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.