by David Mason
I hung on the end of the telephone thinking about what Peter had done. By framing the question as he had, he got the answer he wanted. Like most people, Aboriginal people are, on the whole, polite and disinclined to argue a point. It was far easier to agree than to argue and create tension between people. It seemed I did not have many friends in the National Park Service, or that the National Parks people were nervous about creating some sort of precedent. It all meant that the Management Committee did not want me to walk camels along the road in the park. I could, according to Peter, float the camels through the park while I walked. However, I could not camp in the park. This meant I would have to walk 55 kilometres or so in a day, or organise to be picked up.
So, four months after my initial application, they came up with this. No reason other than, ‘it doesn’t fit within our scheme of management’. There was nothing written, no right of appeal. What to do? There were no fences around the park. In fact feral camels were common sights and another three and a half for two days or so would make no difference. I undertook not to camp anywhere near Uluru or Kata Tjuta, I just wanted to move across the country. There was no flexibility, no compromise. I was forbidden entry.
If I was to go around the park I would need more permits. But I did not want to walk the road, just get to the Docker River track where I did have permits. The situation called for some sanity. I rang National Parks again, hoping to get some help out of the impasse. A warm voice at the other end said, ‘Mate, heard about you. Sounds a bit stiff to me. If I were you I’d follow the northern boundary. Strictly speaking that way you would not be “moving through” the park or need Aboriginal permits. Of course don’t quote me, and you had better look out for feral camels. Good on you.’
After a stressful morning of phone calls, Jarred took me along to the Outback Pioneer Hotel at Yulara. He wanted to fill me with beer and deep-fried food. Jarred was not yet 30 but wise and thoughtful. He worked with Nick Smail at the Frontier Camel Depot, a friendly, well-run camel operation with the greatest advertisement of them all, relaxed fat camels.
Nick was the boss of the operation. Slim, brown and passionate about camels, Nick was helpful, warm and obviously pleased that Kabul, Chloe, Kashgar and little Dalhousie were in very good condition. Along with Noel Fullerton and Rex Ellis, Nick was a giant of the Australian camel industry.
At the Outback Pioneer Jarred fed me hamburger, chips and beer. And what a coincidence! We happened to see George. George was the self-styled jackaroo of Curtin Springs, the one brandishing his knife at the bar for the benefit of tourists, waxing on about cutting out still-beating camel hearts. I remember him saying, ‘Yeah mate. Gets dirty out here.’
As I told Jarred the story his grin grew wider and the gloss white of his teeth had a special sheen. George was playing pool near the bar, throwing back his head and laughing too loudly at a shared joke with blotchy faced and pasty skinned Yulara workers having a day off. I told Jarred I needed to introduce myself. We stood up from the table and made our way to George. But he saw us coming, blinked twice, sucked in a breath then bleated, ‘Jesus, not him again, I’m late for an appointment.’
Later, spluttering in his beer, Jarred told me that George was in fact an electrician at Yulara. Apparently he took himself off to Curtin Springs once or twice a week to ‘play the lad’. George particularly liked talking about camels. ‘Shoot ’em. And if you’re a real bloke, rip their hearts out.’ He was a fake.
We left the fakes, fools and officials and camped north-east of Kata Tjuta, and the day after beside the track to Docker River and the Western Australia border. I stood looking back at Uluru and Kata Tjuta and could not help but feel sad. Two landforms that had been imbued with meaning by Aboriginal people had instead become tourist sites like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. I supposed the Cultural Centre attempted to convey to tourists some of the importance of the places to Aboriginal people. But the visitors did not care. They just wanted a T-shirt that said, ‘I climbed the Rock’.
People imbued things with meaning. The Aboriginal view of the world and their place in it was uniquely theirs. If they did not feel they could share it, or if we did not try to understand it, we would lose an insight into the world that few people ever had. As human beings we would lose a part of ourselves, a way of thinking about the world and the way we lived and died in it. I turned west and I must have sighed because I felt Kabul close and he gave me a reassuring nuzzle on my shoulder. I felt an emptiness that so much knowledge could be lost with so little care. In the days and weeks ahead I reflected on people who moved across the land and wondered why we paid them so little regard. More practically, I thought we would be at Lasseter’s cave in a couple of days, which meant that we would not be too far from Warakurna and the border.
All the camels were still very fat and at the end of that day I found time to take to them great armloads of succulents which they crunched and chewed and swallowed. The pile in front of Chloe was up to her chest and she took almost an hour to get through it all. I watched the muscles of her jaw working, munching her way through the crunchy green stuff. For hours after there was much chewing of cud, then farting. Camels seemed to fart a lot, especially after eating succulent things.
Earlier in the day we crossed the dry bed of the Irving River and as we did so saw a dingo look us over. Seeing there were so many he tried to scamper off. I thought he was lame in his near side foreleg. I watched him move off to the south, toward the red ranges of the Petermanns. Sometimes I imagined the bent and fractured hills to be the petrified roots of all that remained of the great tree of life at Uluru.
There were so many changes in the land. Shadows, contrasts and primary colours filled my mind’s eye and my walk every moment of the day. I felt I was starting to know it, to feel it in my pores and in my chest. But without some knowledge of the land I did not think this country would have been easy on me. The Aboriginal people had a long time to learn to live with the land, to know its secret places and secret ways that made life easier. What must the early white explorers have felt! They knew maps, horses and their men. But how could they know a timeless land without living in it and being part of it? Instead, they walked across its skin, not touching the pulses or hearing the sighs of the old land.
We camped just short of Pinta Punta, past a whiteant-riddled sign that declared Ernest Giles named the Petermann Range after Sir Augustus Petermann, a cartographer. The faded sign gave a date that indicated Giles and his party had been moving though this country in summer. What a heated hell it must have been. Pausing for a while in front of the sign I was reminded that on this expedition he was the first European to see Mount Olga, as he named Kata Tjuta, and more significantly, later in the expedition he named Mount Destruction. I was to continue west across much of the land crossed and labelled by Giles. In a few weeks I would arrive near the place where he lost one of his men. To the south of where we stood were the ranges, shattered, jagged and fractured indigo and red knobs, knuckles and teeth. Perhaps, rather than roots, they were the desiccated bones of a Dreamtime creature breaking the surface of the dark red sea, exposed to those who understood what they saw.
We saw a lone male camel. I bent down to check his tracks and his off-side rear pad print had ridges in it. I looked into the distance and saw him, too old now to gather a harem around himself and probably too old to hold his own in a bachelor group. In a land hard on all those who lived in it, I wondered how long he might survive. There were no old age homes here, for camels or for people. You survived, grew old, got thin and died. Elemental stuff, and a reminder of how far we had come from the coast where people grew fat, old and died on life support machines, with flaccid muscle and bones too weak to carry them.
We walked parallel to the raised red of the Ranges and looked up to the bones left to bleach under the sun. I was distracted, thinking of the Aboriginal people who had lived here for thousands of years, so Kabul heard it first. I watched his hippo-like ears prick and swivel to catch the sound. I he
ard it at last, still a long way off. A bang, whine and shake of a large metallic dog. We moved north to make contact. I watched the red crust of the land scroll beneath our feet, looked up to white trunks and green crowns painted against the blue sky and turned toward the track and the direction of the sound.
I wanted to wave to let people know I was there and okay. The vehicle slowed in the distance and we had time to consider each other. The car was an old purple Holden sedan, much battered, the windscreen a cobweb of splinters and the other windows down. Black arms hung outside the car reaching for the cool and the country. There were two men in the front and five along the back seat.
As they pulled up, I could hear, even over the rattle of the engine, a discussion among the men. The discussion was not in English. A young man wearing a black and white striped football jumper, baggy black shorts, a mop of black hair and with a very generous belly stepped from the back of the car. He leaned on the car door and asked me if everything was okay. I told him everything was fine. The country was good to us. The young man nodded and I heard a voice of warm tobacco from the front of the vehicle, ‘You all right then?’ I nodded and Kabul blew from his nose in agreement.
Then a pause. The men in the rear of the vehicle looked away and the young man who had left the car found himself a very interesting tree to consider. They were waiting for something. I speculated with a ‘You blokes like a cup of tea?’ Faces instantly transformed from shiny black to red and white with smiles. The young man moved forward and opened the door for the man in the front. The other men waited while the man moved his legs from the car to the desert dust.
He stood no more than the height of the purple roof and considered me. A sparkle under milk-bottle glasses, and though the temperature had to be in the high twenties a black beanie so full of red dust that it looked rusted to his head, ripped and faded green shirt with buttons missing from the pockets, red dust coloured white cotton trousers held up by a thin black belt, and Dunlop Volley sandshoes that he wore as slippers.
‘Already heard ’bout you long way back. You bin walkin’ long way,’ and he paused, ‘You all right.’ A statement. I was instantly glad I had taken the time to secure permits for Aboriginal land. I tilted my head to a shady place a short walk away where I could start the fire and we could talk. He smiled and said ‘After you.’
I tied the camels off, started the fire and set the billy to boiling. I apologised to the young men that I only had two mugs. They shrugged and one said ‘No worries.’ Another returned to the vehicle to search out some mugs while the rest sat a little away, at a respectful distance.
I sat in the red dust next to the old man and we introduced ourselves. Jimmy was from Docker River and had just come back from a visit to Uluru. ‘I been watchin’ em 40 year an’ I still don’t know why whitepela wanna walk up ’im,’ he said, shaking his head gently, referring to the thousands of tourists who lean into the rock and walk to the top.
He asked me whether I had ever walked to the top. I hesitated for a moment and told him of my work with the Aboriginal Land Commissioner in the mid-1980s. I said that at the time I had asked an Aboriginal man what he thought of people walking to the top of Uluru. That man also said that he didn’t understand it at all. He said it was because white people needed to be on top of things all the time they felt they had to do it. So I did not.
Jimmy told me he had heard about the incident at Curtin Springs and that I had come with the camels across the Simpson Desert. ‘You come long way, eh?’
His voice was tobacco, whiskey and long draughts of sweet black tea. His tongue was fat and lingered near the roof of his mouth so that his consonants were warm and flat. Jimmy slipped off his shoes and began to wriggle a white rheumy toenail into the ground. I found myself drawing my fingers across the surface of the red dust, warm and giving to the touch, the grains parting under my fingers leaving gentle curves and ridges. I was feeling the curves and the contours, feeling the grains against my skin.
We watched each other for a moment and gently smiled. We had been doing the same thing. Reaching for the land, needing to touch it and feel it against our skin. The billy was on the boil and I began to make the brew.
Just before a sugary sip he asked, ‘You like camel?’ I smiled and said that camels were wonderful animals, friendly, trustworthy – though I didn’t mention Chloe’s snakiness – and a great way to move across the country, to feel it, taste it, hear it and even if for only a short time, be a part of it. He nodded, and turned to me again.
He paused for a moment and said, ‘I know that one camel lady. You know?’ I said that I did know that a camel lady had been along this way 20 years before. He looked away, shook his head gently and said with a low throaty laugh, ‘Funny one, that one.’ Jimmy told me that the ‘old fella’ who had gone with her was his cousin. His cousin had told him that he had to accompany her on the track to make sure she didn’t stumble on men’s or women’s business, or get lost. After all, it was his country and he was responsible for taking care of it. He was quiet then, and looked into the hot coals.
I took a sip of the hot sweet brew and thought about whether he wanted someone to accompany me across his country. This was not a question I wanted to ask. It might be difficult for Jimmy to answer. He would want to find a way to look after the land and my feelings at once. I watched his feet for a while and his big toe as it burrowed into the ground.
He put his hand on mine and said, ‘You be all right. I know ’bout you. You got country in you and there’s a little bit of you in the country.’ We shared touch, texture and warmth; we shared too the ground on which we sat and the need to touch it. And he smiled, the warmest most open smile I had ever seen. In that one smile he summed up friend, welcome and homecoming at once. That one action was a vindication and a validation of all I had set out to do.
Jimmy told me stories about the land and its people. He described how, in one Dreaming story, the Possum moved across this country and met with the great Dreamtime Serpent. As he did so his arms pointed to the rugged red escarpments around us, and a moment later one finger carefully described curves and circles in the red sand at his feet. As he told his story the past was immanent – everywhere around us – and time seemed to swim before my eyes. Time was no longer linear. It became a plane on which any story was possible, where wooden ships were pulled by white clouds and the men on them were the objects of curiosity for the Dreamtime animals of Australian Aboriginal lore.
We sat there quietly for a while, listening to the bursting coals, the rush of a desert pigeon, the slurp of warm sweet tea being drunk by the young men and the peace in each other’s company. We were layers, just points in time. There were people before us at this spot, as there would be people after us. And because we were there, on the country, touching it and it touching us, we became part of it and its history. Without touching the land, without being a part of the land, you could never know it, which was why, when people left the land they lost a part of themselves and the land lost a part of itself. Jimmy reminded me that if a person did not have a relationship with the place they lived in, they were tourists, invaders, exploiters or worse.
We sat together for hours, talking about the land, its people, the young men and women, the rubbish children, the problems of petrol-sniffing and alcohol. He spoke of the land’s meanings, its sacredness, and watching him and listening to his stories I was reminded of our need to create and our craving for immortality through story and meaning. I was reminded too that thought shapes place and creates meanings where there was nothing before; just land and sky.
Too soon Jimmy said he needed to leave for Docker River. His wife was waiting for him. He passed his mug to me and we stood. As he made to slip his feet into his sandshoes he stumbled and I caught him, my hand on his back. The young men started and sprang forward to lend a hand. Jimmy put out his arm and said, ‘I’m orright.’
I remember the touch of his body, firm yet frail, warm and enduring. The touch of his body was like t
he land itself.
The young men thanked me for the tea and said goodbye to the camels hooshed down in the shade. Little Dalhousie watched them closely and even allowed one to scratch under his chin. At the Holden the young men piled into the back and Jimmy took his place in the passenger seat. We shook hands again and over the sound of the engine starting up he simply said, ‘Thank you.’ I could never forget the thump of the cylinders as the car headed west along the track, black arms outside, hands reaching for the country.
Next day we camped just short of the turnoff to some prefabricated houses on the road to Lasseter’s cave, another 500 metres or so to the south-west. There was plenty of good feed for the camels and even a water trough from which I could wash and the camels drink.
Once the camels were settled I paid homage at the cave. What a country! To have entered it as Lasseter did, without knowing the location of water, or even more remarkable, move through the country knowing that there was a risk that water might be impossible to find, must have been daunting. The search for gold drove him hard. Certainly there was water in some rock holes and there were natural springs. But the time it must have taken to find these!
In 1930s Australia, Harold Lasseter’s story attracted nationwide attention. He had been looking for a gold reef that he swore he had discovered on an expedition years before. Many people did not believe him and some refused to continue on the expedition with him. So he found himself at this place. Without the assistance of the local Aboriginal people he would have perished far sooner than he had. At least he had a chance to survive.
Reflecting on the past. Outside Lasseter’s cave, west of Uluru.
The cave was some three paces wide and six deep, with the cave roof dipping sharply down after two. Much of the rock had been darkened by smoke, the campfires of many people over a long time.
