by Kim Mahood
Crossing the border back into the Territory, my childhood rushes to meet me. The colours begin to intensify, the light sharpens. I begin to feel something in my bones and nerves and viscera. I would not describe it as an emotion. It is more like a chemical reaction, as if a certain light and temperature and dryness triggers a series of physical and nervous realignments. I stop the car, get out and walk a little distance away from the road. My pulse rate is up, everything takes on a hallucinatory clarity. I sit first, breathing deeply, then stretch full length, inhaling the smell of dry grass and earth, feeling the texture of grains of dirt along my bare arms. It is almost too much, this sense of belonging, of coming home. I roll onto my back and lie staring at the sky, which is punctuated with a few strands of high winter cloud. Sam jumps off the back of the ute, digs himself a hole near the back wheel and settles down to wait.
The great Australian myth of the Outback takes on another dimension here. It is impossible to live in the Territory without being in some way touched by its mythology. It seduces with its hints of the unattainable, the dark heart of the continent, frontier country. Its glamour has been marketed, packaged and sold, and pilgrims come from everywhere to pay homage. But beneath the superficiality of tourist gloss is an older, harder reality. The land here is stronger than the people. Once it has staked its claim, it does not relinquish it.
I lie on the earth and look into the blue immensity of the sky, and the questions ask themselves.
Why can t you live here?
Why did you leave?
When I was a child at boarding school I became aware of the gulf between the city and the bush. Each side held all sorts of derogatory assumptions about the other. The city was a stinking, crowded, polluted hotbed of ill-informed left-wing intellectuals, politicians and conservationists. It was a place of crime, corruption and distrust, where neighbours didn’t speak to one another and you couldn’t let your kids play in the streets. City people were swayed by the fickle winds of media opinion, out of touch with practical realities and addicted to material excess and soft living.
The country, on the other hand, was an intellectual desert full of bigots, racists and rednecks who bulldozed the last existing stands of ancient forest through pure bloody-mindedness. If they no longer organised hunting parties to shoot down Aborigines, they still thought it was a good idea. The macho ideals of manhood ruled supreme, shored up by alcohol and violence. Country people were ill-informed, unsophisticated, attached to a romanticised notion of rugged individualism and resistant to change and new ideas.
There was an additional element in the urban view of the country. At a certain point it ceased to be the country and became the Outback, a mythical zone of spiritual possibilities and marvellous landscape. It harboured primordial secrets, and it cast a curious grace on all those who lived in it or passed through it.
It took me a long time to shed the attitudes of my own childhood. I discovered that I loved cities, the bigger the better. I even enjoyed the company of left-wing intellectuals. My own attitudes and values were challenged continually, and while I did not abandon them I modified them radically. And yet there was something missing in the assessment my city friends made of the country. There was little understanding of a dignity, an integrity, a stoic perseverance that seemed to me admirable even when it was attached to opinions I no longer shared. And there was a romanticism, a sentimentality in relation to the landscape and the Aborigines, which also sat uncomfortably, and which had nothing to do with the reality of what I remembered.
As long as I stay away from the country I grew up in, I can manage these contradictions. When I come back to it I feel like an imposter. The people of the world to which I once belonged treat me as if I am one of them, assume that I understand the intricacies and difficulties of their lives as no outsider can. And of course I do. I am sucked back into the world which shaped me, with its harsh imperatives, its black humour and subtle understandings. It reclaims me, and the divisions no longer exist outside me but are inside, laying equal claim on my allegiances.
It is simply too uncomfortable. I cannot resolve the contradictions. In fact I don’t believe they should be resolved. This is an age when such contradictions are the reality of the time. I have neither the physical stamina nor the moral fibre to live all the time with them actively confronting each other. I can manage it for short bursts, and then I must retreat to where the turmoil can settle and the ambiguities transform themselves into a creative tension with which I can engage.
There is no middle ground. In the softer coastal fringes I found something flexible and cosmopolitan which felt like another sort of homecoming. But there is no substitute for the true inland, the edge of the desert.
THE OLD ROADHOUSES OF Barry Caves and Frewena are gone, replaced by a great green glossy BP service station with a shop full of tourist bric-a-brac. I refuel and drive on a few kilometres before pulling off the road to brew coffee. Intellectually I appreciate the surrealism of these space stations in the landscape, and no doubt they are more efficient than their predecessors; but their ugliness, inside and out, has a stridency which distresses me.
Across the Barkly Tablelands the dark blue bitumen road goes on forever, until it hits the T-junction of the Three Ways. Somebody once told me of directions given to a family who had arrived by ship in Perth and whose final destination was Townsville. Go straight ahead until you get to Port Augusta. Turn left and keep going until you reach Three Ways. Then turn right and keep going until you hit the coast.
The car seems to be okay as long as I don’t go over ninety kilometres per hour. All afternoon the sky around the sun has been a curious pinkish colour, striped with indigo clouds. As I turn left at Three Ways, perpendicular ranks of cloud begin to march at great speed. The sky blazes into a sunset so spectacular it is absurd, and I drive laughing into a flamboyance of gold and bronze and pink and silver and fathomless blue.
I camp at the Devil’s Marbles, which have been fenced in. There is a designated camp ground and I follow the signs obediently. The old anarchic days when we pulled off the side of the road, threw down our swags and camped where we liked are over. The camp ground is neatly demarcated with a low timber railing, and for a moment I think I have arrived on another planet. I am in a village of white four-wheel drives and white caravans, and no people. The sun has gone, and the great piles of granite stones hold the light, releasing it slowly. There is a hum of generators. Inside the caravans I can see the flicker of television screens. Here in the sublime dusk a mobile suburbia has come to a halt.
Sam goes off to pee on the wondrous array of car and caravan wheels while I light a fire and drop the side of the utility tray out into a ready-made kitchen bench. Here and there a face moves across the yellow light of a window, watching, as I prepare my meal by the light of the slowly dimming stones. Later a battered and overloaded station wagon pulls in, carrying three raffish-looking kids. They drag blankets and bundles out of the vehicle and crawl off among the rocks to sleep. I am glad of them and their disregard of fences and prohibitions.
6
IT IS A BRIGHT WINTER DAY when I arrive in Alice. The air is sharp and luminous. If I have a home town, it is Alice Springs. It contains for me the childhood memories I recognise in Australian writers, the petty classroom cruelties, the sound of crows, the smell of asphalt and dust, the notion that some sinister grace separates Catholics from non-Catholics.
I came here as a seven year old, when the population was about three thousand. Today there are traffic lights at the causeway crossing of the Todd River, but the air has the same crisp eucalypt smell I remember. We used to stand on the footbridge when the Todd came down, egging on adventurous and foolhardy drivers to make a dash before the river got too high. Someone always took up the challenge and more often than not was washed off the causeway, becoming the centre of a major rescue operation. We took this as a personal achievement. The river used to come down in a tumbling creamy flood, with a head of foam on it like a schooner
of freshly pulled beer. For a few days the town side and the East side would be divided. School would be disrupted as the Aboriginal students from St Mary’s hostel and kids from the Gap and the industrial area couldn’t make it across the river to the East side school.
But it happened all too rarely in those years of entrenched, continual drought. Mostly we rode our bicycles across the dusty flat to the school, barefoot and scabby-kneed, attuned as lizards to our arid world. All the years of my childhood were dry years. Old people talked of a green time when the rainfall in a year was twenty-five inches and more. We drought children did not believe them. Our reality was of dust storms turning the sky into a red dome, and of scalded-looking yards of yellow grass and the wide dry sandy bed of the Todd River. The green years came back in the seventies, but it is impossible to put aside the sense that drought is the true condition of this country, that the sudden bursts of rainfall and growth are cosmetic and transient.
I take a turn after the causeway crossing and drive along the street we lived in. It is much shorter than I remembered, the encircling ranges closer, pinker and higher. The river red gum seedlings my father planted thirty years ago dominate the street. I look at the house as it stands now, ramshackle and overshadowed by the big red gums, the oleander hedge luxuriant and poisonous. In the back yard, which I can’t see, lurks the furred, malevolent presence of my first horse, an evil Shetland named Happy. Even now the word carries overtones for me of the rolled-back white of an eye and something subversive and unpredictable.
I can see my mother crouching with a broomstick, trying to prize my brother out from the brick chimney foundation under the house. She is howling threats as to what she will do to him when she gets hold of him. He scuttles out of the alcove and deep into the spider-infested darkness under the house. At this point my mother abandons the broom and begins shying rocks in an attempt to flush him out. It is quite probable that I am standing by handing the rocks to her. He makes a sudden dash and escapes over the back fence, my mother close behind, yelling—Wait till I catch you, you bloody little swine!
These are the days when my brother Bob and I are arch enemies. He can reduce me to a blind, murderous rage simply by pulling faces, and because he is small and very fast I rarely catch him. I revenge myself after nightfall, when he is in the outdoor lavatory with the car lights switched on to illuminate the dark stretch of the back yard. He has invented a kind of monster called a gark, and these cluster in the smelly darkness of the lavatory. I dash out and flick off the lights and scream—Garks! at the top of my voice, and my brother howls with terror and bolts for the safety of the house.
THE RANGE TO THE SOUTH of the town has subtleties of texture and colour that seduce and excite my painter’s eye. This aesthetic response drives home to me the fact that I have been away too long. There was a time when the notion of beauty would not have entered my head, when it was simply my place. I did not know it was beautiful, but I knew the bends in the riverbed and the stony tracks and gorges through the hills. Even now my memories are of the way the shadows fell on rock, and the way the dust came up over the ranges like red smoke.
Now I pay homage like any other stranger.
MY FRIEND PAM LIVES ON THE East side, in a part of Alice Springs which has not changed much, although the saltbush and claypan area we called the Swamp has been built on, and the dusty flat near the school is a grassy playing field.
In Pam’s yard the citrus trees are laden with fruit, thin-skinned mandarins and the addictively sweet oranges which grow here. The scent of oranges assails me with nostalgia. In the morning the sun filters through slatted blinds and strikes bands of light on the yellow wall. This is the light I remember from childhood. I took it for granted, that such light was a part of life, that light and space were a given.
A small green and grey bird is bouncing in the terracotta birdbath. His voice is very big and resonant for such a small bird, a three-syllable statement made with great emphasis. He falls backwards into the birdbath, and flies away in a flurry at my burst of laughter. Today for the first time in months I feel no anxiety. Something has lifted, this light has got through. In between the hard new shapes the old town survives. It is the light which draws it all together and makes it a town I can remember.
Pam is an artist whose personal philosophy places her very much on the side of the Aboriginal community and against the pastoral industry and what it stands for. To her I can speak about the contradictions and difficulties which confront me, but nevertheless they remain as acknowledged differences between us that push me sometimes into defensiveness and irritation. Last night we talked about the culture of the town. Of course we talked about Aborigines, and of course I sounded off with all sorts of opinions. I woke up this morning thinking—Shut up, Kim.
I get in touch with my friend the mechanic, who identifies the problem with the car as a worn distributor spline. The morning is spent tracking down a second-hand distributor, which he installs for me.
Tomorrow I go north-west.
MOST OF MY VERY EARLY memories are of travelling through an essentially flat landscape, studded with patches of low scrub, sometimes with grass, sometimes without, and always somewhere on the horizon a blue range or escarpment or series of hills. The colour would deepen to purple as we got closer and then turn into flat-topped red sandstone or green and yellow spinifex cover or something equally unpredictable. Slowly the mysterious, uniform, transparent blue that was only slightly deeper in intensity than the sky would solidify, become opaque and textured. Details would emerge, a watercourse or track, vegetation, rocks, colours, an accumulation and refinement of texture which obliterated the dreamlike distance. When I remembered to do it, I would turn and watch as we travelled past and away, until the range or hill was reclaimed by distance and retreated again into the transparent realms of possibility and imagination.
The range which today cuts its blue template along the western horizon is the Stuart Bluff Range. It lies like a series of wedges, end to end, making a tidy saw-toothed edge of the horizon. Mt Wedge Station is named for the highest of the hills, Central Mt Wedge. It was owned by one of the original members of the stock route land party, Bill Waudby, and is run now by his son. I make camp along the turnoff track and puncture a tyre when I pull off the road into the mulga scrub. There is still plenty of light, so I unload some gear and change the tyre, to save doing it in the morning. I could call in and see Bob Waudby, whom I knew when we were children, and who I know would make me feel welcome. But I feel introspective, unable to make the effort required for social interaction. It is as if I must hoard my emotional energy for whatever it is that I am going to encounter. There was never any doubt in my mind that this journey must be made alone, but it leaves Sam as my only outlet for light relief, and tonight he is not providing it. We sit in silence by the campfire, and the night is very cold and big around us.
7
THIS MORNING, BETWEEN THE Mt Wedge turnoff and Yuendumu, I am hailed by two Aboriginal men with a battered white car. They are pulled over on the side of the road with the bonnet up. On this track we never ignored someone in trouble, and old habits die hard. Of course I have been told all the horror stories of white women being raped by black men, but I pull over anyway. This morning I don’t feel like a potential rape victim. There are no pleasantries exchanged. They simply ask me for some motor oil. I give them enough to get to Yuendumu, as I am only carrying enough for my own trip. The taller of the two is the spokesman. He doesn’t look at me when he speaks. The next demand is for a ‘tin o’ meat’, so I give him a packet of corned beef from the esky. When he produces an empty water container from the car I start to grin. It is just as well this is not a first, romanticised encounter with the desert Aborigine. I fill the water container and leave them to get themselves going. There are lots of vehicles along this road these days, so I am not concerned about them breaking down again.
Driving away, I am curious about the dynamics of the encounter. I was not at all afraid, partly
because I have known and worked with many Aboriginal men. But I think too there is an element of ‘white missus’ in my thinking, an assumption that we inhabit mutually exclusive worlds, which is a hangover from my past. I wonder if I would have stopped for two white men looking as disreputable. Probably not.
I go in to Yuendumu to get the spare mended. At the garage the mechanic who mends the tyre is curious about my destination. When I tell him Mongrel Downs he says—I did some work out there a few years ago. It was a hundred and twenty in the shade. Hellhole of a place. I could see why they called it Mongrel Downs.
When Mongrel Downs was first named, the administrator of the Northern Territory, who had been obstructive in the granting of the lease, thought it had been named after him. More recently an Aboriginal friend sent me a newspaper cutting describing the transfer of the station into Aboriginal hands and its subsequent renaming as Tanami Downs. The article suggested that the old name was an example of the attitude previous white owners had had towards the country, and the renaming was a mark of respect. An artist friend in Alice who works for the sacred sites department tells me that the local Aborigines believe Mongrel is a distortion of Monkarrurpa, which is the traditional name for Lake Ruth. In a Brisbane gallery I picked up a catalogue of work by Balgo and Tanami artists, and featured in it was a work by a woman artist from ‘Mongrelupa’.
In fact the naming was an ironic response to local scepticism. The popular perception of the Tanami was that it was an uninhabitable desert region, and the general consensus was that Joe Mahood and Bill Wilson must be mad to try to create a cattle station on ‘that mongrel bit of country out there’. So Bill and my father called it Mongrel Downs as a kind of up-yours gesture.
