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.