Lost, disappearing and not yet gone in the Western Desert

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.

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.