T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  IT WAS HALF PAST TWO next morning when Theo was wakened by the sudden blazing up of the restoked campfire and the talking of Njitiaka and Lornie, who were rolling up their blankets. The waning moon, which had risen almost two hours earlier, was now lighting up the landscape sufficiently to allow the journey to be resumed. Titus, riding bareback on his horse, was already bringing in the donkeys. Their hobble straps and chains had been taken off their feet and put around their necks; and the clinking of these hobble chains blended with the muted notes of the bells whose clappers had been slipped sideways into holes punched into the ends of their neck straps. Theo rolled up his swag, while his three companions harnessed up a fresh team of eight donkeys. Then the gruff voice of Njitiaka barked out at the donkeys, and the van moved away from the cheery blaze of the campfire into the moonlit sandhill silence. The resinous scent emanating from the bulging tufts of spinifex which the donkeys kicked with their plodding feet was not as overwhelming in the cool night air as it had been in the heat of the previous evening; but it nevertheless pervaded the whole atmosphere with the unmistakable menace of its aroma. For here as elsewhere in the Centre this resinous fragrance drew attention to the deep loneliness and the dangerous waterlessness of the huge inland sandhill regions. The lushness of the spinifex tufts, now heavy in ear, showed how abundant the rains had been in this normally rather dry region during the previous year. Even Henbury had recorded thirty-three inches of rain during the period of twelve months beginning on 1st July, 1920, and ending on 30th June, 1921. Since no water could flow or drain out of the sandhill regions, all this amount of rain had soaked into the ground. But it was not only the spinifex which showed this lushness of growth in its great tufts and tussocks: the trees too – desert oaks on the dune slopes and crests, and ironwoods and mulgas on the numerous clayflats between the dunes – were all clad with luxuriant foliage. The branches of the mulgas were densely covered with greyish-green leaves; the ironwoods with their drooping branch-tips had come to resemble river willows; and the continual sighing of the magnificent desert oaks in the soft night breeze indicated the extraordinary length to which their jointed needle-like leaves had grown. No longer did the strong moonlight conjure up a delicate tracery of dark lines and ribbons on the ground below the trees: the almost unnatural heaviness of growth in all foliage produced heavy and completely opaque shadows similar to those normally cast by the European trees.

  Theo was overwhelmed by the silence and the resulting sense of haunting loneliness that was brooding over these moonlit sandhills. It was easy to fill the scene with the spectre shapes of the iliaka njemba that had frightened him in his childhood, just as they had terrified the minds of the younger Western Aranda children at Hermannsburg. These iliaka njemba had been the legendary grim emu-shaped phantoms that stalked over the sandhill wastes at night and devoured children who had dared to move away too far from the campfires of their parents. Though, like his dark teenager friends, he had long since ceased to believe in the grim fairy-tales told to shivering small children, he realised how perfectly these evil emu-like phantoms would have fitted into this eerie landscape. A more realistic fear that entered his mind while he was staring at the moonlit scene was the apprehension that from somewhere out among those deep tree shadows a wild bull camel might emerge and pursue the van in its rutting season madness. For a few wild camels did live in these sandhill wastes; and a bull camel ‘in season’ was a terrifying and dangerous beast, if it took it into its head to chase an animal or human being that had come into its domain while it was in this state.

  But nothing happened. The donkeys, unswervingly pursuing the winding, twisting camel-mail pad, gave short snorts every now and again, the gruff voice of Njitiaka and the low-pitched calls of Lornie rang out from time to time, and the van creaked its way forward over the spinifex tufts, cutting deep grooves into the heavy, colourless sand between them.

  Afraid that he might go to sleep on the seat of the van, Theo had decided to walk during the night hours so that he could chat to Njitiaka and Lornie. He walked barefoot according to his normal habit. So far he had, most unwillingly, put on boots only during the eight midwinter weeks each year in order to protect his feet against the heavy morning frosts and also against the freezing winds of cloudy days. He knew that these were his last few weeks of barefooted freedom. After that he would have to accustom himself to having his feet encased in imprisoning footwear for the rest of his days.

  Since the donkeys were pulling the van with real will and determination, it was easy for Theo to chat to Njitiaka and Lornie, and to ask them questions about the road that lay ahead of them. About what time would they emerge from the sandhills? Where was the next water? When would they be likely to reach Idracowra Station? And so on. Theo enjoyed listening to Njitiaka’s replies. Njitiaka, whose name was generally abbreviated to Njitia, was a man only about five foot five inches tall, and of moderate build. He came from Ungwatja on the Finke River, below the Palmer junction, and belonged to the emu totem. His bushy black beard, streaked with many grey hairs, gave him, in Theo’s eyes, a somewhat gnomelike appearance. But what he lacked in girth and inches he more than made up for by a powerful, gruff, and rasping voice. He always talked very loudly; and his speech, instead of flowing smoothly in the normal Western Aranda manner, showed rather the somewhat staccato pattern that was so characteristic of Lower Southern Aranda speakers, but which was found also among some of the Upper Southern Aranda folk. From his contacts with the Henbury visitors at Hermannsburg Theo had become aware of at least some of the dialectal differences between the speech of the Henbury and Hermannsburg Aranda groups. These differences had always led to much good-humoured mockery and banter among the children: everyone loved mimicking the speech of their dialectal neighbours, and then laughing at it. Theo was frequently amused when he heard Njitiaka talking, and the latter retorted by passing derogatory remarks about Theo’s Western Aranda manner of speaking. It was only occasionally that Theo and Njitiaka were unable to understand the meaning of individual words in each other’s speech. Then they would ask and argue with each other about these words, with Njitiaka bluntly protesting that he had difficulty in understanding the ‘corrupt’ dialect of the Western Aranda. He had Theo at a disadvantage here – a boy of fourteen could not repeat to a middle-aged man the stock Western Aranda reply that the harsh, broad, and halting chatter of the Southern Aranda was an utterly stupid and ridiculous kind of expression.

  The black forests of desert oaks, whose moon-silvered crests were shimmering so brightly, kept on exciting Theo’s intense admiration; for he had never before travelled through sandhill country at night. Eventually he passed a remark to Njitiaka concerning the brightness of the moon, referring to it by its Western Aranda name of ‘taia’. Njitiaka, in true or wilful ignorance, failed to understand Theo at first, and when the latter finally pointed at the moon, he exclaimed gruffly, ‘Why don’t you give the thing its proper name? You don’t want to talk to me like one of those stupid Western Aranda men who don’t know their own language.’ Then he explained to Theo proudly, ‘We Southerners alone have kept the Aranda tongue in all its purity as it has been handed down to us: the Western men have corrupted the speech of their forefathers. “Talpa” is the only correct word for what white men call the moon; as for “taia”, I do not know what that means: I have not heard my fathers using such a word.’ Theo made no reply: though a white boy, he had long since learnt not to be rude to the older dark men. He merely smiled to himself, and reflected that probably people everywhere regarded any social customs and any forms of speech that differed from their own as being for that very reason inferior to their own. And in the Southern Aranda area it was only natural that Southern Aranda social customs and forms of speech had to be accepted as the correct local norms by all visitors.

  Slowly the hours passed, and mile after slow mile was put behind the travellers. Theo was glad that the luminous dial of his pocket watch enabled him to work out the distance covered from the time taken in tr
avelling between points.

  Gradually the dark eastern horizon became tinged with grey. The blurred and shapeless tree forms began to reveal their limbs with increasing clarity. The eastern sky became overspread by a reddish-yellow tinge, and finally the spinifex tips on the crests of the sand-dunes began to glow in the first rays of the rising sun. As the sun soared over the horizon like a ball of fire, the sudden burst of warmth that accompanied its full revelation foretold that the day now begun would be, in local terms, ‘a real scorcher’. To Theo it was a relief to know that so many miles of sandhill travelling had already been completed; for there were no dense stands of timber in this region for keeping down the midday temperatures. These soft red dunes, that still looked so beautiful in the morning light, would soon turn searingly hot in the fierce overhead blaze; and the air above them would then singe the bodies of beasts and men like a blast from a heated furnace.

  At seven in the morning a cloud of dust rising about a mile to the eastward showed that the buggy party was just leaving their night camp. Half an hour later the van reached the same spot – a flat on the edge of a shallow, dry watercourse, studded with some box gums. The van halted in the shade of one of the larger trees. The campfire of the buggy travellers was quickly stoked up again. Soon billies filled with water from the galvanised iron canteens were boiling at the fire, and a quick morning meal of damper and steak grilled over an ample bed of coals by Lornie satisfied the hunger of the party. The stop lasted about three-quarters of an hour. Then the journey was resumed; and the donkeys, still unfed and thirsty, patiently plodded on without protests or jibbing into the heat haze that was now spreading its ugly grey veil over the country.

  Like other Central Australian sandhill regions, the Britannia Sandhills did not form an unbroken waste of dunes. A number of small rocky outcrops rose up out of them, and sometimes low hills ran across the track of the travellers. There were quite a few clay-pans as well to ease the strain on the donkeys that had to pull the heavy van. For the camel-mail road over the Britannia Sandhills followed more or less in the wake of the mythical trail left by the fish ancestors – a trail which had already provided the party with a gap at Iltjanmalitnjaka or Parke’s Pass. During the night the van had passed two hills lying north of the road. These hills symbolised the head and the body of an ancestral ntapitnja or bony bream, while the clay-pans over which the road made its way represented the lagoons once formed by the mythical flood that had carried these fish on towards Uratanga. Some low hills lying across the camel road also figured in the fish myth, and one ridge symbolised a fish weir cast up at the beginning of time. But for the most part the camel pad followed by the van led through heavy sandhill country.

  Had the travellers taken the normal wagon road which kept to the Finke Valley between Ekngata and Talpanama, they would have passed a long line of important Upper Southern Aranda ceremonial sites, each linked with a magnificent waterhole. All of these waters contained fish, for they were permanent pools, fringed with long banks of green reeds. Even if an unusually long drought should have succeeded in drying up one or the other of these waterholes, the next flood would have brought down fresh fish from Irbmangkara or from the deep gorge holes in the MacDonnells that had always defied even the longest and driest seasons ever experienced in Central Australia. The first of the more important of these totemic sites was Peiterama, situated at the confluence of the Palmer River with the Finke, where an evil eagle ancestress, who had stolen a young eaglet from the Upper Southern Aranda eagle home of Pmoierka on the Palmer south of Henbury, had paused for a rest on her way back to her own home at Jora (or Joara). The frantic parents of the eaglet had tried in vain to recapture their fledgling: the daring Jora robber had turned herself into a wildly rushing whirlwind which had successfully evaded the hysterical attacks made with beaks and talons by the swooping, screaming, pouncing parents.

  The next waterhole was Iltiriltutnama, where the two rain ancestors from Pututunga, southeast of Irbmangkara, had crossed the Finke while travelling to the Eastern Aranda rain centre of Ujitja. Before reaching the Finke, these two rain ancestors had proved their terrible power by wiping out a group of foolish and unbelieving arkara bird men at Arkariwala on the Palmer River. They had destroyed them by unloading huge hailstones on their flimsy saltbush rain-shelters and then drowning them in a cloudburst.

  The next site was the far more important ceremonial centre of Ungwatja, Njitiaka’s personal totemic site, where one of the box gum overflow channels of the Palmer known as the Waijowa Kringka entered the Finke from the south at the base of a mountainous red sand-dune. According to the local myth, the Finke flats at Ungwatja had been populated at the beginning of time by vast numbers of ancestral emus, all of whom had originated on the nearby clay-flats of Ilbungka Woputa from blood poured on them from the veins of the original emu sire. This sire had finally opened his chest in order to pour out his very life-blood so as to create an abundance of new emu life. Because of the numerous mythical figures revealed in its sacred performances, Ungwatja was a centre honoured in a cycle of acts which took many weeks to stage in full. It was linked with a large number of ceremonial centres, both major and minor, in other Aranda and non-Aranda areas.

  It was associated in this way with the minor ceremonial site of Taltjiltja, several miles downstream from Ungwatja, where a huge grinding stone was believed to have disappeared into the water-logged quicksand bed of the Finke. This grinding stone had rolled down under its own power from Tnjanawala, near Alitera, pursued by a group of ancestral teratera bird men. Each evening it had come to rest, only a few inches below the surface of the ground, at a convenient campsite; and the pursuing bird men had dug it up and ground their gathered store of grass seeds on it. But when Ungwatja had been reached, the teratera bird men had refused to allow one of the local emu ancestors to use this self-propelled stone for grinding his own grass seeds. In revenge the offended Ungwatja man had sung dark spells over it. The huge grinding stone had, as a result, begun to vibrate and to move ominously when the teratera men approached it. It had then spun away from them wildly, like a heavy, rolling stone disc, which they were afraid to touch lest it crush or maim them. All they had dared to do had been to pursue it as far as Taltjiltja, where it had sunk out of sight for ever.

  Another important Upper Southern Aranda ceremonial centre was located at Ultjua, on the third major Finke loop downstream from Taltjiltja. Ultjua was one of the most important carpet snake ceremonial centres in this area; and just as Ungwatja had been associated with several other emu sites, so Ultjua was linked by myths with a number of other carpet snake sites, such as the Lower Southern Aranda centre of Erulitna or Old Crown Point on the lower Finke River, the Antekerinja centre of Ananta on Lilla Creek, and the Matuntara centre of Waltanta, whose soakage had been appropriated by white cattlemen and converted into the central station well of the Erldunda property. In the flanking box gum flats of Ultjua began the extensive stands of giant saltbush which stretched from here to Idracowra and beyond. The pioneer settlers had hence built a stockyard at Ultjua for use during periods when the cattle which were grazing on the middle Finke reaches were being mustered and branded. They had given Ultjua the name of ‘Main Camp’, since it was the main cattle-holding camp on the combined Henbury-Idracowra runs.