community, he doesn’t think there’s any funding for more ranger groups at the moment. We talk about Veronica and some of the other custodians going to talk to land council, but I know funding is limited, and don’t hold out much hope.
On this trip Veronica also talks about the language centre she wants to set up. She wants a place for people to keep their language strong – sophisticated language with all its built-in knowledge of plants, animals, people, places, the Arrernte way of being and seeing the world. She wants a place where this language is spoken, taught, documented, used.
There is a local Aboriginal community education centre which teaches language courses, mostly to whitefellas, and has housed dictionary projects. But this organisation has been badly managed. And it’s run by people who aren’t language speakers – that’s what Veronica calls Aboriginal people who can’t speak their language, because they were taken away from their families, or their parents or grandparents were.
There seems to be a kind of feud between some of the language-speakers and non language-speakers in town. The non-language speakers often have more power, in the whitefella sense, because they have more whitefella-type education. So they’re the ones usually running the organisations.
Veronica can read and write in Arrernte and English. I can’t believe that someone as skilled and knowledgable as her is not being paid to document and teach others what she knows, to support her language.
I know how much people – black and white – are trying to retrieve the little they can of Aboriginal language and culture down south and over east, and can’t understand why there’s not more attention being paid by governments to what is happening to the languages and cultures here.
Such enormous knowledge still living, but fading quickly, as the old people die. In another ten years or so there will be no-one left who spent at least their youth living out bush with little or no contact with whitefellas. Veronica’s grandfather was one of those people. Out in the western deserts, where contact was latest, there are still some old people like that.
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We gather round the old radio under the shelter near the range: the nursery manager, the young green corps mob, who’re doing mulberry cuttings, Audrey on a stool in the sun, me and another project worker. Sitting on concrete blocks, milk crates, the donga steps, an old metal bench we listen to our boss being interviewed by a local radio station.
He’s talking about the government axing CDEP, the work-for-the-dole scheme that everyone listening is paid through except me and the other project worker. The government is replacing CDEP with back-to-work training and counselling.
Our boss runs a program like that too. I know how hard it is for most people
to get to that training, let alone a full-time job, because they’re sick, their family’s sick, someone just died, a stabbing, a car accident. no-one to leave the little kids with, no sleep because of the drunks. All reasonable excuses.
I look at Audrey, a tiny woman who can do a mean limbo. In between the drinking parties and fights with neighbours and family, and time out bush on her outstation, she’s pricked out and potted up thousands of plants here over the last twenty years.
Our manager is getting angrier. He says the government mob lied to him, denied this change was coming. I’m surprised by his vehemence – he’d guessed CDEP was on the line.
Around the radio, we laugh uneasily – at least he’s not angry with us. I suppose we could feel hopeful, but I don’t think anyone does.
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I go on a camp with a community school a few hours north of Alice Springs, out on the great red sandplains where you can see the horizon in every direction. This school has really got its act together with taking the kids out bush with old people, as part its Warlpiri language and culture program – although it’s not just that, as an Aboriginal researcher with us says, but about giving the kids a well-rounded education connected to their history and where they live.
Two small buses, with all the kids, and several troopies, one towing a trailer with a water tank, others with loads of swags and blankets, set off up a bush track. We trundle for over an hour across spinifex plains, some patches thick and yellow, not burnt for years, others sprouting back green from fire. People still burn this country like they always have, to bring up green pick for roos, encourage bush tomatoes and other fireweed foods. We pass through little woods of mulga with flowering shrubs.
The senna bushes are bright yellow with flowers. An Aboriginal man I worked with told me that’s when the dingo puppies are opening their eyes, when those flowers come out. As a child he used to travel out bush with his family to get dingo skins, and avoid the Welfare, who would have taken him away.
After an hour or so our cavalcade stops on a newly-cleared patch of ground next to a river. There’s a big spring-fed waterhole nearby, an important site for these people. They’ve recently refused a mining application in the nearby hills.
There’s a great flurry of activity as everyone sets up tarps, swags and mattresses, gets little fires going. Soon all the older women have their camps set up – there are about a dozen elders on this trip, most of them working part-time helping with language and culture at the school. The kids have matching blue swags in rows, or clustered around their family fires. The young women from the youth group have little dome tents, for themselves and their babies.
In the afternoon we go for a walk to the waterhole. The white sandy creekbed is wide and beautiful, scattered with river gums, paperbark and flowering wattles. It’s hot and when we get to the water, the kids jump in and splash around. The women sit in the shade and talk, keeping a watchful eye on the kids.
When we get back to our camp, it’s late afternoon. Soon there are billies on, damper being made. The school teachers plonk big blocks of frozen chicken stew in pots on a fire, set up tables with washing-up bowls, piles of plastic plates.
It’s cool now and everyone gathers around fires. The sky is fading and a fuzzy line of bright orange shading into eggshell blue marks the horizon in the west.
After dinner everyone sits on the ground round the main fire. The kids shuffle excitedly. The old women discuss what stories they should tell, who should tell them: stories about the ancestor creatures here, where they came from, the adventures they had, how they travelled on or remain here under the ground, who should look after them.
After a few minutes of talking, the women start chanting, singing the stories for this place, filling up our camp with them. The chanting stops abruptly and the talking starts again. All the kids are chattering and have to be told to shush so the young women from the youth group can record the old women with a video camera.
The talking and singing goes on into the night. The children wander off to their swags. Soon everyone has gone to bed, except a few women around the fire. I lie snug in my swag, look at the sky full of stars, listen to the women singing, and think it should always be like this.
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