Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  Johnny finds me before I find his camp. The word has gone ahead. His tall figure is instantly recognisable as he approaches. He embraces me, white-haired now, his face scarred from an accident in which a nun died. He launches immediately into the story, in which he was driving the mission Toyota. He tells me too that he got married, had a couple of sons, but his wife has left him. We sit by his camp, which is a roofless three-sided corrugated-iron structure, a few metres square, floored by a pile of blankets. Four or five mangy, scalded-looking puppies scuffle among the blankets. Johnny tells me he is painting now. I tell him that Malley has already shown me some of his work, and show him photographs of the rest of my family. We don’t speak about my father. And then there is no more to say. This big, dignified man releases me. You can go now, he tells me, conscious of my whitefella awkwardness at ending the conversation. I would cry but don’t want to embarrass him. Johnny was always getting into scrapes, getting arrested in town for drinking misdemeanours, having to be rescued. The police sergeant would release him into my father’s or mother’s custody without charging him, to get him out of town and out of harm’s way until the next time. We children loved him for the time he took with us and the things he taught us.

  —Which way that motorcar track going, Johnny?

  —Might be … that way.

  We would nod seriously.

  —Or might be … that other way.

  Deadpan, lips pointing along the track.

  He was a different language group, different country from the other stockmen, and always a little apart because of it, too tall and gangling to make a really good horseman. I cannot imagine his life here in his corrugated-iron windbreak with his pile of blankets and mangy puppies. Does his painting sustain him? This is not his country, he comes from somewhere further to the south. His people have largely disappeared.

  After the encounter with Johnny I retreat to the edge of the Pound, out of range of the sliding sidelong glances of the people and away from the squalid fecund awfulness of the ubiquitous camp dogs. Sam has retreated in appalled disdain to his nest in the spare tyre, having glimpsed possibilities of a dog’s life too horrible to contemplate. I need to be still, shut down the urgent conversation in my head, which insists—It s too difficult, why are you doing this, let s get out of here. A hard wind channels up the clefts of sandstone and beats against the metal sides of the Suzuki. The voice is scoured from my head by the abrasive air, leaving behind a raw and sensitive silence. From the plateau at my back, as the wind drops, come the sounds of young men playing football, the truncated yipe of a dog, a vehicle without a muffler hooning across the flat. Ordinary sounds. In a little while I will take the north road and head for the women’s business. Meanwhile I try to fill in the neglected journal, using my father’s trick of days and dates and blank spaces. But language has fled. I have effectively silenced the voice in my head, and there is nothing to say. The mapmaker takes up the thread, weaving her strange tale with the cross-threads of country and some loose end of my mind. The Pound’s ancient seabed with its fossil memory of water is her territory.

  The songs I know have spent too long in the mind. Like the maps, they hide the country from me. In these weeks of walking they have come apart, been shaken down into shapes of sound which echo the thud of a camel s hoof, the scraping of lizard s claws on rock, the high call of a hawk. Somewhere in the monotony of these repetitions is a language which reflects the country.

  14

  THE CHILD’S FIRST MEMORY was of black bodies, black skins, a warm, affectionate many-limbed creature of sagging breasts and sinewy limbs and tobacco-stained teeth. And with this memory came also the memory of being different, of her own tiny pale body amongst all the shining dark skin, of a difference which could not be annulled, which in spite of mud and ash and insect bites continued to emerge a pale translucent pinkish colour. Her parents were more or less the same colour, but flesh was not so manifest in them, it was always largely covered up and seemed to be a similar colour and texture to the clothes which contained it. It did not have the conspicuous skinness of these others, who tossed her about in the waterhole, passed her little froglike body between them, supported her kicking paddle among the waterlilies. Even the ones her own size were clothed by their skin in a way she was not, their grinning faces with gobbets of snot held precariously in place by upper lips. She could not achieve even this successfully, being constantly wiped clean on her mother’s orders. So it seemed this most desirable state, to belong, could not be achieved, and she must learn to live with it.

  Later she was to discover that a pale skin had many advantages, though it was an impractical colour for the climate, but by this time the habit of difference was ingrained. And the paleness proved infinitely permeable in the very young child, so that she absorbed through it the sensations and textures and odours of the place inhabited by her dark-skinned companions, and did not realise it was not the place inhabited by her own kind. As she grew older and spent most of her time among whites she forgot much of this, but a trace remained which made her reflexes always slightly out of kilter, as if her first responses sprang from a sensibility unfamiliar with the social language which surrounded her. Because of this she became acutely watchful and cautious, adept at anticipating and fulfilling people’s expectations. Without deliberately contriving it, this provided a space within which she concealed her own fragile perceptions, which were able to survive intact.

  She had two mothers, the white one who had borne her and the black one who named her and dreamed for her. The one who dreamed for her, her skin mother, gave to the child the dreaming of Pintapinta the Butterfly and named her for her own child which was never born. The child imagined the intensity of the light on the rust-coloured slabs of stone, the heat radiating out, butterflies clogging the hot air and covering the shallow edges of the tea-coloured water. She remembered nothing of the black woman’s words, she had no idea what this totem conferred on her. All she had of it later was a sense of loss, especially piercing at the sight of butterflies, which blundered out of scented gardens in the heavy summer air and settled on her.

  This time was almost perfect, except for the colour of her skin, which she tried to remedy with boot polish and paint, and was painfully scrubbed clean. Her white mother was romantic and delighted in her child’s intense identification with this mysterious indigenous people. For a restless young woman unused to babies, they were a priceless source of childminding, and she readily relinquished the little girl into the black women’s capable hands. Inevitably the child spoke first the language which surrounded her, and was fiercely frustrated that her white mother did not understand her. Later this white mother often reminded the child of this early gift of a dream, a name and a country, and the child accordingly cherished it as something which set her apart and made her special. She felt a responsibility towards her own singularity which she took seriously into adulthood, fending off the spectre of ordinariness with this talismanic knowledge.

  THIS WHITE CHILD WITH HER skin name and her dreaming accompanies me along the sandy desolate track north towards Billiluna. I am Napurrula, which makes me legitimate heir to the country my father turned into a cattle station. I am aware of the spuriousness of all this. The conferring of a bush or skin name is given to everyone who spends time with the Aborigines, as a formality which places them in a category of relationships and behaviour. I would be deeply resentful of the same attempt to categorise me in white Australian society. So why do I cherish and honour this unearned title, which has been largely meaningless in the context of the life I have led?

  I know why, of course. It gives me a link, a way of being here that circumvents my whiteness. It has allowed me to claim a kind of belonging that I have never felt. I have used it to claim a certain credibility among urban friends for my knowledge of Aboriginal society. It creates a frisson in the secular comfort of a suburban living room, provides a scrap of evidence that out there something authentic, chthonian, spiritual inhabits the continen
t. I have invested myself with its glamour. It is as if I have come by a secret password by dishonest means and have hoarded it against the moment when it might open a magic door. The door, when I arrive, has been open all along.

  But it has provided something real too. Back then, when I received the name, when I was too young to remember, the country laid a claim on me which I cannot shake off.

  Now that I am here I am embarrassed by it, reluctant to claim it. I know I am an imposter. I am confronted merely with a sense of difference which strikes me as being much more profound than I remembered. I have been away a long time.

  THE CAMPSITE, WHEN I ARRIVE in the late afternoon, fills me with the familiar discomfort of all the times in my life when I have arrived alone among strangers. I am not supposed to be a stranger here, I have known this country since my childhood. The truth is, in spite of years of contact with Aborigines, I am always overcome by an extreme shyness in their presence. And I know them well enough to know there are all sorts of hidden etiquettes to be observed.

  Making camp, I observe the Aboriginal tradition of camping in strange country in the direction closest to my own country. I do this automatically, as if a thread holds me which must be kept clear. I hunt for firewood, which is going to become a prime concern during the next few days. I am annoyed that I had not thought to throw some into the back of the Suzuki on the way to the camp. Wandering and looking, I am overtaken by the afternoon light slanting along the spiny edges of the spinifex and casting deep purple shadows. Such a clear light, and such dark shadows. I feel the anxiety leave me, as if it had never been.

  —HELLO, DEAR. WHERE DID you come from?

  The speaker, a light-skinned woman in a pink dress, gives off an air of ingratiating gentility.

  —Hello, dear. I’m camped in the green tent over there. Where are you?

  —I’m on the other side, the yellow ute is mine.

  I am noncommittal, feeling some kind of subtle demand in the woman’s presence.

  —Who are you with, dear?

  She puts a hand out to take hold of my arm.

  —No-one. I came alone.

  —Are you by yourself, dear. You come and camp by me.

  Her gaze floats around and past my face and she does not meet my eyes. Her smile bleeds away at the edges into lipstick-filled cracks. She is more white than black, this one, and wants me to know it. She is as out of her element as I am. But I know better than to be drawn into alliances of this nature.

  —You come and camp by me.

  But she has felt my withdrawal and given up already. She wrings her pale brown, rather pretty hands and backs away, her pink dress glowing in the sunset.

  I say—Thanks, but I’m fine where I am. Thanks, I’m sorry.

  —I’m sorry too, dear.

  She continues to back away.

  —You just come over to my camp if you get lonely, dear.

  In the late afternoon light the campsite looks like a film set. Black figures in bright dresses and woollen beanies greet each other with shrieks and cackles, crouch over campfires, haul mountains of grubby bedding out of the dozens of white Toyota troop carriers. The cleared circle of deep red earth is lit by the falling sun in bands of brilliant light, the long shadows of women falling across it in slow elegant patterns.

  As the darkness comes down a thin singing begins to seep out from the squatting groups, to collect and resonate at the centre of the circle. I remember the singing. It has always hurt me in some indefinable way, like the sound of curlews. A voice calls and is answered, calls again, and again is answered, until it becomes coated with layers of its own sound. It seems to contain and return its own amplified echo. The circle of fires and the chanting voices are suddenly piercingly familiar, and I fall through the gap of years into the desert night.

  SOME TIME DURING THE EVENING I find Annette, the Balgo women’s project officer who has organised the event. Annette is plump with pregnancy, harassed in a relaxed sort of way. Her major concern is the camp water supply. She leads me across to see the new portable corrugated-iron tank. The solder around its base has broken off in chunks, and water is running out unchecked. It is useless.

  —I don’t know what to do. The bore supply isn’t enough. There’s four hundred people here.

  She looks fragile and exhausted. She is at least six months pregnant.

  —There’s a tank at the roadhouse, but there’s something wrong with the tap.

  —Maybe we can fix it. I’ll come with you in the morning to look at it if you like.

  The roadhouse proprietor also owns the station property on which the ceremonies are happening. He treats Annette and her project with amused tolerance. The tank, a robust steel structure mounted on its own trailer, needs a leather washer replaced at the tap connection. We drink tea in the large room behind the store. It serves as a kitchen cum dining room and the children’s schoolroom. It is very familiar. The bare metal prefabricated walls and fly-wired windows, the scuffed lino floor, the touches of bright colour in curtains and tablecloth, children’s drawings taped to the walls. The children watch and listen with bright curiosity for the moment which will include them. We establish common ground, talk about the ways in which the country has changed, who has stayed, who has moved on. These people are moving on soon.

  —We’ve got the place on the market. Been made an offer by one of the local Aboriginal groups. Can’t go against the way things are happening out here.

  The proprieter is gauging me, to see how much I understand of things he will not spell out in Annette’s presence. His wife speaks.

  —We like it here. We love the country, you know. But it feels like it’s time to go. And the kids will be in high school soon, it’ll be good to be near a school.

  They have scrupulously not said it. The country’s gone to the blacks. We’ve hung on longer than a lot of others, but things are changing in ways we can no longer deal with.

  On the drive back to the campsite Annette says—I’ve known them for two years and I’ve never had a conversation with them like that. It’s like there’s a wall between the station people and the whites who work with the blacks.

  At the camp there is sorry business going on. For many of the women this is the first opportunity to get together since the deaths of family and friends, the first chance to carry out the ritualised grief which is part of the laying to rest of the dead. Groups of women advance towards each other, keening and wailing, clasp each other and bow heads and fall to their knees.

  THE SINGING AND DANCING HAS been going on all day, with a repetitive monotony which cuts a groove into the brain. The dancing so far has combined something profoundly authentic with an impromptu awkwardness, like an unrehearsed chorus line. Bodies are exposed without self-consciousness, fat, skinny, glossy and nubile, ancient and leathery. Physical appearance seems to have little meaning. The ubiqitous woollen beanie exaggerates the line of a nose or brow ridge, but everyone is in skirts, except for a few of the white women. Most are wearing tights under the skirts for warmth. As the dancers heat up, blouses come off, brassieres are peeled down around the waist, and the slap of pendulous breasts syncopates with the thud of pounding feet. It is not serious yet, everyone is in a carnival mood, just playing. There are no dogs, apart from Sam, and only a few children, none of them boys older than four or five.

  In the evening the tempo changes. The firelight simplifies and exaggerates the dancing figures, the bodies become iconic and marvellous. A young woman called Judith joins me in my camp. She is working on a project looking at major lake systems in Australia, and is here with a scientist studying Lake Gregory. We talk about the strangeness of being white women in this place, the immense distance which separates our cultural experience from the one on whose perimeter we now crouch, the ambivalence with which we participate and draw back. We are neither of us comfortable. The gulf feels immensely difficult to negotiate.

  THE CAMPSITE IS NEAR A BORE which Carranya Station’s owner has given permission to use. T
oday they are helicopter mustering, and the pilot flew over the ceremonial ground, whether by accident or design no-one is saying. The site and the country within a radius of several kilometres is forbidden to men for the duration of the ceremonies. Within twenty minutes of the infringement the chopper came down. Fuel problems, according to the pilot, who was unhurt. The helicopter was a write-off.

  THIS MORNING ONE SET OF dual wheels on the Balgo truck is flat. The tyres have been staked during a cross-country hunt for firewood. After a half-hearted attempt to undo the wheel nuts, the attempt to change the tyres has been abandoned. The responsibility to find a solution has been left to Annette. She enlists my help, and together we try to shift the wheel nuts, without success. I saturate them with CRC and suggest she finds a long piece of pipe for leverage on the next water run to Billiluna. Annette is looking increasingly harassed. The mill is no longer pumping because the kids have pulled aside the wire netting protection and dropped stones down the column. The bore will have to be pulled, a major operation which can’t be carried out until the ceremonies are over. The lack of any toilet facilities is also making itself apparent, the campsite becoming ringed in ever-increasing diameters of human shit.

  The women continue to dance, heavy bodies on thin legs, in shuffling, stiff-legged jumps, knees slightly bent. This step and the singing seem never to vary, as if the constant reiteration weaves and reweaves a pattern from which there can be no deviation. It can be woven with great skill, or poorly, but it does not change. The different dances are composed of different props, different arrangements, but the shuffling hop does not alter, nor does the curiously haunting lift and fall of voices which accompanies it. In the dance and in the song, time fragments. The rhythm of the circling feet becomes the stamping rhythm of ancestral women. Through the clear dense layers of the song their voices call the dancers in.