Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  Back in town, Ramona and I would sit with our coffee in the Mediterranean Café, headquarters of the large local alternative culture, its windows full of little business cards for therapists of one persuasion or another, from ear candling to primal scream, watching this faraway other world go by. This aspect of the Januslike Alice was a desert Totnes. Among the window stickers was one for a gardening firm calling itself ‘Weeding Wimmin’ but these were not the women we saw on the streets, Aboriginal women with one arm in plaster, always the left arm because it is the one they instinctively raise to ward off the blows of their abusive, drunken men. The hospital treats queues of these battered wives every night. ‘Alice is tinder just waiting to go up,’ a friend told me in Melbourne before we left.

  Ramona was still asleep in the house and Latz was already out weeding buffel grass somewhere on his patch. He was obsessed with this rogue plant, an invasive exotic from South Africa that was out-competing the delicate native grasses everywhere, upsetting the fine balance of life among the desert plants he loved. Every morning before the sun rose too high, his first act was to go out and uproot another few square yards of the stuff, a ritual he kept up in a one-man war he knew he might not win. But his work really was making a difference: the grateful native plants were gradually reappearing on Latz’s wild acres, and his list had grown to 127 species.

  My first impression of Latz the previous afternoon was that of a tall, lanky, bearded figure lying naked in the shade of his bedroom on the telephone to a fellow botanist. He lay under a languid ceiling fan, a muted Beethoven symphony on the hi-fi just at the threshold of audibility. Outside, under the shadow of a hat brim, his ice-blue eyes shone with quiet mischief. Latz is an ethno-botanist and has lived all his life in the Arrernte country of central Australia. He knows more about fire and its traditional use by the Aborigines than just about anyone, and there’s hardly a wild plant, bush or tree he doesn’t know in the deserts and wild expanses of the centre. Bushfires and Bushtucker, the title of his definitive book surveying the use of plants and fire by the Pitjantjatjara, Warlpiri, Arrernte, Pintupi and other central Australian Aboriginal peoples, describes his passions well enough. He ought to know: he grew up as a boy with the western Arrernte people in the Aboriginal community of Hermannsburg, seventy-five miles from Alice Springs, several days by camel in those days. His father worked as the engineer, sinking a bore five miles away and piping in a fresh water supply across country. Latz spoke Aranda and learnt the Aboriginal customs and skills. The red-tailed cockatoo, he said, was his totem animal, his dreaming. It is often associated with fire.

  Everybody called him Latz. He lived about twelve miles outside Alice Springs in a house he had built himself after his divorce. He made it small and simple deliberately, so he could spend as much time outdoors as possible: single storey, veranda, corrugated-iron roof, water butt, two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen and a living room that was also his study. The old caravan he lived in before he built the house was still outside, full of redback and white-tail spiders, scorpions and the odd snake. It was originally meant for guests, but the spiders, which pack an unwelcome bite, took over. A butcher bird sat on the air-con unit outside the kitchen window every day and sang so sweetly you would never guess it was a killer that stabbed and speared its prey, leaving the corpses hanging in a thorn-bush larder. It had even recently tried to assassinate a neighbour’s budgie through the bars of its cage. It sounded like a tradesman, whistling as he worked, swooping up and down to the notes like a swannee whistle.

  Inside the house, an old cast-iron ‘Klondike’ pot-bellied stove stood in one corner, and there was a vase full of the red-and-black tail feathers of the male red-tailed black cockatoo. On the walls hung dot-paintings by Latz’s Aboriginal friends, painted on bits of card or board. The most impressive of them was by Nosepeg, an old Pintupi man of the western deserts who once met the Queen and introduced himself on equal terms as ‘King of the Pintupi’. Nosepeg’s dreaming was the mopoke, the boobook owl I had heard in the night. The first white settlers called Ninox boobook the cuckoo owl; to the Arrernte, it was the arkularkua. This sounded to me so much like the name of our old cub mistress, Akela, that I felt I understood the bird. The painting, on a base of red ochre on an offcut of cardboard two feet by two and a half feet, depicted Nosepeg’s dreaming, his mopoke country, in a dreamer’s aerial vision of a hill with a waterhole at its peak and ten clefts or valleys running down from the summit like petals. The green dots, Latz said, were mulga bushes, a kind of acacia that grows everywhere on the stony plains, and the smaller white ochre dots all over the bare, inhospitable rock and gravel of the hillside were clumps of spinifex grasses. The bigger earth-brown dots represented the burnt stumps of trees and bushes, and the charred roots of grasses. Areas of mixed green, yellow, white and brown dots showed where there had recently been burning, though the vegetation was growing back. Six dotted circles at the top and bottom of the picture were waterholes, which may have been great distances from the hill, to which Nosepeg and his people would journey. One waterhole, at the bottom right of the picture, obviously different from the others and more delicately painted, may have been more sacred.

  I liked the way this picture was unframed, just hung lopsided from a nail in the wall, and I puzzled over it, wondering why Nosepeg would have given away his secrets like this in a painting whitefellas would see. But then perhaps that is exactly what it was: a puzzle, encoded in dots to keep us guessing, or imagining. It was like the Mappa Mundi, a chart and expression of the world of Nosepeg as he saw and experienced it: his home owl-country. What I liked about it was the abstract way it rendered the landscape as a single organism, like the cross-section of a plant stem seen under a microscope, every dot a cell. It made a strange landscape even stranger, and that first night in Latz’s house I had been unable to take my eyes off it. It expressed an inner life and a way of seeing so apparently different from my own that the more I looked at it, the more its painted pixels seemed to challenge me, like a riddle or a maze. The way the picture was hung, I realized, was exactly right: it was the Aboriginal way with things. They are not in the habit of attaching much mere money value to objects. That such paintings can fetch high prices on the international art market is said to be a source of private amusement to many of the painters themselves.

  On the kitchen wall, next to one of the knitted woollen beanies Latz likes to wear pulled down over his ears in the desert winters, was a permanent list of the things he needed to take with him on his expeditions ‘out bush’: hat, torch, swag, book, towel, clothes, rucksack, glasses. Film, freezer, camera, shoes, aloe vera, plant-collecting press, diary, map, spare camera and battery, thermos. It had rained heavily in the desert for the first time in several years, and Latz was planning an expedition to see what plants had come up, and which trees and bushes flowered or fruited out there.

  Next day we drove into Alice Springs to buy ice and provisions for the journey out west towards Glen Helen Gorge and the Finke River. Back in Latz’s yard, we loaded his Toyota truck with our swags, mosquito nets, rucksacks, camping gear and his precious botanical pressing boards. We filled water cans and crammed ice and raw food into the Esky freezer. In the best nomadic traditions of the central deserts, Latz clearly spent most of his time on the road, or rather off it, in a four-wheel-drive: all we had to do with most of the gear was lift it in boxes straight out of a garage shed. There was even a small folding table, and a canvas chair for each of us. The very sight of a four-wheel-drive is usually enough to send me into a green rage, but, as we pulled away, crammed in the cab of the big, dusty ute, moving along the line of rugged hills to the west, fording the great desert rivers – the Hugh, the Ellery and at last the Finke – this suddenly seemed the most natural means of transport in the world.

  Near Glen Helen, where the Finke River goes through a gap in the Macdonnell Ranges and heads south towards the Simpson Desert and Lake Eyre, we turned northward upstream and wound along on the rocks and sand of its upper bed, thro
ugh big river red gums. The Finke is said to be the oldest river in the world. Its course has not changed for a million years, and it was once the size of the Amazon. Since the drying of the centre, it has largely gone underground, yet certain water holes along its course generally retain water, and after heavy rains it will periodically flood. The rains a week or two earlier had brought the Finke to life, and the string of river creeks near where we camped were full of clear, deep water. River red gums always delineate the course of rivers, growing along the banks and in the sandy river beds, where they not only withstand deep floods from time to time but need them. The early explorers of the interior who came this way, men like Thomas Mitchell or Ernest Giles, soon learnt to discern the courses of rivers in the landscape ahead from the river red gums along their banks.

  Thirst is a natural condition of life in the desert, and trees have always been used to mark waterholes, or as a source of water themselves. A stone would be placed in a niche in the trunk, a sign carved in the bark, or the trunk painted with ochre. This could mean one of two things: that you could dig for water close by the tree, or that certain trees themselves contained rainwater that would trickle down the branches and collect in the cool tank of a hollow trunk. It would be sucked out through a hollow stem, or squeezed out of a mop made of a ball of grass on the end of a stick and dipped in. As children at Hermannsburg, Latz and his friends never carried water on their wanderings but would know where to dig for it. But there were other ways to get water from trees. In an account of one of his expeditions in the arid lands, Thomas Mitchell writes:

  How the natives existed in this parched country was the question. We saw that around many trees the roots had been taken up, and we found them without the bark, and cut into short clubs or billets, but for what purpose we could not then discover … I expressed my thirst and want of water. Looking as if they understood me, they hastened to resume their work, and I discovered that they dug up the roots for the sake of drinking the sap. It appeared that they first cut these roots into billets and then stripped off the bark or rind, which they sometimes chew, after which, holding up the billet and applying one end to the mouth, they let the juice drop into it.

  A similar technique involves cutting three-foot lengths of root and standing them overnight in a container, always with the cut ends from nearest the trunk facing downwards. In his 1889 classic The Useful Native Plants of Australia, J. H. Maiden describes a drink known as beal or bool, prepared in tarnuks (the large wooden bowls ‘seen in every camp’) by steeping the flowers of banksia or ironwood trees in water.

  We camped in the sands of the upper river bank in the shade of a grove of gigantic river red gums, taking care not to place ourselves directly beneath any branches: they have a habit of suddenly dropping off. Until nightfall, the sand was too hot to walk on barefoot, but then it was luxurious: soft and liquid, each grain perfectly rounded by age. We had stopped by a patch of mulga bushes on the way and gathered dead branches for firewood. Plenty of dead wood debris, washed down and left as flotsam by the river, lay about around the camp, but sand fills the pores of the wood and it burns less readily. Mulga burns hard and hot, and leaves good ash for cooking.

  Fifty yards across the hot sand of the river bed was a delicious clear, deep waterhole, where we swam. On the opposite bank, in the top of a river red gum, a pair of wedge-tailed eagles were nesting, seizing the advantage of the mass of birds and animals flocking to the river. I floated on my back, gazing up at one of the eagles. We fished too and caught spangled grunters, Australian perch, which had suddenly filled the Finke waterholes since the rains, hatching from dormant eggs and growing at an astonishing speed. Latz said there were ten or eleven different species of fish in the Finke, all of which had the opportunist ability of every desert animal and plant to seize the moment the rains came. They hatched, grew amazingly fast, bred and buried more eggs in the sand to carry their species beyond the next drought.

  The trunk of the red gum we chose to shade us was at least six feet across and ragged with torn red bark, hanging off in strips. It was well over sixty feet high and spread quite as wide, its mottled, reddish upper branches twisting and coiling like Baroque carvings into dense foliage. The tree was alive with nesting budgerigars and ring-necked parrots. Each pair of birds had claimed the stub end of its own hollowed branch, a kind of natural didgeridoo tunnelled out by termites attracted by the sugar in the eucalyptus sap. The organ-pipe effect seemed to amplify the massed choirs of a bird I had always known as a rather annoying species of attention-seeking chirpy-chappie pecking a tiny mirror in a cage. It was like camping under an English petshop. Like other parrots, the budgerigars used their beaks as well as claws to climb all over the tree, often upside down. Green gales of them wheeled and dived along the river bed and disappeared into the foliage, chirruping excitedly. They are nomadic, sensing where the rain and food are and flocking enormous distances across Australia to nest and swell their numbers. Latz said the massive roots of these gums will draw up to a ton of water a day through the tree during floods to ensure enough growth to withstand the next inundation. According to J. H. Maiden, red gum was highly valued for its strength and durability, especially for piles and posts in damp ground. ‘It is also used’, he writes, ‘for shipbuilding, railway sleepers, bridges, wharves, and numerous other purposes. This timber is exceedingly hard when dry; this limits its use for furniture.’ The tough, sinewy, snaking habit of the tree made its timber particularly useful for the knees and angled joints in wooden boats.

  Latz’s botanist friend Dave Albrecht and his wife Sarah came and joined us in the camp with their little daughter, Erimea, and we dined on the excellent spangled grunters, grilled over the fire, which we kept going, for illumination as well as a billy of bedtime tea. It also kept away the mosquitoes.

  I had rigged a net, borrowed from Latz, from a mulga bush overhanging my swag and reclined in it on my back like a pasha, gazing up at the night sky through the fine gauze with a smug reassurance that the mosquitoes queuing and whining just the other side of it couldn’t reach me. Then I focused on the net itself and realized it was riddled with little cigarette burns. I did some hasty rearrangement. Latz confessed next day that he used to lie in his swag smoking before he gave it up and began chewing pituri instead. It is traditionally the Aboriginal stimulant of choice, concocted from the dried leaves of one of four species of the pituri plant, Nicotiana, ground up with the ash of at least twelve species of plant or tree, including tea-tree wood. Nicotiana is of course the same genus as the commercial tobacco plant, Nicotiana gossei being the most prized for pituri, closely followed by Nicotiana excelsior. According to Latz, the ash seems to promote the rapid absorption of the nicotine into the bloodstream through the thin tissues of the lips and mouth, and possibly even through the skin behind the ear, where the quid is usually kept when not in use. Pituri was probably the most important item of trade among the Aboriginal people of the desert and was carried over long distances until at least the late 1940s, when Latz remembers a Hermannsburg man, Tamulju, returning from an expedition with the ethnologist Arthur Groom with camel-loads of wild pituri leaves. He became a rich man for a while. Latz searched the Macdonnell Ranges for years in vain, looking for Nicotiana excelsior, until a fire burnt the spinifex grasses on some limestone rises, and large stands of Nicotiana came up soon after. The seeds had been buried there all the time, just waiting. Aboriginal people, Latz said, seem to have been making use of the nicotine in these wild tobacco plants since long before Raleigh brought tobacco to Europe.

  The others were still asleep as I wriggled out of my sleeping bag at daybreak and quietly wandered over the soft sand, studying the delicate lacework of last night’s tracks: skink, goanna, snake, kangaroo mouse, beetle, millipede. The slanting early sun drew tiny shadows along the contours that would soon evaporate like dreams as the fine sand rolled back to evenness in the slight breeze. Drawing a square of the etched desert in my notebook, I thought of the excitement of going out into the m
eadows in Suffolk after a fresh fall of snow: the busy thoroughfares of the night revealed. People sometimes describe a desert as ‘trackless’, but of course there is no such thing. The art of desert living, especially for small creatures, is to conserve and retain as much water as possible in their bodies, so they tend to live down cool burrows and emerge only at night. Along a sandy ridge overlooking our camp I found the fresh tracks of a dingo that shadowed our camp, hoping to find scraps but always keeping out of sight.

  By the time I returned, Latz had a billy boiling on the campfire and Ramona was swimming in the river. The more Latz talked about Aboriginal culture, the more I began to realize how much had been lost. He and his childhood friends at Hermannsburg learnt to be desert botanists from an early age. All nomadic people living in central Australia had to be first-rate botanists and ecologists just to survive. They needed to know which plants, fruits or seeds to eat, which parts of them would be nourishing, which plants were poisonous or could be used as hunting poisons, which plants needed cooking, which plants were medicine for particular ailments, which had religious significance and were used in ceremonies. They needed to know how to extract water from the roots and hollows of trees, or the stems of plants, and how to find proteins or sugars in grubs hidden inside trees. The larvae of a large cossid moth, often found in the trunks of river red gums, constitute an important part of the traditional diet. As a child, Latz remembers collecting, with his Aboriginal friends, about twenty-five witchetty grubs from one tree in an hour or so of leisurely work, locating their boreholes and fishing them out with the hooked wiry stem of the curly windmill grass. River red gums also supplied the Aboriginal coolamons, carrying bowls carved out of the boles or crooked roots, and sometimes the bark. Hardly a single one of Latz’s Arrernte childhood friends from Hermannsburg was still alive. He remarked sadly, ‘The grog got them all.’