by Monica Tan
As I unpacked the groceries, Adam told me how his people cooked kangaroo. After the roo was gutted, its carcass was stitched up using a sharp-tipped stick and secured with some intestine. They singed all the hair off in a fire, and cut the feet and tail off, discarding the feet but cooking the tail. The rest of the roo was also prepared in the hot coals.
‘It’s so tasty when there’s a lot of fat on it,’ said Adam. ‘So delicious. No garnish necessary.’
All of a sudden his cat Diddle leapt onto the counter. I’d woken up that morning to her prodding me with her clean white paws, looking at me curiously with yellow-moon eyes. She was named after the nursery rhyme ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’, and her fur was imprinted with a tortoiseshell saddle on her back.
‘Hey, Diddle,’ Adam said to her, as she collapsed into a lazy heap on the counter.
She immediately meowed as if to say, ‘Not bad, Adam, you?’
He swore she never shed fur, even though she slept on his bed and on their charcoal grey couch. She was the perfect housemate.
‘Do you eat the eyes of the kangaroo?’ I asked Adam as I stroked Diddle’s silky fur. She rumbled like a motorcycle engine and wore a satisfied look.
He nodded. ‘And we drink the blood. We believe it makes your blood thick.’
That way of thinking was familiar to me. In traditional Chinese medicine, a tiger penis boiled in soup enhances virility, and bear bile is used to fortify the liver. I found it novel to discover how our respective cultural worlds overlapped.
We let my second-rate, store-bought steaks remain on the dinner menu. As Adam told me of how his mob put a tin can underneath the kangaroo’s slit throat to drink the blood hot, I prepped the veggies I would roast to accompany the roo.
Adam’s favourite meat was emu. ‘I would do anything for emu meat,’ he said wistfully, explaining it’s more of a hassle to prepare than roo because you have to pluck it first, and during hunting the emu always shit themselves, leaving a mess of green poo.
He shook his head slowly. ‘I wouldn’t know what to do if emu was my totem.’
As with many Aboriginal groups, Arrernte people are forbidden from eating their totem, which dictates hunting Law and the protection of breeding grounds—to the point that a totem can be regarded as kin. I’d once met a Wiradjuri woman who told me her dead brother occasionally visited her as his totem: a glaring crow, making clear his disapproval with whatever she happened to be doing. It didn’t annoy her; she was glad to still have his guidance.
Arrente creation stories that feature ancestral beings with the ability to morph in and out of animal form loom large on their cultural landscapes. Such stories are invoked in song, art, ceremony and dance, the animal attributes portrayed with a startling likeness. They help keep human existence anchored to the natural world—people, species and Country are interlinked in a divine trinity.
A totem is usually an animal or plant, but there are also totems of wind, sun, water or cloud. ‘In fact,’ wrote anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen in 1899, ‘there is scarcely an object, animate or inanimate, to be found in the country occupied by the natives which does not give its name to some totemic group of individuals.’ Among the more unusual entries on their list of totems collected from across the Central Desert were ‘monster or mischievous spirit’, ‘uncircumcised youth’ and ‘laughing boy’.
‘What’s your totem?’ I asked Adam.
‘The cockatoo,’ he said, as he put the kettle on so we could drink the Chinese tea I’d gifted him. Turns out, it’s possible to have totem-envy. ‘My grandfather’s totem is the wedge-tailed eagle—I wish that was mine,’ said Adam.
I asked if he’d read a recent story in the local newspaper of a wedgie trying to make off with a young boy at the Desert Park’s famous bird show. The paper included a dramatic photo of the eagle wearing a fierce expression, wings spread like a fighter plane’s and talons sunk into the hoodie of a terrified six-year-old. Luckily the kid only suffered superficial injuries, but the eagle was retired from performing.
‘Those birds are incredible,’ said Adam. ‘They can take down whole kangaroos. Americans are so obsessed with their bald eagle, it’s even their national bird, but it only hunts fish.’ He added contemptuously, ‘It’s just a glorified seagull.’
With two steaming mugs of green tea, we opened up my paper map of the Northern Territory. Adam pointed out spots of interest: this was where the annual Finke Desert Race was held that he had participated in, this was the Granite Gold Mine where he and Chris worked, and here was his home community of Wallace Rockhole.
Adam’s grandfather was born out bush, the traditional way, then as a young man moved about a lot for work before founding Wallace Rockhole. Around a hundred people now lived there permanently, most of whom were related to Adam. He’d come to Alice for high school, living at the house of an aunt and uncle who had a son around the same age.
‘You might have to send me more of this stuff,’ he said of the tea, taking another appreciative sip. I was glad—not everyone finds Chinese tea palatable.
Adam was taking a year off from the mines to spend time with his young son. He partly blamed the breakdown of his marriage on the long periods away from home and admitted working at the mines wasn’t sustainable long-term. He had grown up horseriding—his grandfather was a former stockman—and harboured dreams of establishing a tourism venture in which he would take visitors for rides out on Country. ‘We’d point out different things from our culture,’ he told me.
‘Sounds like a fabulous idea,’ I said sincerely.
In the meantime, during his sabbatical Adam was picking up other career skills: working as a teaching assistant at his son’s school and now, during school holidays, as a park ranger. Soon they would head out bush for a few days to do a controlled burn.
‘Scary, right?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, those fires can turn on you any minute.’
The other day on duty he’d watched a legless skink die in the fire.
‘Did you feel bad?’
‘Nah. Pretty soon after a wedgie swooped down and collected it.’
Takeaway barbecued skink.
Having popped a tray of cut-up potatoes, garlic, brussels sprouts and carrot in the oven, we decided to take the short drive to Anzac Hill or Untyeye-artwilye (corkwood story) while dinner was baking. We took my car, with Adam in the passenger seat pointing the way through suburban streets and then onto a road that wound up a steep hill covered in ghost gums. From the car park it was a few steps up onto a platform at the hill peak where an Anzac memorial had been erected. Both the Australian flag and NT’s orange-and-black flag, bearing Sturt’s desert rose, flapped about in a restless wind. We were just in time to catch the cooling sun turn the mountain ranges purple. The Ntaripe gap was thrown into dramatic relief.
‘There are a few Dreaming stories attached to the gap,’ said Adam. He told me one speaks of the ranges as the bodies of two ancestral caterpillars that will touch one day; another says the gap is a chunk of caterpillar bitten by a dingo.
All up, we could see more than a dozen land features—hills, rocks, swamps and rivers—that were the battlegrounds, cocoon sites, dance grounds and campsites used by the caterpillar ancestors: Yeperenye, Ntyarlke and Utnerrengatye.
In First Australians I’d learned of another gap further south which was a men’s site forbidden to women. There, in 1883, one of the area’s first constables William Henry Willshire, accompanied by three ‘lubras’ (Aboriginal women), encountered a group of Central Desert men. The men demanded the party clamber over the 500-foot range. Willshire wrote in his journals: ‘at first they assumed defiant and bellicose attitudes, but they were cleared out and passed on, followed by the lubras, who picked up some rags, bushes, and grass, and made coverings over their faces, and walked blindfolded, led by the sound of the horse’s footsteps and the black boy’s voice through the Gap’—such was the care that the women took to avoid infractions on such sacred Law.
; Willshire was a nasty piece of work who summarily executed Central Desert men who interfered with herds of cattle. At least thirteen deaths can be attributed to him, although the true number is likely to be higher for he was not fond of official paperwork. In contrast, his personal journals are filled with memorable passages revealing his sadistic streak. In one description of an encounter with ‘cattle killers’, he wrote:
It’s no use mincing matters—the Martini-Henry Carbines at this critical moment were talking English in the silent majesty of these great eternal rocks. The mountain was swathed in a regal robe of fiery grandeur, and its ominous roar was close upon us. The weird, awful beauty of the scene held us spellbound for a few seconds.
As is often the case with the cruellest of men, he applied twisted logic to his treatment of the fairer sex. He wrote perversely of Central Desert women: ‘Men would not remain so many years in a country like this if there were no women, and perhaps the Almighty meant them for use as He has placed them wherever the pioneers go.’ These proclivities finally triggered a chain of events culminating in Willshire’s exit from this region of Australia.
In 1891 Willshire ordered his Central Desert troopers to shoot two men in cold blood at Tempe Downs Station and wound one of the men, Ereminta, allowing Willshire to personally cut this man’s throat. Historians believe Willshire was infatuated with Ereminta’s partner, Nungoola. After the murder, Willshire took Nungoola to his camp at Boggy Water. Only with these atrocities were higher authorities alerted to the fact that the intemperate Willshire was not well placed in his role, and he was removed. He later spent twelve years working at an Adelaide abattoir as a nightwatchman.
There is still a street in Alice named in his honour.
As I travelled through the Tjoritja (MacDonnell Ranges), having left Adam’s house and headed west from Alice, I realised I had never before seen such beautiful rocks. Some are smooth and pink like raw steak or have the sheen of cold roast beef; others are stacked in layers like a lasagna; and there are car-sized rocks like square scoops of melting ice cream or jelly cut cleanly with a knife.
The caterpillar humps of the Tjoritja were visible wherever I drove, a sweep of shadow-streaked ridges. Winding through the Tjoritja is the Larapinta Trail, beginning at Alice. Over several weeks it takes walkers through 223 kilometres of arid, stony, mountainous terrain. I was driving it over several days. Here and there I stopped at secretive pools of cold, dark green water guarded by rock walls. Ghost gums were growing, impossibly, from sheer cliff faces, and their smooth, skeletal limbs ended in hands of gumleaves reaching up to the sky.
The ranges are that particular Australian shade of orange-red. Having sustained an eternity of weathering, much of the continent is laced with iron oxide lending the land such a distinct hue. Yet this colour doesn’t appear much in the lands upon which Sydney is built; there the views are coloured by blue-green gums growing in a thick cover over yellow soil and dark rocks. To me, the orange-red is exotic—there’s something novel about being in a place that feels like postcard Australia. It is the Australia of tourism ads and Outback westerns.
On my third day in the ranges I camped at a picturesque spot by the venerable Larapinta (Finke River). The water was so clean and clear that it reflected the long strip of land and its huddles of elderly gum trees, sculptural rocks and fringing reeds, like a Rorschach inkblot test. Larapinta is touted by tourism literature as ‘one of the oldest rivers in the world’; scientists say it has followed the exact same course for at least the past fifteen million years. ‘If Uluru symbolises the nation’s heart, the Finke must be its ancient artery,’ a journalist once wrote.
In the distance I could see the climax of Tjoritja’s ageless ridges: the towering Mount Sonder. For a few minutes at the beginning of each day, it is lit up with licks of pink sunrise.
I drove down a dirt track that meandered along the course of the river. Eventually I found a spot back from the riverside, nestled among some shady gums and a patch of metre-high, drought-hardy buffel grass. After getting out of my car and doing a long catlike stretch, I ran my palms over the cylindrical seed heads of the grass and found them furry to the touch.
This invasive species hitched a ride to Central Australia with Afghan cameleers, as they were known, beginning in the 1860s. In truth, the cameleers not only hailed from Afghanistan but also parts of what today we call Iran, India, Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey. They weren’t strangers to land dominated by harsh, hot sands and rock. In a time before highways and monster road trains, these camel riders were the sole cross-country transport line for supplies, tools, produce, surveying equipment, mail and sometimes even water. While diverse in nationality they shared the Muslim faith and across the Outback built mosques and special places facing Mecca where they prayed.
As is often the case, one innovation begets another. Their obsolescence was sealed as they helped build major infrastructure projects including the Overland Telegraph Line, linking communication from Australia’s north to south, and The Ghan (the Afghan Express) railway named in their honour.
Despite the decades their community had spent living and working in Australia, the White Australia Policy was to ensure they had no permanent place here.
More than once over the past few days, I had spotted a line of footprints in the sand, each print the shape of a giant apple cut in half. Reportedly 750,000 feral camels are wandering throughout the Australian Outback—the largest wild population of camels in the world—sprung from the founding population brought by the cameleers.
Their saddles were stuffed with buffel grass that left a breadcrumb trail across the countryside. Later the grass was deliberately planted for dust control, after local cattlemen noticed it could withstand heavy grazing. Like so many introduced species, buffel grass is an aggressive coloniser; it steals nutrients from native grasses and sedges. A day ago at Ellery Creek I’d read park signage explaining how native lizards, mammals and birds seem to like the grass less than native flora, and where it grows their populations drop. The grass also feeds very hot, long-lasting fires that kill river red gums and other native plants. Sandy creek beds once acted as firebreaks, but lined with buffel grass they’re like detonating lines that spread the flames; most sinisterly, the grass is quick to regrow after these intense fires, like a zombie that just won’t die. Slashing it only increases its growth rate. The weed is so pervasive, there’s no hope in hell of hand-pulling or chemically annihilating it from the entire vast, unpeopled Central Australian desert. One expert called the grass ‘the botanical equivalent of the Cane Toad’.
But I struggled to regard the grass as objectionable, while this sea of nodding, golden heads bobbed in the wind and caught the afternoon sunlight. I sat back in my camp chair almost feeling drunk. Fluttering moths spelt out lucky figure eights in the air, and a friendly magpie lark pecked for crumbs by my feet. I wanted to catch that amber light spreading like honey over everything, because I knew when it trickled away the dreaded cold returned, as it had each evening of this trip.
Later on, keen to change up my usual routine of huddling around a fire in the wintry night, I left my tent set up and drove through the darkness towards the highway. After a short drive up, I took a left turn onto a road that ended at the Glen Helen Homestead Lodge—a long, low building with a corrugated iron roof—one of the few resorts in this far-flung patch of country.
Inside, the lodge was busy with tourists who, like my father, did not consider camping or caravanning their idea of a holiday. Seeing as it was only 7 p.m. and outside the bitter chill had already set in, I could see their point of view. I felt cosy in this heated, wood-panelled lodge, divided into a restaurant and pub. Framed paintings by Albert Namatjira and his extended family hung on whitewashed walls.
After ordering a beer, I sat on a burgundy leather couch with my diary, hoping that if I took slow enough sips I might draw out a few hours here.
A middle-aged woman piped up from the other end of the couch. ‘What are you writing? Is that a j
ournal?’
Her husband, sitting on a sofa adjacent to her, looked up at me for a second and then went back to reading his newspaper.
The woman smiled. ‘Are you writing a book?’
‘Yes, I am writing a book!’ It was the first time anyone had presumed this of me.
‘Fiction or non-fiction?’ she asked, taking a sip of red wine.
‘Non-fiction.’ I hoped my smile seemed mysterious and in keeping with the aura of a travel writer. I told her about my trip and how young people from Sydney know little of the country outside our main cities—how I wanted to change that for myself. I hesitated before explaining the other key driver of the trip, because I couldn’t read which way it might land. ‘Also, I want to learn more about Aboriginal Australia.’
She smiled. ‘I’ve been absolutely blown away by the Aboriginals!’
She and her husband were at the tail end of a trip in which they’d driven down the Stuart Highway from Darwin to Central Australia. As a horticulturist she responded strongly to the philosophy ‘you give to the land because it gives to you’ and had been fascinated to learn about their complex marriage system. And to her own surprise, she’d been impressed by the ancient rock art at Kakadu National Park.
‘I never liked Aboriginal art before. But now that it’s been explained to me, what the different symbols mean, I can look at an artwork and understand it.’
Didn’t that say it all? It’s much easier to appreciate someone else’s culture once you had stepped inside of it and had someone from that culture, or someone in the know, guide you through it.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
Then she veered straight into the badlands of political incorrectness. ‘We have Aboriginals in Tassie but they’re not full-blooded like up here. This trip completely changed my views on them! I’d always thought they were nothing but druggies and alcoholics.’
I held my tongue. Out of habit I kept my cards close to my chest when first meeting someone, as I knew my views were considered ‘extreme’ by many Australians and could rub people the wrong way. I didn’t see this as self-censorship so much as healthy self-moderation. Although I wondered, as well, if I was simply justifying taking the less confrontational, less courageous option.
