‘We’ve got the story of clashes and massacres and there is no doubt that happened. But the other story is not told, of really close, cooperative relationships that lasted for generations, and in some cases still do. There’s the odd pastoralist out there who is the complete redneck, but they really aren’t too many and that’s encouraging.’
Tim believes the evidence that this relationship was the common experience can be found in all kinds of ways.
‘In the De Grey River catchment we had this massive flood with Cyclone Rusty, biggest in living memory—at its widest it was ninety kilometres wide,’ he says. In fact, for most of the time the De Grey River is a large dry bed. When it is flowing it is no more than 130 metres across.
‘All the old, original homesteads are built within two hundred metres of the main river channel and when you see a flood like that you think the builders would have had to be mad. From the air you could see all the original homesteads, on a strip of sand, in a ninety-kilometre-wide inland sea. The reason none of those original homesteads went under water is that they were built to be above even the biggest floods—but those first settlers wouldn’t have known what a big flood could look like. The local Aboriginal people would have told them that,’ says Tim. ‘The early pioneers tapped into the traditional owners’ knowledge, respected that knowledge and would have obeyed that knowledge, otherwise they’d probably have got a spear through them.’
Loving the same land can create a connection as profound as loving the same child. Caring, even caring in very different ways, is a forger of mutual appreciation and bonds built on a shared commitment to the wellbeing of the land. The stories of ‘other forces in the landscape’ that Tim mentions are found all over Australia, not just in the outback, but in cities, too. The mysterious stewardship of the traditional owners is another kind of land care. It is based on a body of knowledge, a language and a science most of us don’t yet understand.
‘I was talking to Chris Ward at Lake Violet outside of Wiluna—they’ve been there for five generations, they were the original settlers. I said, “How do you get on with the mob?” And he says, “Oh really, really well, my great-great-grandfather was best mates with these guys in town today, and we have this friendship passed down through the generations.” And I asked the mob and they said, “Oh, our family were best mates with his great-great-grandfather.” There’s been a strong positive relationship out there for five generations on that property. No dramas at all. Chris knows a lot of the Aboriginal history for his property: he respects them and they respect him. Where it exists it works really well.’
Sadly, that mutual respect isn’t found everywhere, not because of a lack of goodwill, but simply as a function of the revolving ownership of many pastoral properties. Tim identifies 1967 as a critical year: with the increase in Aboriginal stockmen’s wages, the number of stockmen employed greatly decreased, and many families moved to find work in the towns. After this time, if a property changed hands, often pastoralists and traditional owners never met. Tim believes this is a loss felt deeply on both sides, yet rarely do either pastoralists or traditional owners act to re-create the relationships.
‘There is a need for a “dating service” out there,’ says Tim. ‘Pastoralists often say to me they would like to know more about the Aboriginal history and culture of the sites on their place. They don’t want to muck it up—but they don’t know where those sites are, they don’t know how to manage them. I say, “Why don’t you talk to the traditional owners?” and they don’t know who the traditional owners are. Then there’s the mob in town, they don’t know the pastoralists and they’re too scared to go and introduce themselves.’
Their shared lives in Wiluna (and then Marble Bar, where they moved next) taught Tania and Tim that their relationship could act as a bridge between traditional owners and pastoralists.
‘It was Wiluna that really taught me that this was where we fit. This is where our common links are, this is where we are strong because we have those relationships on both sides of things and are able to bring it together. That’s bound what we do—we think and feel the same in our own different fields, but they connect really nicely,’ says Tania.
‘When Tania was working with those communities I had the opportunity to sit with very traditional cultural people and listen to them and learn from them. Without her I wouldn’t have developed those relationships—I’d have just been working with the pastoralists.’
In helping Tim connect meaningfully to Aboriginal people Tania was further refining her mastery of one of the most precious and rare skill sets in Australia: cultural brokering. We tend to understand cultural brokers as intermediaries, messengers and translators between two or three different cultures. That’s not quite it, though. When a message is passed from a person of one culture to a person of another, at that very moment of transmission, the broker absorbs and holds the message and very gently, in their body and their face, in their gestures, in their words, they reframe it for both people.
The broker says and conveys what was meant to be said and conveyed by one person to the other, and they help the other person hear it and convey their response in return. It all happens in a flash. It is teaching as much as translating, building trust as much as it is building knowledge, being in the moment with the people rather than doing any particular thing. Nowhere is this harder—and more important—than in brokering across the gap between any traditional culture (where it is all about cooperation, sharing, surviving and spirituality) and any modern Western culture (where it is all about specialising, owning, producing and self-expression). We have nowhere near enough of these people, simply because they are most often created when an unusual sort of person is given an unusual kind of life.
Such expertise in negotiating boundaries can only be developed when a born negotiator has had to make their way back and forth across a society’s liminal spaces for a very long time. Of course, this has been Tania’s story. From living under the oppression of domestic violence and low expectations to suddenly having to find her way in Australia’s mainstream and finally to her apprenticeship on the frontiers of academia under Ann Larson, she’s been crisscrossing Australia’s cultural borders for a very long time. And she is a born negotiator. The wonder is not that she’s become a cultural broker but that her marriage to Tim has taken her into a place where we have so few cultural brokers working: the interface between modern agricultural science and the oldest living culture on the planet.
If Wiluna had showed Tania that this in-between space was where she and Tim fitted, Marble Bar went one step further. It adopted them.
‘The day we rocked up, someone said, “Do you need a hand unloading?” and we didn’t have any tucker and Foxy the publican said, “Oh, we’d better feed you.” As soon as you walk in you feel a sense of community,’ says Tim.
Marble Bar is an entire community living on the borders of old Indigenous culture and the new mainstream. There are only two hundred people in Marble Bar: more of them are Indigenous than not, and everyone gets on.
‘You’ve got people who come up with an idea, the people who say, “Yes let’s do that!” and then the organisers who make it happen,’ says Tania.
These are the ingredients, she says, for a lively and rich community life, no matter a town’s size. Tim and Tania had a year and a half in tidy, pretty Marble Bar, then a year and a half in Port Hedland, when they spent most weekends travelling back to Marble Bar, and then they returned to Marble Bar for another two years.
In and around Marble Bar Tim and Tania played and worked, and listened and changed. Tania was managing the Commonwealth Development Employment Program (CDEP) in three communities (Warralong, Gooda Binya/Marble Bar and Irrungadji/Nullagine), while Tim worked on a range of projects, including a bio-diesel project for Ashburton Aboriginal Corporation. In both their work and leisure hours they were listening to custodians of the very oldest knowledge about what it means to be human, what it means to work together and all the ways humans,
land, animals, plants and spirit interact.
The work Tania was doing is considered one of the ‘impossible’ jobs in outback communities. Mostly CDEP seems to not quite do what it is meant to do: that is, provide meaningful work and training to Aboriginal people and get the jobs done that need to be done. Too often a community’s CDEP yard is a place where any hope of self-direction and meaningful work must be abandoned at the door, and cynicism and distrust hangs in the air. Even worse, a CDEP program can expand rifts, or even create them, between different groups in a community.
‘When I left the CDEP program the numbers of people turning up for work had tripled,’ says Tania. What had made the difference was the fact that Tania didn’t see her role as ‘organising and telling’, but rather as ‘facilitating and asking’.
‘If there was a problem I’d say, “How are we going to fix this?” and they’d say, “Oh, we could do this, or we could do this.” And I’d say, “So what do you want to do?” and they’d say, “Let’s try this.” At the end of projects there was complete ownership of those projects because it hadn’t been me saying, “This is what you have to do.” People chose what they wanted to do.
‘And I didn’t acknowledge any family issues between any of the mobs. If you acknowledge there’s a rift you enhance it. With those that couldn’t work together because of the son-in-law and mother-in-law thing, we just worked around those cultural zones. I had a whole pile of jobs that the guys said they wanted to do and I let people pick what they wanted to do and they went off and did it. They solved their issues culturally among themselves. As long as I provided the tools and resources for them to do what they wished, that was all I needed to do.’
‘That’s the way I work with farmers and pastoralists, you’ve got to treat people with a bit of respect,’ says Tim. ‘I say this is your place, your life, your problems, you’ve got a brain and you’ll figure it out … we are just here to help.’
Just as there are rifts in Indigenous groups, there are rifts between pastoralists, too.
‘One of the things I did when I got there was go out to the De Grey Land Conservation District Committee and say, “Are you keen to get fired up again?” They said, “Yep,” and early on what we said to the group was, “Look there’s going to be disputes among neighbours, so we’re going to have to have a way of dealing with it—not ignoring it, but not letting it get in the road of everything else.”’
Tim sees another parallel between pastoralists and Indigenous people: over the last few generations in the pastoral country the relationship between government and pastoralists has been characterised by increasing government control and consequent increasing distrust on both sides.
‘The government’s been the landlord, the pastoralist the tenant. The government has treated pastoralists like naughty boys out there trying to rip them off. The pastoralists see the government as the policeman trying to beat them into submission. I found this culture a shock, having come from the wheatbelt freehold land where it doesn’t exist. It’s really a significant problem, that lack of trust, the lack of power for pastoralists and control by government,’ Tim says.
He feels it is a far milder echo of the extreme and ongoing reluctance of government agencies to allow Indigenous people control over their own lives. Tightening government control is not just, he says, a reflection of the modern Australian trend towards tighter management and more and more documentation, but the distrust by public servants of both pastoralists and Indigenous people.
‘Of course, the ultimate disempowerment has been for the Aboriginal people. In both cases we have this power imbalance and control by government that have now been in place for generations. We need to get rid of the deeply ingrained British class culture of power and control and elitism, which we so unfortunately inherited from the Poms and it is still there. That thinking is still ingrained in government. These guys are so sharp and switched on, but they don’t get treated that way. The only way to get real change is for people at the grassroots to take responsibility for their own problems and speak for themselves. That’s Tania’s and my job: to make sure they can speak. But I’ve found that with these groups when you give them the opportunity to take control, they’re very scared and reluctant to take it on.’
At the heart of this reluctance is a lack of trust in the institution offering the opportunity. Both pastoralists and Indigenous people have a history of painfully discovering that opportunities presented have been illusions or have had strings attached.
‘So how do we overcome that, how do we break that cycle and how do we change the relationships? Tania and I have the same view of what needs to happen: it’s exactly the same with the pastoral industry as it is with Indigenous society. What I do with pastoralists, and what Tania does with the mob, is to try to create a new culture that breaks those existing power relationships and develops one of collaboration and cooperation in order to create links. You can do anything if you work together, but you have to build trust. We know it works—and when it works it is just so rewarding.’
Tim and Tania are seeing so much speaking up, collaborating and taking control all the time now in the Kimberley and the Pilbara. It’s a new way which borrows from both traditional and modern Western cultures—collaborating, for example, is a strongly traditional value, but speaking up is very much a modern Western behaviour. Their favourite example of seeing this culture emerging came in the middle of a project Tim created which brought Tania’s connections and work with the mob together with Tim’s connections and work in agriculture.
In working with pastoralists in the De Grey River catchment in 2013 Tim had found that the scale of the properties he was working with prevented him from being able to build and hold a mental map of how they worked. Without that encompassing map of the whole catchment, Tim knew that any intervention might work on a small scale but do more damage somewhere else. The scale, coupled with the complexity of the interactions in the landscape, meant a map showing how it all worked was vital.
‘I went from four hundred hectares to four hundred thousand hectares—where do you start? It was just too overwhelming.’
To help him make sense of the landscape over many hundreds of square kilometres, Tim invited Peter Andrews (a farmer who has had remarkable success in turning degraded land into fertile, healthy land again) to work with pastoralists in the De Grey River catchment.
‘Early in my career I figured this out and it is really important: you can’t learn anything from someone who thinks like you do, you can only learn from someone who thinks differently. So I like talking to nutcases, the thinkers with radical ideas—like Peter Andrews. He’s a genius. He talks about how to read the landscape, these patterns, the water—its movement and control.’
Peter Andrews is considered a land-prophet, a water-whisperer, with a singular concentration that lets him observe, interpret and predict how land and water and plants will relate over many rains. Tim had met him several times over the years, and was convinced that he needed Peter to assist him in mapping the geomorphology of the De Grey catchment, which holds a number of pastoral properties.
‘I’ve figured out a way to map it, based on Peter’s stuff, and it’s pretty new, but it’s working really well.’
This map is the basis for figuring out how to interact with the landscape: to see how best to send water to an area that has been water-starved due to man-made structures such as mines or roads, or how to slow water down by such actions as altering how animals graze so more plants grow and water can sink into the earth along with the plants’ roots.
Tim was aware that while Peter’s thinking is cutting-edge in this time and place, Peter also knows his way of seeing land isn’t unique to him. When Peter first encountered traditional ‘abstract’ Aboriginal art he was amazed by it. He did not see art but a map presenting detailed information about how water moved in the artist’s landscape.
‘All the information was presented and Peter could read the message. He was pretty keen to get
out and meet some of our guys and talk to them because he’d recognised that this knowledge had been pre-existing in their culture and was expressed in their art.
‘To help me learn this same thing, I was going home and using Google Earth—basically painting out what I’d learned onto Google Earth. Peter can do that from the ground—when you really understand it you don’t need to see it from above. Then Tania bought me a painting from someone who lived out near the South Australian border. After my experience using Google Earth, when I saw it, I said, “Whoever painted this has painted a Peter Andrews description of how landscape and water works.” Then one day I was travelling between Perth and Alice Springs and I looked out of the window of the plane from thirty thousand feet and I said, “That’s our painting.”’
With this in mind, Tim had lined up both pastoralists and traditional owners to meet Peter and work with him tracking the actions of water in the land, reading the subtle changes in landscape and slope. And it was then that Phillip, an Aboriginal man well into his middle years, began to speak up, to offer his knowledge in collaboration with the group.
‘Phillip’s reaction was amazing. There’s this old fellow who doesn’t normally say anything to anybody and he was speaking up in groups of all these pastoralists, talking about his knowledge,’ says Tim. ‘He got what Peter was all about and what he was doing and how he was doing things to heal land. He could synchronise his culture with what Peter was saying.’
Phillip’s contribution was powerful, and no-one felt it more than Tim. The merging of that other, older Australia with his scientific world view, which had begun when he’d met Tania, was offering new insights from this still deeper engagement.
Love In a Sunburnt Country Page 25
