Hot but not so hostile

It’s very hot on this trip to Hayes Springs, named after the grandfather of the Aboriginal woman with us. Veronica’s grandfather was an Arrernte (Ar-run-da) man who got the surname Hayes from an early white cattle farmer. I don’t know the details of that story. Maybe the grandfather worked on the Hayes’ station – what we call the huge cattle farms here. The grandfather’s real name was Ulampa, just like Hayes Springs is Mpartwenge.

Such a telling story, just in names. There are lots of Aboriginal people in Alice Springs with surnames of early white cattle farmers, or pastoralists as we call them. Often these Aboriginal people are the descendants of the pastoralists, who took (often literally) Aboriginal wives before, or as well as, white wives. Sometimes people just worked as stockmen on a property and adopted – or were allocated – the pastoralist’s name when they needed a surname.

Grandfather Hayes was a rainmaker. We could do with him now. Most of central Australia has had less than 10 cms of rain this year, low even for here. Although we couldn’t say it’s global warming. Droughts and flooding rains really are the norm in the Centre, and they’re not predictable. There are no regular rains.

It’s the kind of heat where you check your water supplies very carefully. The springs have been fenced off from cattle, horses and camels for a year now, but there’s still a lot of manure in them, I wouldn’t choose to drink that water yet.

Because of some miscommunication and being in a hurry to leave - to meet me - the other car-load on this trip only ended up bringing one 20-litre water container. Not enough for 3 people for 3 days in this weather. I'm going a day earlier than them, so I give them some water from the tank under my Toyota before I leave.

We’re only forty minutes, on a track that winds in and out of the creek and then across rolling bulldusty plains, from the nearest Aboriginal community. But that’s 40 kilometres, a long way to walk. You’d have to do it at night in this weather.

People, both black and white, still die when their cars break down in the bush, often not all that far as the crow flies from a settlement. I've been stranded myself and got to the point of draining the car radiator and windscreen-wiper water, ready to walk 20 kilometres to a slightly busier track in the evening. But then we were saved by a community rubbish truck that for some reason had gone to check on a deserted outstation.

Of course in the last few years we’ve had satellite phones. They’re still too expensive for most people to buy for private use, but organizations use them a lot now. We have two between 4 adults, from 3 different organizations, on this trip.

There are quite a few small springs in these red sandstone hills and nearby ranges. Veronica tells me how one of them, Marion Springs, had clear water flowing over a large flat rock. The missionaries who set up the nearest Aboriginal community, Santa Teresa, in the middle of last century, put a well down there and used it for a water supply. Now the spring is dry. The water’s never come back.

Veronica tells me about another spring you have to walk some distance or ride a horse to get to. She hasn’t bothered talking to the land council about fencing that.

We get the plant and water animal surveys and water readings done at Hayes Springs and move on to Salt Springs the next day. There are salty and fresh pools at both places.

As we drive through open woodland along the track to Salt Springs, I practice Arrernte plant names with Veronica. The kids in communities, who speak Arrernte or one of the other local Aboriginal languages as their first language, still know most of the plants, and their language names.

Atwakeye – bush orange, arlperre – whitewood tree, artetye – mulga tree, atnyeme – witchetty bush, untyeye - corkwood. Almost every tree and bush has fruit or sweet sap or flowers you can eat or suck honey from; or an edible grub (moth or beetle larvae) in its bark or trunk; or leaves, sap or bark that can be made into medicine.

Hot and dry as they are, these rolling plains are far from the empty hostile land that is still the stereotype of the outback for many Australians.

Burning before bed

We’re out on the spinifex sandplains, my favourite country – grasslands with scattered small trees and shrubs. There’s that comforting feeling of being able to see the horizon in every direction. I’m going on an overnight school camp with a dozen or so women, mostly grandmas and great-grandmas, and a couple of dozen school kids, a few teachers.

The women decide to stop and camp in a little patch of mulga. The first thing they do is set fire to the spinifex. They want to clear some space under the small trees. Spinifex is very prickly, a fire hazard in a camp, and might hide snakes. (The long, thin leaves of spinifex grass roll into sharp spears to protect themselves from the sun.)

Soon flames are leaping from clumps of spinifex around the trees and lines of fire trickle off across the plain. The women seem to mostly ignore the grass burning around them. They set to threading bunches of spinifex, and branches they’ve ripped from shrubs, through the mulga trees to make them shadier – it’s a hot day. The children run around the flames, or sit down near them, waiting for the camp to be set up. Soon everyone is sitting in little enhanced mulga tree shelters, often only metres from roaring flames. Occasionally, the women rake up some nearby spinifex and shove it into a fire.

Within an hour, the ground under the trees is mostly clear of grass, the sooty ashes raked up. One fire is still heading in a 20 to 50-metre strip out across the plain and doesn’t burn out til the evening. We watch falcons and buzzards hawking for lizards and mice running from the flames.

The ‘old’ spinifex that hasn’t been burnt for a few years is pale yellow and as thick as wheat. Burning is the only way of recycling its nutrients into the ground. Burning also brings up green pick for roos, bush food ‘fireweeds’ like desert raisins (a Solanum species); and makes firebreaks so that hot summer fires from lightning strikes don’t burn out huge swathes of country. (This happens where there’s not much burning, in places where there are few tracks and people don’t travel through that country anymore. Thousands of square kilometres can burn.)

On the way to our camp, we’ve travelled past kilometres of recently burnt country, with black stubble on terracotta sand, and strips of bright green where the spinifex is starting to grow back.

Patches which people burnt 6 months ago, at the beginning of winter, are dotted with lime green spiky spinifex and other fireweeds (annuals that grow quickly after fire) and red termite mounds.

Back at our camp, everyone sits around during the heat of the early afternoon. Then the women head off hunting for goanna – it’s easy to see tracks on burnt ground. The children come back with bunches of ‘bush beans’, long thin pods of a type of wattle with large seeds. People eat the seeds green, straight from the pods, or roast them a little. Some women found a few bush tomatoes (another Solanum species). There are lots of yams in this country too, but they’re mainly around in winter.

In the late afternoon, a ute-load of blokes come past and drop off a bullock leg, they got a ‘killer’ on the neighbouring pastoral property. One of the teachers cuts up the leg and the pieces of meat sit in a bloody pile in a metal tray covered with a tea-towel, til they are taken and cooked the next morning – we have roo tails (frozen, from the community store) and plenty of stew for dinner. And one family has two goannas.

As the sky darkens, the flames from a fire lit by someone a kilometre to our north make a spectacular show along the horizon. After dinner, the children climb into lines and clusters of swags. The women sit on the ground softly singing the dreaming songs for this area, the stories of the ancestor animals and people who made this country.

Soon everyone is in their swags, but the kids are restless, keep on getting up and running around. So one of the teachers stands up and sings them some bedtime songs, Aussie rock classics by old bands like Midnight Oil, who used to tour Aboriginal communities a lot. The kids sing along:

'The time has come
To say fair's fair
To pay the rent
To pay our share

The time has come
A fact's a fact
It belongs to them
Let's give it back

How can we dance when our earth is turning
How do we sleep while our beds are burning
Four wheels scare the cockatoos
From Kintore East to Yuendemu
The western desert lives and breathes
In forty five degrees'

The teacher sings and dances for 20 minutes. The kids settle down after that.

The Gap

I’m coming back through the Gap
after a bush trip
tired but full up as usual

so much to learn
in that other world
where I should be a great-grandmother
families are big and wide
so much happens in a day
a new baby, a fight, a breakdown
but no-one gets lost
behind a desk for the day

I think about the creek where we had smoko
clean white sand, graceful curves of gums
the boys dug soaks
showed me and the teacher
how to to scoop out the muddy water
so clear water seeped in, lovely to drink

the girls dug up fat frogs
and pencil yams, skinny bush potatoes
the size of your finger
they piled them next to a little fire
covered them with ashes
soon we were eating them, warm and nutty

I remember a bloke from the Education Department
lamenting to me recently
that Aboriginal children out bush
often don’t know all the colours
or what a circle or triangle is
can’t read very well
are so far behind
white children of the same age

now as I drive through the Gap
I think how little white teenagers
could read of that creek bed out bush
and I lament that too