Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  Latz and Dave elected me to carry the plant-pressing boards, and we set off across the scrubby desert, heading towards a distant mound spring my companions thought might be sprouting some interesting plants after the rains. We picked our way through spinifex, the dense, bristling tussocks of porcupine grass that dominate the central Australian deserts and positively thrive on fire. Mulga, by far the most widespread tree or shrub, grew in dense stands on the hard, gravelly, red earth. Both plants are central to Aboriginal life in the deserts: mulga for its nourishing seeds and tough wood, spinifex for a plastic adhesive and filler that is made by grinding and heating its resinous stems. Mulga wood is easily worked when green, but seasons into unsplittable toughness, so is by far the most important material for making implements: spear blades, boomerangs, shields, digging sticks, adzes, fighting clubs, spears and sacred tjuringas. Even ash from the burnt twigs is mixed with pituri. As an acacia, mulga produces plenty of seed in leguminous pods. Cleaned, roasted and ground into a paste that looks and tastes like peanut butter, they are quite as nutritious.

  We advanced slowly, botanizing as we went, now and again folding a specimen plant between the collecting boards while Latz wrote notes and assigned it a number. He was up to 15,418 that day. That is how many plants he had collected over twenty-five years.

  ‘About forty of them have been new to science,’ he added. There is even an acacia named after him: Latz’s Wattle, Acacia latzii. All these plants and trees were strange to me, and I tried to work out what difference it made to the way I saw them before and after Latz or Dave taught me their names. Knowing their names, being formally introduced to them, seemed to bring me one step closer to them. It was like meeting people.

  Picking our way down aisles between bushes, avoiding the webs of the brilliant-green, gem-like orb spiders slung between them, we ate the sweet little black fruit of the conkleberry and found bush bananas, bush tomatoes and the desert incense bush, whose scent attracts moths at night. The salty mound spring, when we reached it, seemed to be sweating in the heat, water oozing and trickling down tiny gullies where the purple cryola, favourite food of the all but extinct hare wallabies that once lived here, coloured the gravel. A tiny desert wren sang like a squeaky gate. Dingos had been here too, licking the salt and water, printing tracks. The small white volcano holes of spiders stood out in the sandy seepage pan round the spring under desert samphire, another useful food plant, and we sucked the little red berries of the ruby salt bush, which Aboriginal children gather as sweets. Beyond the spring, we came into a big natural bowl full of yalka, a kind of sedge with grassy leaves, whose roots end in small, nutty-tasting bulbs. You roast them lightly by rolling them about in a wooden bowl with hot charcoal. Everywhere in the sand, the holes of snakes, skinks and goannas stared back. Almost everything we saw had a use. A willowy ironwood tree was being wrapped by an army of processional caterpillars. Latz said that in Aboriginal medicine, the silk they spin is valued as a second skin to seal and dress burns.

  ‘Suppose you couldn’t see a single tree. How would you find water?’ I asked Latz and Albrecht. ‘You would have to kill a wallaby or something, rub the meat with plenty of salt and stake it out. You can always find salt in the desert. Then you hide up and watch. Sooner or later a crow comes down and gorges itself on the salted meat. The salt makes it thirsty, so it flies off to the nearest waterhole. Crows always fly in a straight line. You follow, keeping to that line. Eventually you’ll find water.’

  That night around the fire, Latz sat writing up his plant notes by head torch. He talked about the Finke and how dangerous it could be when it flooded, bringing a surging bore alive with rampant uprooted trees and branches. As it first charges down the dry, sandy bed, the river feels its way with a slender foot-long tongue of water that slips over the sand ahead of the wall of the flood. River red gums wait for this moment to open their seed capsules and shower millions of their tiny yellow seeds into the swirling brown water; stranded along the outer limits of the flood, they germinate in the organic debris. Women and girls use the seed capsules to decorate their hair by folding over the ends and cramming them with a twig into the nut cavity. They also tuck bunches of the leaves into their arm- and leg-bands to rattle rhythmically during ceremonial dances.

  Some day, said Latz, he would like to raft right down the Finke River in flood, from its beginnings south of the Tanami Desert, all the way to the Simpson Desert, and on down the Macumba River into the vastness of Lake Eyre. The fire was having its effect as we gazed into it and dreamt or remembered. Camping 200 miles away in sandhills on the edge of a plain covered in the most elegant desert oaks, Ramona and I had sat before a campfire a few days earlier as giant white centipedes three or four inches long emerged one after another out of the desert darkness and raced madly round and round the fire in a frenzied dance. Energized by the fire, they skipped almost right over our toes, which we instinctively withdrew, though blissfully ignorant of the poisonous, painful bite they could administer.

  Latz began to talk of the great deserts: the Simpson, the Gibson and the Tanami, where he loved to go for weeks at a time, sometimes accompanied by the artist John Wolseley on walk-about from his studio home in Leatherarse Gully. There had been photographs on Latz’s kitchen wall of Wolseley in wide-brimmed Akubra and cotton jacket, seated on a canvas chair at an easel outside a wiltja of canvas sheeting stretched from a mulga bush. On one of their expeditions together, Wolseley had asked Latz to take him into the Gibson Desert, which he wanted to paint. They went west of Haast’s Bluff and made camp, where Wolseley proceeded to spend a week drawing and painting a rare desert plant before once raising his glance to the horizon. He was getting the hang of the place, engaging with it, working from detail as he always did, trusting to his instincts as artist and naturalist to provide the connections and an overview all in good time. On another occasion, he buried painted canvases in the desert, returning a year later to unearth them. This was Wolseley’s way of working: to camp in a place, often for weeks or months on end, keep a journal every day, and record every detail of the natural phenomena he encountered and observed. Through the patient acquisition of an intimacy with the land, Wolseley had evolved a kind of fusion: a language of painting that was much closer to the Aboriginal ways of seeing and feeling and at the same time full of scientific detail and limitless curiosity.

  The conversation drifted round to cockatoos. We talked about our mutual friend back in Sydney, Tony Barrell, who had made a documentary about a flamboyant Queenslander, the brother of Joe Cocker, and entitled it ‘I’m a Cocker Too’. Cocker’s nephew Jarvis had agreed to help him make the sequel next time he toured Australia. Tony said he would call it ‘I’m a Cocker Too 2’.

  It was late. The budgerigars were all asleep in the big red gum up above, and somewhere along the river bed, the mopoke was calling again. We fell silent and Latz leant back, dozing off, dreaming, roosting in his chair before the embers like the fire-bird he really was inside: the red-tailed black cockatoo.

  Utopia

  It was Sunday, the appointed day of the bush-plum hunt, and Ramona, Theo, Kemarre and I had been up half the night preparing a big picnic stew to take with us, according to the custom. Ramona and I had driven the 150 miles out of Alice a day or two earlier to the remote Aboriginal community at Utopia, where we were staying with her friend Theo, the nurse at the Urapuntja health clinic. ‘Utopia it ain’t,’ the man at the petrol station in Alice had said. Theo said the place took its name from the cattle station that was once here and either expressed the early settlers’ naive optimism or a well-developed sense of irony. A book written in Latin by Sir Thomas More and published in 1516 with a title that translates as ‘Nowhere City’ wouldn’t be the first thing that came to mind out here unless, of course, you had a lot of time on your hands.

  A few Indian-looking cattle still wandered the bush around Utopia disconsolately searching for the odd blade of desert grass, but the whole area had been grazed into oblivion years ago. The Utopi
ans, mostly of the Alyawarre and Anmatyerre groups, are famous for their painters, in particular a group of female artists who included the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Her work takes pride of place in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and in leading collections all over the world. Although art is now the main economic activity in Utopia, and Aboriginal art has become a lucrative department of the international art market, nobody in Utopia appeared to be getting particularly rich. Emily was said to have earned thousands of dollars a day from her painting, yet always gave away her earnings to an extended family of some eighty relatives who had come to depend on her. She ended her life living on the same old bed under her tarpaulin wiltja in Utopia. At Alice, the famous painter Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri now lives in a humpy in the dry bed of the Todd River, all his painting money dissipated among countless relatives.

  Kemarre, a Lutheran missionary in his early thirties, lived alone in a caravan in the badlands beyond the health clinic and was here to translate the Old Testament into Alyawarre, one of the two main languages of the people here. We found him delightful company: kind, funny, a good linguist, and well versed in Aboriginal ways. He had got as far as Exodus, with the help of an old Alyawarre man, Frank Taylor, who sat down with him in the caravan for four hours every day to work through the text. That left thirty-seven books to do. Kemarre, one of the four main Alyawarre skin names, had been temporarily conferred on the missionary and was likely to stick. Kemarre’s real name, David, could on no account be mentioned because someone by the same name in the community had recently died. By the same token, a book about the women painters of Utopia lying open on Theo’s kitchen table contained several pages covered up because they bore the name or photograph of a dead person. Such are the conventions of Aboriginal society.

  One such convention was that on a bush-plum hunt, it was the natural role of the whitefellas to provide the transport and the meat, preferably prepared in advance and pre-cooked in a stew. As nurse to a community of 2,000 Alyawarre and Anmatyerre people scattered about the Utopia area in some twenty-five outstations and small family groups, Theo knew just about everyone. Her dog Mitchell, a species of black cattle dog with alert, pointed ears, lay outside on the front doormat. There were dogs everywhere in Utopia, most of them half dingo, and hungry.

  We put the stew and picnic things in two Toyota trucks and drove over to Kurrajong Camp to pick up the others. The dogs came out to meet us: thirty or forty mangy, skeletal, aimless creatures that ran nearly under our wheels, rolled in the dust, nibbled their fleas and cruised the camp in a pack looking in vain for some action. Four men sat on the roof of an extinct Falcon 500 propped up on wheel hubs. More cars rusted away under some ironwood trees. An old Holden full of dead firewood that stuck out of the windows like snipers’ rifles was parked in the sun.

  We found Mary Kemarre sitting in her wiltja on a big bed supported on a rusting roof rack raised on ten-gallon oil drums and wheel hubs. ‘You got the tucker?’ she said. ‘Yeah, plenty,’ said Theo. The children led us proudly to a clutch of new puppies living down a hole in the ground beneath one of the beds. They reached into the hole up to their armpits and brought out the blind puppies one after another, clutching them inexpertly by a leg or a tail, hauling them into their embrace for us to admire. A well-marked tabby cat with an unusually long tail lay with her kittens under another bed under the trees. ‘Some of this country is important dog-dreaming, so nobody can touch the dogs,’ said Theo. The dogs had the status of sacred cows. ‘The police came out to shoot some of them but the elders told them to go away.’ Kemarre said that during the church services, which are always held outdoors, there can be sudden, explosive dog fights and everyone scatters. The women sleep with the dogs to keep warm on cold nights, hence the expression ‘two-dog night’ or ‘three-dog night’ as an indication of the temperature. All the dogs had names too – Army, White One, Red One – and everyone was obviously very fond of them, even though they hadn’t much notion that they might be suffering or carrying disease. ‘Why,’ said Theo, ‘when 850 million dollars a year are spent on the Aboriginal health care programme, is no money at all spent on sending vets to care for the dogs, which we’re told are “culturally important” to Aboriginal people?’

  Mary, who was clearly the senior woman in the camp, called her friends over, and we sat and talked and stroked the puppies before setting off. We were quite a gang. Kemarre, who spoke fluent Anmatyerre and Alyawarre, was our translator. One of Ramona’s daughters, training to be a doctor, had worked all the previous year at the Utopia clinic, so we were warmly welcomed. Besides Mary and Theo, our hunting party consisted of Audrey, Lily, Tracy, Kylie, her infant Serrick and Audrey’s sister Sarah. The women had all been dancing and singing in a ceremony until late in the night and were still full of elation and laughter. Large numbers of empty yoghurt pots were hastily thrown in a plastic bag as coolamons for fruit-gathering, and we all piled into the two trucks and set off. ‘Kwaty,’ said Mary, pointing to some tiny clouds forming over to the north in the clear sky. She thought it might rain in a day or two. Kwaty means ‘water’ as well as ‘cloud’, and in Alyawarre, ‘raining’ is kwatyrntweyel: ‘water dancing’.

  We drove along a rough track into open sand plains dotted with spinifex, mulga bushes, ghost gums and termite mounds. The women missed nothing, spotting goanna tracks from the moving truck and even discussing how fresh they were and whether the big perenti lizards would be worth chasing. Rounding a bend past a corkwood copse, I had to swerve to avoid an extinct Holden smack in the middle of the track. Then, all together, the women cried, ‘Akatyerre’, and commanded us to stop. Along the sides of the track, bush raisins were growing, and everybody piled out and began filling the yoghurt pots with the shrivelled brown fruit. The desert raisin, a foot-high shrub with purple flowers and soft leaves, is actually a member of the tomato family, Solanum nemophilum. Like so many of the desert plants, it depends entirely on periodic fire for its survival and will simply disappear in the absence of regular burning.

  Back in the Toyotas, we struck out across country, snaking between termite mounds of ochre adobe standing up two or three feet like Gaudí parapets, and concrete-hard. We also had to avoid the risk of punctures from splintered tree roots or spinifex. When William Dampier first landed in Australia on his voyage in the Roebuck in 1699 and saw termite mounds, he thought they were rocks. He writes: ‘There were several Things like Hay-cocks, standing in the Savannah; which at a distance we thought were Houses, looking just like the Hottentot’s Houses at the Cape of G. Hope: but we found them to be so many rocks.’

  Again, a cry went up from the women, pointing towards a distant stand of trees and bushes. ‘Alkwa’: bush plums. We threaded our way off piste through more of the termite stalagmites towards the ten-foot bushes, which, sure enough, were covered in ripe black fruit the size of small olives. Santalum lanceolatum is an important food for Aboriginal people all over central Australia, and its fruit contains high concentrations of Vitamin C. It is also an important totemic plant for the Arandic peoples, even though, as T. G. H. Strehlow relates in Songs of Central Australia, its sacred place, the bush-plum holy of holies, was desecrated by the early European settlers.

  The women broke off mulga branches and used them as brooms to sweep the sandy ground encircled by the trees with meticulous care before spreading out picnic blankets and building a fire. We all collected dead mulga wood, and the fire was laid in no time. Once our hearth had built up plenty of glowing embers, Mary and her friends set the stew on it. Mary assumed command, taking control of the cooking quite naturally, as though she herself had been slaving over a hot stove most of the night before. The sweeping of the ground seemed to me an eloquent expression of the extent to which these nomad people regarded the desert as their home. They swept the red earth with as much care as I might sweep my kitchen at home. Aboriginals have a morbid fear of snakes and will always clear the ground around a camp, however temporary, so that tracks will show up in the dirt. Mary and
Kemarre told the story of a recent open-air church service in their camp. The congregation was singing lustily from their Lutheran song-book, when someone spotted a snake track. The service instantly came to a halt while the reptile was hunted down and killed. The Aboriginal way with snakes is to stone them with deadly accuracy.

  As the stew began to bubble on the glowing mulga, Mary detailed Ramona, Theo, Kemarre and I with yoghurt-pot coolamons to pick plums. Our performance, under the critical eyes of the women, was not impressive. The fruit kept sticking to our fingers instead of dropping into the pot, and we soon covered ourselves in the adhesive purple flesh of ripe bush plum. Our companions, I noticed, showed a sudden surprising absence of enthusiasm for the fruit, preferring to relax round the fire and pass round a soup spoon, sampling the meat with the air of connoisseurs. When at last we returned with our plastic coolamons duly filled, their contents were decanted briskly into saucepans and billy cans. The fruit was sweet but slightly bland, and you spat out the tiny stone. Little Serrick ate rather too many of them, but discipline, in Aboriginal families, is never administered by the mother but by the father, the aunts or paternal grandmother, who is more powerful than her maternal counterpart. A mother would never cause her child to cry. In this group, Mary’s authority was absolute. As an older woman, she had high status and was in charge of certain dreamings that she had inherited with the land to which they were connected, down the female side of the family. She also took charge of the increase ceremonies, which ensured the renewal of plants and animals and the continuance of the camp and family group, thriving and hunting successfully. As we all sat round the fire enjoying the stew, Kemarre interpreted for us. At one point Mary complimented him on his Alyawarre. ‘You are losing your English, Kemarre,’ she said.