View from Alice Springs

Lost, disappearing and not yet gone in the Western Desert

2009-06-30T21:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

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.

The circle and the knife

2009-03-03T19:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Sympathy not fear

2009-02-03T18:46:00.000-08:00

I’m driving to work, the narrow road following the curves of the river with its wide sweeps of sand and leafy gums. There are a few people stirring after a night in the creek, getting a little fire going. I like this road, because of the river and how you can still see bits of the old Alice Springs on the other side of the road – big grassy blocks with ramshackle fences and odd-shaped houses of fibro or stone, on the far end away from floods.

I’m getting near the town camp. This is one of around 20 areas, in or on the outskirts of town, with longterm leases owned by the Aboriginal groups that live on them. They were originally camps of fringe-dwellers but now have a handful to a few dozen houses. The town bigwigs want to get rid of the camps. It’s true many of them are very rundown, but people have a kind of autonomy in these ‘ghettoes’ that they wouldn’t have if they were ‘integrated’ into the rest of town like many Aboriginal people are. Many of the people in the camps grew up out bush and don’t live in houses the same way whitefellas do. They often live around the houses – cooking and sleeping outside – more than in them.

The camp along this road has an official Arrernte name, but it’s usually known as Abbott’s or BP camp – it’s near a BP garage. Not without its troubles and litter, the camp is open to people and the river in a way the new flats with tall colourbond fences will never be. These days, as with all the other camps and remote communities, there is a huge sign out the front proclaiming ‘No grog, no pornography’ in large letters, with details of the Federal Government’s recent Intervention requirements underneath. The Government has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars putting these humiliating and useless signs up all over the Territory.

There’s a woman sitting, with her head in her hands, in the middle of the road outside the camp. Cars are driving carefully around her. If I was in a hurry, I might too. But I’m not today. One of my friends from another camp has just killed herself – accidentally or on purpose – by driving a car into a tree. For her memory, at least, I decide to stop and help.

The woman is not in any real danger, but something’s obviously up with her. I walk over and ask what’s wrong. She says her husband left her last night, and starts crying. I say that I’m sorry, that it’s hard when things like that happen. I had a relationship end recently and I can relate to how this woman, maybe in her early forties, is feeling. She continues to sob. Many people’s lives are so much on the edge, with poverty and violence and deaths and drinking, that any new trauma can make someone flip right out – that’s probably what happened with my friend.

I hold the woman’s arm and tell her she needs to move off the road. She shakes her head. Cars keep driving around. Then one slows down. Some help, I think. I can’t move the woman by myself. The bloke winds down his window. ‘You’re better off calling the police in situations like this,’ he says. This makes me angry. ‘I don’t need the police,’ I say, and he drives off.

I notice a couple of blokes hanging around nearby, on the river side of the road. The woman tells me they’re her brothers – maybe cousin brothers. I yell out to them to help me move her, but they shake their heads, say they can’t. They’ve probably tried talking to her but don’t want to drag her off, it’s not their way.

I tell the woman I’ll give her a lift somewhere. Or does she want to come and have a cup of tea at my work? Sympathy helps, as it would with anyone. Eventually the woman agrees to come with me. She wants to go to the bank, but the banks are not open yet. Then she asks me to take her over to the men – her brothers have walked off into the river, about a hundred metres wide here. I don’t know why they’ve walked off. Maybe they thought the police were coming and wanted to keep out of trouble. We drive around to the other side of the river. The woman tells me her name and the community she comes from. I know this place a bit and we talk about families there.

When we get to the other side, we can see the men are walking back towards the camp. It’s alright, the woman says, they’re going back. You can take me back there. She’s smiling now, chatting happily. When we get back near the camp, a police car drives by. I can see the woman is thankful not to have to deal with them. We part warmly.

A stolen painting and solanum wars

2008-06-17T20:10:00.000-07:00

On my first day back at work, I clean my section of the office, wiping two months of dirt from the computers, printers and desks, replacing maps and photos stained with gecko dung on the pin-up board, de-webbing the windows. Under a bench, I find the dot painting which has hung on the walls of this dusty rammed earth office since before I came here, ten years ago. It was a kind of storyboard for a video made here on local Aboriginal land management.

It’s been ripped off the strips of wood that framed it and rolled up. The woman running the new training business in the office explains: an older bloke from the nearby town camp pulled it down when no-one was around, and walked off with it.
He was found a little later sitting down pulling the canvas off the frame, no doubt hoping to sell it.

This man has come to the office regularly in the last year looking for lifts into town for himself and his lame wife. The training woman felt sorry for them. For a while she made special trips to drive them into town, then got busier and decided she couldn't take them anymore, but the bloke kept coming to ask for lifts. So that story has come to an end, not a good one.

I think maybe it wouldn't have been such a bad thing it that painting had had a new life on some tourist's wall. I wonder what story the man would've made up for it. I wonder if he needed the money for food or for grog.

When I've had enough of cleaning, I wander over to the nursery, just across a dirt yard from the office. This nursery has staggered on through periods of ATSIC (national Aboriginal body) and Community Development Employment Program (sort of work-for-the-dole) funding, and trying to make a go of it as a business. In two decades of this, the nursery has supplied most of the trees for remote communities right across central Australia, often free of charge til the federal government axed ATSIC a few years ago.

Last year the boss was going to close the nursery down, the nursery manager didn’t come to work for weeks because he felt unsupported and depressed; the trickle of down-and-out CDEP workers weren’t helping much. The stalwarts were a woman and man in their fifties, who pricked out and potted up thousands of seedling over the years they worked in the nursery, despite drinking themselves to oblivion several times a week.

The man got sick last year and stopped coming for a while. Then both of them lost their jobs when the federal government axed CDEP, as part of their intervention to reform communities in the Northern Territory.

While I’ve been away, CDEP has come back, so our organisation now has it and ‘work-for-the-dole’, the program set up by the government, I thought, to replace CDEP. My boss tells me people in communities join up with whichever one is best run, although theoretically, I think, they have to be on work-for-the-dole for a while before they can move on to CDEP.

This year the nursery has a new lease of life. The boss has seen the light with bush tomatoes: native solanums, more like pale yellow opaque sultanas with a sweet tangy taste. Aboriginal people love them, and they’re good for you, have always been eaten a lot.

About 10 years ago, a woman in Sydney decided that bush tomato chutney would be a great business idea. She only used one or two tomatoes in each jar, because the taste is too strong for whitefellas. She managed to get one of the big supermarkets to take it on, and the chutney sold, especially as it said on the jar that buying it supported Aboriginal communities.

Because the supply chain for wild-harvested tomatoes is erratic, because of unpredictable rain and fire – both of which the plant needs to grow well – and wholesalers struggling with an uncertain market, this woman has decided to push for people to cultivate bush tomatoes, preferably in Aboriginal communities, to keep the connection and market strong.

She’s not the only person to think of this. A bloke who runs a big nursery down south got onto the same thing some years ago and made his own bush tomato chutney – ‘outback pride’, as opposed to the woman’s ‘outback spirit’. Our Aboriginal organisation was the first he approached, and worked with him to set up his first horticulture plots on communities. I won’t go into all that, but it didn’t end on good terms. The profits for communities were minimal, maybe because they ate too many of the tomatoes themselves, but not just because of that.

This is only one battleground in what I think of now as the Solanum Wars. Aboriginal people don't have much say in them, they're run by whitefellas. The federal government-funded Desert Knowledge research centre, based in Alice Springs, is now bemusing everyone by spending millions on trial bush tomato horticulture plots, so the nurseries will know how to do it. (At least one nursery has already done it, many times.)

Anyway, the last year or two there have been virtually no bush tomatoes to harvest out bush, because there hasn't been much rain. The woman in Sydney got down to her last tomato and, according to my boss, has had to stop making the chutney. The bloke with the nursery down south is sitting on tons of them but his asking price is rumoured to be through the roof.

So the Sydney woman has got into the ear of my boss, maybe given him a bit of money, and he’s got the nursery growing thousands of bush tomatoes. The nursery manager has a proper, if part-time, offsider. Two giant plastic and shadecloth green houses have been ordered. A huge slab of concrete has been laid in the work area – rather bigger than was needed, but these things often happen without much discussion.

It’s not entirely clear yet what will happen to all the bush tomato plants, but it seems there’s a community farm business interested in some of them. And some will be planted in plots on town camps – although this didn’t make any money last time our organisation tried it.

Cow country

2008-04-08T22:18:00.000-07:00

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.

An ending

2008-03-25T20:39:00.001-07:00

As we set up our campsite at isolated springs, we see a dark shape at the base of a tree. It could be a garbage bag filled to plumpness, except few people ever come here.

As we get closer it’s not plastic we see but feathers, with a head resting awkwardly.
It’s an eagle. I’m used to seeing this bird floating high overhead or flying off haughtily from road-kill with its huge, dark wings.

Now it’s curled up on the ground. My friend picks it up and gently unfolds it. The body isn’t stiff yet: the bird died today, as we were driving here.

My friend puts one hand under its breast – black, which means it was at least 10 years old – and with his other hand pulls a wing above his head. The breadth of the wings, hanging beside his height, is easily longer than his six feet. I try this too, can barely hold the weight.

We arrange the head, with its imperious beak; the sturdy body; the wings, that look like they belong on a flying horse; the thick-spined black and brown feathers, a foot or more long, on the ground, to take photos. This dark, beautiful creature does not look right on the ground.

This bird would normally only tread the earth to pick at dead roos, other animals. It should be way above us. A great black shape with a distinctive wedge of tail which means death to the animals scurrying below.

Now it is dead, and the world seems somehow tipped upside down. Finally my friend finds a broken leg. The bird must’ve crashed into the tree or the ground as it zoomed down on a rabbit or some other animal, it’s not unusual, he says

He folds the eagle back up and returns it to the base of the tree. But what has opened in me, as I surveyed this dead bird, I can’t close, and walk around with the eyes of an eagle as it lands on death.

Half a day at a remote community school

2008-02-26T21:44:00.000-08:00

I’m staying with the school principal, who is a friend of mine. In remote communities the Education Department used to build big teachers’ houses, with three bedrooms and lounge rooms with lots of space for extra swags. Now they’re going for two-bedroom flats, so no-one has to share their living space unless they really want to. A sign of the times.

When I lived in a community, the teachers, especially the single ones, used to want their share of the visitors. We looked forward to checking out the legendary, long-bearded bilingual gurus from the Top End and other ‘experts’, and lots of useful conversations happened late at night in those big rooms or out on verandahs.

When I get up at 7.30, Bill has left a piece of toast and half a cup of coffee and gone off to pick up kids. The outstation school, 20 kilometres away along a dirt track, has been closed down, so he’s gone to bring the kids from there to the community school.

Later the school liaison officer, a local woman, will do a run around the community itself to pick up stragglers and kids who don’t get to school much. This happens in most communities. Some people think it should be left to the parents, but the reality is quite a few of them are still asleep, sick, hungover or too tired and hungry to hassle their kids to go to school – school might not have done much for them.

At this community, the school bus usually goes round to pick up kids. But there’s a new group school system, which means individual community schools have to fill out forms and get permission to buy everything, from a few exercise books to fuel for the bus. The bus is off the road at the moment because it’s out of fuel. Bill tells me he told the bureaucrats in town that1950s Russia would have been proud of them.

I’m here to help the Indigenous language program by taking classes out bush to learn more about local animals and plants. Although almost all the kids here, as in other remote communities, speak an Indigenous language as their first language, lots of words and knowledge are being lost.

The local linguist (til recently he was a bible linguist but that’s another story) has just started to co-ordinate the Indigenous language program at the school. He’s shocked that some of the children don’t know the language names for some of the common animals, like echidnas, which they call ‘porcupine’.

Indigenous language and culture programs are of course not the flavour of the month at community schools. Politicians, and so education bureaucrats, are desperate to improve literacy and numeracy – which has not got any better in the 20 years I’ve been in the Centre – and don’t want to give up precious school time to support the teaching of the children’s’ own language and culture.

This is like taking history and related subjects out of the education of English-speaking children. Maybe learning to read and write first in their own language isn’t the key to Indigenous literacy that the aforementioned bilingual gurus thought it was but, as an Aboriginal researcher said to me recently, language and culture programs are a vital part of giving kids a well-rounded education.

Indigenous language and culture is also where the kids have superior knowledge and don’t feel shamed, like most Indigenous kids often do at school. With all the current talk about closing the gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, I often think of the huge gap between what the average whitefella and the average blackfella, at least in the Territory, knows about the bush.

Most of the kids in this community, where more knowledge has been lost because whitefellas came here early, know far more about native plants and animals and many other aspects of their country than most whitefellas, including scientists. Surely this knowledge is to be prized and built on, rather than considered worthless?

When I get to the school, I say hello to Mary (I’ve changed all the names), who’s wearing a black skirt and top and headscarf . One of the six young blokes from this community killed in a rollover a couple of months ago was her nephew. She’s hacked her hair, as people do for sorry business, and covered it with a scarf.

The new young whitefella teacher is sick – gutsache. He’s an OK teacher, Bill tells me, knows how to control a class, isn’t nasty. The Accelerated Literacy teacher has to take his class again today.

She’s an extra teacher the school got when they took on the AL program last year. I don’t know a lot about it, except that it’s the latest ‘cure’ for low literacy, at least in the Territory, and involves going over and over one text. The class has been doing ‘Henny Penny’, which has driven the new teacher so much up the wall that he’s changing to a new book.

Mary’s class is the first to go out bush with the linguist and me. All the kids pile excitedly in two troop carriers. When we get to a nearby waterhole, the kids race off to check out the traps I set the previous evening and grab the nets to look for more fish.

There hasn’t been much rain in the last 6 months and the waterhole is only waist-deep, but we find four types of fish, mostly finger-size or smaller. The linguist was hoping for some shrimps or yabbies, but we don’t catch any. It’s chaos but everyone’s having a good time. The linguist, who has a local wife and has lived in the community for decades, is very calm and kind with the children. Nothing seems to faze him.

It’s very hot, at least 40 degrees, and Mary doesn’t feel well, goes and sits in the shade of a troopie – there aren’t any trees near the waterhole. Wendy, who’s come on the trip because she knows a lot about animals and plants, says there were lots of drunks last night, she didn’t get much sleep.

Wendy doesn’t know all the fish – the knowledge of animals that weren’t eaten was always less, and is often scant these days. We make sure the kids all get to see the different fish we’ve found, then we put the fish back in the waterhole and the kids pile, dripping, into the troopies.

On the way back, we stop to look at trees. The linguist asks the children the names of river gums, bean trees and paperbarks, and describes them to the children in language. Paperbarks are important, because they usually meant there’s water if you want to dig for it.

Later I ask the linguist if he thinks the trip was useful or just fun. He says it’s so good to get all the kids out bush like that, some families don’t take their children out bush much at all.

Back at school, it’s recess time. The kids get given lunch now, because they get hungry if it’s later – they get breakfast at the school too, but some of them come too late for that.

The food money currently comes out of the government family payment; it’s one of the Federal intervention initiatives. The new Federal Government is talking about making this debiting of family payments for school lunches voluntary. The principal wonders how the hell that would work, having lunch for some kids but not others.
The school used to get money for school lunches from a grant, but those grants have been discontinued.

One of the Aboriginal teacher assistants comes up to me and says hello. All the classes that have a whitefella main teacher, also have an Aboriginal assistant teacher – a necessity especially in the younger classes, when the children don’t generally speak English well.

Hilda tells me she and the other trainee teachers are not allowed to do training at Batchelor College in Alice Springs any more. They have to stay at school with their classes. Local Aboriginal trainee teachers have always had jobs as assistant teachers at their community schools.

These jobs have always been a good incentive, as well as providing on-the-job training, a real context for their study, and a point for communication between Batchelor and trainees. Hilda seems to be saying that the Education Department has now forbidden this.

‘The Government wants to bring up teachers from down south,’ Hilda says, ‘they don’t want us.’ She’s angry. Whatever’s happened, it hasn’t been encouraging. Hilda was taken away and came back to this community as an adult. She expects the Government to be hard on her. She’s in her fifties, a grandmother now. ‘I wanted to retire with something’, she tells me, ‘ to have something I’d achieved’.

Mary goes home sick; the principal has to take a class now. I head out to a waterhole with the linguist and another class.

Sorry Day in Alice Springs

2008-02-12T20:53:00.001-08:00

I miss most of the words
because I forget –
I wonder why? –
but the few I hear
make me cry at once

because they’re saying
the wrong that everyone sees
in the streets of our town
is the most important thing
for our country to deal with

because we’re faced daily
with the trouble and sickness
that’s come from that wrong
and most of us, including me
turn away from it
most of the time

because they’re saying
people will come together
and you almost never see
a white person
walking with a black person
in this town

because a real leader
got elected

because this wrong
affects everyone in our town –
practically if not emotionally –
and it feels like the rest of the country
has no idea

and we can’t talk to them about it
because they’ll never understand
from their all-white suburbs
or just get more racist

because it sounded like
he really meant it
and people believed him

because any reconciliation
might be possible now

Blessings

2008-01-22T19:37:00.000-08:00

I walk my familiar route, remember it’s the first time since _ and a wash of sadness flows over me.

But, I tell myself, this is the time when your legs are striding out with the energy of beaches, and the sun on your bare arms is a joy despite the heat.

The networks of needle-leaves of the big old, rough-barked corkwoods are dark green and firm despite weeks of searing sunshine, will shelter finches and pigeons this and many other nights.

Witchetty bushes fan out from stoney ground like it’s nothing to keep doing this for months without rain.

The mulga trees, my favourites, stand in graceful crescents, spreading their fine branches and leaves, saying this is just another summer in a hundred or more.

The young ironwoods have bunches of leaves around their bases, are still on the slow path to recovery from that fire six years ago.

The buffel grass clumps are grey and look dead, but that’s a blessing with this weed.

The pale brown soil, sprinkled with dry lichens and tiny, brittle grass stems, keeps its hundreds of thousands of seeds, waiting carefully for the right rain.

I walk to the stone circle, my touchstone. There is another car track across it, faint but a couple of fist-sized stones have been displaced.

The circle is slowly disappearing. Maybe someone will come and fix it up, but I suspect not.

As I walk back, I watch the clouds, always a novelty here. There are lines of fluffy ones, some of them grey enough to look semi-serious.

They’re joining up to make a wall in the west. The sun only looks through it occasionally.

So this is the time when the sun is not in my face but lines of sunlight stream down in front of the clouds, not doing anything dramatic, but there nonetheless.

Honeyeaters

2007-12-18T23:03:00.000-08:00

The white-plumed honeyeaters
swing on skinny branches
in the sprinkler sprays
whiz down to the pond for a splash
line up on a slightly bigger branch
rock madly up and down
flit off again, twittering

they hover in the spray
like humming birds
flutter in the air in front of me

the spiny-cheeked honeyeaters
are twice their size
but can’t get to the pond
the little honeyeaters fight them off
snapping their small beaks
one-to-one at the long pink beaks

the spiny-cheeks
are kept to the mulga tree
lead a singular but not uninteresting life
wobbling on tomato plants
showering under the rosemary bush

The bat caves

2007-12-11T21:19:00.000-08:00

Last Friday night I went to the bat caves. Like the superhero’s Bat Cave, their location is secret. The scientists who took the local field naturalists group there asked us not to give other people directions.

Mind you, many people who’ve been in Alice for a decade or more know the caves – someone took me to them years ago but I’d forgotten exactly where they were. I’m sure more than one young bloke with a ute has used the line, ‘Fancy going to the bat caves?’

Anyway, the caves are about half an hour’s drive southwest of town. That’s all I’ll say. They’re like sinkholes but unusual because they’re in conglomerate – pebbles with a limey cement – rather than limestone.

A bit over 300 million years ago, this conglomerate was a thick wedge of rubbly scree at the base of large mountains here. Since then it’s been buried to great depths, cemented, broken up by long parallel sets of cracks called joints and exposed at the surface again. The joints formed ideal pathways for rainwater, and so the caves were born.

We walked through witchetty bushes up a low slope at dusk and came to a couple of large depressions in the ground, two or three metres square, with a dark hole leading off from each of them.

In the flatter of the depressions, we turned on our torches, got down on our hands and knees and crawled into a tunnel. Very soon we found ourselves in a cavern the size of my lounge room, but rounder.

We shone our torches around and found a few bats, furry brown shapes snuggled flat singly and in pairs. They were the size of my palm, or one of the larger pebbles – dark brown pebbles could look like bats. It looked strangely comfortable, snuggling between pebbles on a cave wall.

We went through another tunnel and came out into a narrow cavern only a metre or so wide but very high, like a gorge but with no sky above and pebbly walls – almost like the walls of an old stone cottage, but even more haphazard.

Lines of green twine led off through other tunnels. The caves go for a long way. Our leader told us that there were maps of them but they weren’t very useful.

We still didn’t find the clusters of dozens of bats the scientists usually see in one of these caverns. The bats low down on the wall or ceiling succumbed to camera flashes for a while and then took off, one minute a dark outline on a wall, the next a flash of polygonal wings, then gone in the darkness.

We turned off our torches for a minute and stood around edgily in the dark, laughing uneasily.

When we came out of the caves it was dark outside. The scientists showed us some bats they’d caught in nets the previous night. Little cave bats, like the once we’d just seen, and a chocolate wattled bat, which sounds edible but didn’t look it.

The bats looked furry and mouse-like in the scientist’s hand, but when they flew off they were something else, their wings surprisingly big and strange. I’ve often heard the silvery tings of bats flying around campsites at night but, I realized now, have rarely got a proper look at them, even for a few moments.

Only the microbats, not the big fruit bats, can echo-locate – this ability is limited by size somehow. But all bats can see, quite well. So 'blind as a bat' is a misnomer.

All 16 species of bats in central Australia are microbats and eat insects, as opposed to bigger animals, fruit, flowers or blood. Most of these bats live in hollows in trees, like the big river red gums along the dry creek beds. You can watch the bats pour out of these hollows at dusk, sometimes in their hundreds.

There was one large bat in central Australia, the ghost bat, named because of its thin, ghostly wings. This 11 cm bat is the largest echo-locating bat in the world. But it has disappeared from central Australia and its numbers are declining elsewhere in the country.

The scientists had set up several harp nets near the caves. These are rectangular metal frames, several metres tall, strung with fishing line, like a harp. The bats are not hurt by the ‘net’, just drop into a trough of canvas below it, crawl up under a plastic sleeve lining the trough and, according to the scientists, often go to sleep.

You set these nets up between a couple of tall bushes or in a gully or at the entrance to a cave. We found more little cave bats in them, but no other species.

These days you have to have a series of injections before you can handle bats safely. A lot of Australian bats have a virus like rabies, so you don’t want to get bitten by them without being protected from the virus.

I must say I’m tempted to have those injections.

A different kind of euro

2007-12-05T18:32:00.000-08:00

As I went out to hang out the washing this morning, I startled a roo at my little pond. It jumped up and back a few metres. I went inside and watched the roo from the lounge room with my binoculars. It was back at the pond, drinking. It looked up and around with its pools of dark eyes, then drank some more, looked up again, drank.

My old cat decided to assert herself and walked over to the pond all fluffed up with her tail up. The little roo hopped off. Later, Tiger brushed against my legs as I was hanging out the washing and laid down on the ground for a pat. I told her that her species had a bad name for hassling native animals around here.

More than hassling them. Feral cats, together with foxes, are responsible for the disappearance of various small wallabies and bandicoots (smallish ground mammals, often with big ears) from central Australia in the last 60 years, including quite a few extinctions.

When I went out to check on the roo after Tiger scared if off, it was standing just over the back fence, which consists of a few strands of wire between star pickets (short steel posts). My appearance caused the roo, a young euro, to hop along the wide slope of the drain behind the backyard, and off into the bush. I was sorry, I don’t think it had had enough to drink.

These euros – a little smaller and, when they get older, stockier than red kangaroos – have been coming to drink from my one metre by half a metre pond for several summers now. Euros live in rocky hills but often come down on to plains and river flats to feed at night.

There are lots of little bouldery gneiss hills around Alice. But not many people see euros in their back yard. I’m lucky. My house backs on the bush and the fence is minimal so I can enjoy the view.

At least I thought I was lucky, until the euros started knocking branches off shrubs and all but draining the pond every night. When I go away now, I have to remind my son, or whoever is looking after the house, to fill up the pond every morning.

‘Those euros drink 40 litres of water every night!’ my son complains. He jokes that the goldfish must be immortal – he reads a lot of fantasy. We find the fish, still alive, in a few cupfuls of dark water each morning. There’s a wide flat rock, balancing on a small rock, for the fish to hide from the herons under, and so the roos can’t quite drink the pond dry.

An ecologist friend uses the nightly draining of my pond as evidence to argue against the long-held theory that roos survive in the desert because they don’t need to drink much. They may get most of the water they need from green feed, she argues, but they need to drink quite a lot in dry times.

I don’t know how many euros are using my pond, but I suspect it’s just two or three, who come regularly. When I walk through the bush out the back now, I see their trail, sprinkled with little black rectangles of dung, heading towards my back yard.

I’m surprised these euros are still alive. Aboriginal people still hunt roos, with cars and guns now instead of on foot with spears. We eat roo meat a lot too, but we buy it from the supermarket – it comes from approved culls down south.

It rained a few weeks ago and the goldfish has been left in peace since then. But it seems like the euros are back now. I don’t know what to do about them. Friends have suggested getting a child’s wading pond and filling it up just outside my fence. But I think that might attract more euros.

I can’t bring myself to empty the pond. I’m hoping the euros, goldfish and I can continue to co-habit.

Hot but not so hostile

2007-11-28T20:45:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-20T22:56:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-08T21:46:00.000-08:00

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

A year and a half of uneasy pieces, but not without hope

2007-10-30T18:20:00.000-07:00

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.

*******************************************************************

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.

**********************************************************************

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.

**********************************************************************

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.

********************************************************************

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.

**********************************************************************

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.

*****************************************************************

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’.

*****************************************************************

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.

*****************************************************************

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.

*****************************************************************

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?

*****************************************************************
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.

*********************************************************************

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.

*****************************************************************

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.