Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  Some of the dances are light-hearted, mostly entertainment. Some are dark with hints of violence, some overtly sexual. During one of these performances, danced with broomsticks and a good deal of suggestive body language, the watching circle of women fling up a constant barrage of twigs, leaves and dust to clear away the spirits unleashed by the dance. Of the two principal dancers called in from the spinifex beyond the perimeter of the cleared ground, the younger woman is wearing black lycra cycling shorts. Most of the chorus line wear their woollen beanies, one has on sunglasses and sneakers, all are painted across the shoulders and breasts with white and red ochre. The performances are full of such incongruities, which at times border on the absurd. To me, the watcher, my perceptions are dislocated continually, the incongruities counterpointed suddenly by the dying fall of the voices, the puffs of dust which mark the boundary the dreaming spirits may not cross.

  I wish I truly understood what is going on here. It is like reading a book whose real text is invisible. It was always like this, the sense of being on the outside of knowledge and language. One had one’s own knowledge and language, which was difficult enough to manage, but something else was always taking place on the periphery of vision, within earshot but not quite comprehensible. I wonder if sheer discomfort is at the heart of prejudice.

  Anna John makes me throw handfuls of dust in the direction of the dancers, to deflect the spirits and avoid being trapped in the dreaming. I ask her about the dances and ceremonies, but she says she doesn’t know much, she is just learning about it now. Here in the midst of her traditional people, in her own country, she was raised on the mission as a good Catholic girl. Now I sit with her in the dust by her campfire, holding her newest grandchild, daughter of Julianne, who I held in the same way almost the last time I saw Anna twenty years ago. Julianne is now a plump young woman and this is her second child. Her little boy crawls over me, snotty-nosed and grinning, and Anna fishes a damper out of the ashes and offers me a piece. She tells me that she cried when she heard about my father’s death. Rex, her husband, is still chairman of the local land council. Theirs is a story of true love. Anna, mission educated, could read and write, and would send letters to Rex when he worked on Mongrel Downs. Like most of the original team of stockmen, Rex came from Billiluna. He was an exceptional horseman, with a crumpled, worried face and a gentle nature. He was illiterate and would ask my father to read the letters to him and help him to draft his replies. Anna was wrong skin for Rex, and in order to marry her he went through a ritual spearing in the leg.

  Anna has hardly changed, she is still tiny and skinny with a huge bush of hair. In fact she is physically very different from the other women, and I wonder whether she has some other blood somewhere in her background. Her manner is an odd mixture of gracefulness and brusque tactlessness.

  I wonder why this journey has brought me into the presence of several hundred women who represent a basic, extreme form of femaleness. Their bodies are used, misshapen and damaged. So much flesh. Oiled and painted, it is magnificent. What am I supposed to make of these pared-down rituals in the desert?

  Somewhere in my notebook is a quote from Charles Ponce. ‘There is, in the psyche of mankind and womankind, an idea of something inferior, dark, weak, exiled and soulless.’ An archetype of inferiority, projected onto the feminine. I touch this raw nub in myself and my hands come away bloodstained.

  I IMAGINE MYSELF AS SOMEONE different, someone who meets life head on, who has fun. When invited by the women to be painted and join the dancing, she does it with respect and a light heart. She does not stand back self-consciously. This woman does not waste things. The taste of dust and ashy damper stay on her tongue with the taste of tea and the smell of burning gum leaves. She hears the creak of the windmill and the sound of women calling and splashing in the dam, and remembers the scent of childhood and the footprints of children in wet mud. This woman takes joy in life, and is not afraid.

  Out in the spinifex the women sit in groups painting each other’s bodies, heads leaning in towards one another, hands touching, rubbing, patting, marking. Above the grey-green mounds of the spinifex a circle of heads and arms move and sway like a single many-headed, many-armed creature. When I read their stories I feel as if there is a dimension missing. Maybe it is this dimension, of a shared knowledge so taken for granted that it has no words and therefore no place in the story. I read the stories and they don’t touch me, but when I see them performed, that is something else altogether.

  We have been given another piece of news about the helicopter pilot. I don’t know if it is true, but the story is that last night his house in Perth burned down. His wife and child were unhurt.

  THE NEARBY STATION OF Ruby Plains is supplying beef for the gathering. Each afternoon a girl drives in with a Toyota loaded with butchered beef. There have been mutterings about its distribution—apparently the bigger, more powerful groups are getting the lion’s share and the small groups and old women are missing out. The spinifex windbreak is bristling with bits of bullock. Many of the white women are vegetarian and are giving the butchering area a wide berth. The growing pile of gumleaves onto which the meat is unloaded is beginning to look a little grim, if you are unused to seeing meat butchered on the hoof. It is the fourth day and there are now nine bullocks’ heads gazing in mute bovine recrimination from the pile of leaves, and as many sets of shins and hooves, discarded at awkward angles as if trying to go somewhere away from all this.

  This morning I attempted to organise it a little by hanging hindquarters and shoulders from wire hooks along the roof of the bough shed, so that chunks can be easily sliced off. Annette has asked me to oversee this afternoon’s distribution, to see if it can be made a little more equitable. I enlist the help of two of the white women, Shannon and Emma. As the Ruby Plains Toyota pulls in there are already about a hundred women gathered and clamouring. We wade into the fray. It takes all the skills of placation and intimidation we can muster to give us some room to manoeuvre. I have given Shannon the axe. Her job is to chop through the bones, while I keep the butcher knife and identify good meat and rough cuts. Emma establishes who is who, how many in each camp, and I make lightning estimates of how much meat they need. Shannon chops with a will, long hair flying, and I slash rumps and topsides in a way that would make a butcher weep. He would weep even more to see what happens next—most of it will go straight into the beef buckets for boiling, though some is roasted directly on the coals. Emma is in the front line and taking most of the fire. The Pitjantjara mob from south of Alice are outraged at being subjected to such discipline. They are the largest and most powerful contingent, everyone holds them in some awe as they have a reputation for serious ceremonies and harsh penalties. But Emma stands her ground, and pretty soon all the meat has gone, save a few backbones with tails still attached. An old woman makes off with one of these clutched over her shoulder like a sack, skinny legs buckling under the weight. Shannon looks like a young red Indian warrior just back from a successful scalping expedition. I probably look pretty wild myself, butcher knife in hand and blood to the elbows. The three of us stand knee deep in gumleaves and carnage, adrenalin pumping, grinning at each other.

  I have saved a fillet steak, thinking that the nonvegetarians may like some for the evening meal, but when I offer it at the kardiya camp (the Aboriginal term for whitefellow) they recoil from it and me as if I am some kind of monster. Suitably crushed I take it back to my own camp and eat in solitude. I hang the remains of the fillet from the canopy rack of the Suzuki, and some time during the night Sam steals it, adding to the growing list of his misdemeanours.

  EMMA HAS TO MAKE A TRIP back to Halls Creek, so I go with her, curious to see what kind of town it has become. Emma’s job has something to do with linguistics. Everyone I meet is associated in some way with the burgeoning industry of Aboriginal culture. They record stories and study language, assist in the production and sale of art, plan and build dwellings which take into account the needs and prohibiti
ons of Aboriginal traditions. They undertake studies of the culture and the law. And so many of them are women. The male culture of the bush has undergone a strange sea change, and so have I. I have gone through the looking glass, and now I find myself pressed against the glass, looking back into the world I knew.

  Emma bemoans the fact of cattle, mutters and curses as we pass through country showing the effects of drought and stock. It is too familiar to draw a response from me. She mutters and curses too at her own attachment to the country, says she needs to get away and get some perspective on her life. She is short and dark and attractive, full of bravado and vitality. I like her, with her sharp dry self-denigrating humour. Another refugee from the Melbourne climate (seasonal or psychological, I don’t ask), she is beginning to show the wear and tear of this one. It is an old story, and one which the country spins out in endless variations, of a traveller who comes in search of a dream of glamour and splendid challenge and finds instead something intractible, uninhabitable and addictive.

  I barely recognise Halls Creek, a small tidy place of lawns and bougainvillea. I came here with my father the Christmas before I went away to boarding school. It was a strange, fraught visit, the culmination of a series of confrontations for which I only vaguely understood the reasons.

  IN HER CHILD’S WORLD SHE is hardly aware of the adult business going on around her. A rumour of cattle theft seeps across the border. It is whispered that Joe Mahood has stolen four hundred head of cattle from Ruby Plains and has shifted them across waterless desert without leaving a track. Unchecked, such rumours become part of the country’s folklore. The girl’s father has no desire to become a legend of this kind and sets out to track the rumour across the southern Kimberleys to its source. It is nearly Christmas, time for the black stockmen to go back to their own country and start preparing for the big January ceremonies. The girl rides on the back of the vehicle among swags and stockmen, perched on the forty-four gallon fuel drum, absorbing a calligraphy of landscape as it unreels behind her. At one of the dinner camp stops Ferdie and her father broach the rum bottle and play a game of chess on the bonnet of the Toyota. Ferdie was a child chess champion back in Austria before his parents emigrated.

  They stop at Carranya Station to talk to the owner, who has played his part in spreading the rumour. He implicates his neighbour, who is one of the local cattle kings. A big raw-boned woman tries to lift the drowsy child from where she has gone to sleep on the cool concrete of the laundry floor, but she fights away from this female concern, gone away into a world free of domestic boundaries. At Ruby Plains, from where the cattle had allegedly been stolen, the plot thickens and tempers fray. The station owner is not a man who takes kindly to being confronted. He places responsibility for the rumour with the stock inspector in Halls Creek. The girl’s father insists that the owner accompany him to Halls Creek to speak to the stock inspector. The girl likes the man’s wife, who is beautiful and lets her be.

  The town of Halls Creek is red and muddy from recent rain, with a flotsam of rubbish along the edges of the main road. Malley’s parents live in town, and his mother takes the little girl into the bathroom and shows her where she can wash and change. She is a gentle dark round woman, her voice softened with Aboriginal intonation. She would have made the child at home, but the girl insists on going with her father. He leaves her on the pub verandah in the charge of Pony Express and goes into the bar with Malley and Ferdie. Pony Express offers to shout her a beer, which she refuses, and then tells her his life story. He keeps losing the threads of it, until it is reduced to a tangle of loose ends in which even he loses interest. The girl has long since found a tattered magazine to read and curls up on a bench with the local dog for company and moral support.

  She is hungry and bright-eyed when the men emerge from the bar, hilarious with some new song they have discovered on the jukebox. Ferdie sings the chorus in his Austrian accent.

  When dem cotton balls get rotten

  we didn t pick werry much cotton

  in dem o-old cotton fields back home

  He sings it over and over, and smiles his soft luminous smile. They carry her off between them like a princess.

  The confrontation with the stock inspector solves the mystery of the stolen cattle. It seems he has mistakenly identified the earmarks of several Mongrel Downs cows as Ruby Plains on a trip across the border and has carelessly mentioned ‘a mob’ of Ruby Plains cattle on Mongrel Downs. The bush telegraph has done the rest. Her father is quietly satisfied that the matter has been cleared up and that people will be less inclined to bandy his name about in the future.

  ALTHOUGH HALLS CREEK IS tidier and more substantial than my memory of it, it still has a makeshift feel. Emma’s house is a fibro prefab balanced on steel stumps, the yard overgrown with dry clumps of yellow grass, the same grass that grows outside the cyclone wire fence and over the road and back into the surrounding scrub. The imposition of order on the straggling recalcitrant bush seems superficial and impermanent. So many Outback towns are a kind of mirage, given substance by a collective need for them to exist. The energy to maintain the idea of them ebbs and falters, and the towns at times become transparent, like film sets when the money has run out, and the actors are stranded in a drama that has mislaid its plot.

  I should look for Harry as I know he is somewhere in town, but I can’t face seeing him. This is a piece of profound cowardice on my part, which I know I am going to regret. I don’t fully understand my reluctance, except to know there will be too much pain in the meeting for both of us. I have known Harry since I was ten years old. He, Rex and Malley were the mainstays of the Mongrel Downs stock camp, Harry taking over from Malley as head stockman when Malley moved on to manage Chilla Well. Across the gap of colour and culture we both know that lives go astray, fall apart, are patched together and reconstructed. People die out of their time and grief goes unnamed. We do not share a social language that will allow us to articulate this knowledge, but it looms between us with no room for any other thing to be spoken. I know he loved my father and my family. He knows we loved him. What can I say to him? I will do nothing but stand there and weep. I am on the brink of losing my nerve and my bearings out here. I must husband my tiny store of courage for what I still have to do. I deplore this abjectness in me and wish for more of the kind of courage that matters.

  On the return journey to the camp we get a flat tyre, so it is sundown by the time we arrive. In the evening I join the white women at their campfire. Aboriginal women wander in, sit down for a while and talk, wander off again.

  The talk is mostly about the business of working with Aboriginal women. It is refreshingly without constraint. There is no need to establish credentials. The mere fact of being here suggests a grasp of the ironies and contradictions which are an essential part of working in the fallout zone of cultural intersection. It is not necessary to edit the realities which must be spoken about so circumspectly in other contexts. The real work of these women is not written into the job descriptions of project or liaison positions.

  —We’re just white slaves, one of the women says cheerfully.

  —We run our arses off and get burned out, and then come back for more. I don’t know why we do it. For times like this, I suppose.

  The perfect circle of the dark horizon, the bursts of singing and laughter from other campfires, answers the question.

  Another woman speaks.

  —The men don’t like us. They think the women are getting too much power.

  She tells the story of how on Balgo recently the men tried to get Annette dismissed. The women painted themselves up and marched through the community, forcing the men and boys to hide. The subject was dropped, but it continues to simmer.

  I WOKE UP THIS MORNING with a weeping eye, so will try to see the nurse from Billiluna when she comes out today. The Yuendumu women are doing a major honey-ant dreaming dance, which has been going on for hours. Anne Mosey is with them, bare-breasted and painted up. Anne is an artist a
nd has worked for a long time with the Yuendumu people. She has established a collaborative relationship with the Warlpiri artist Dolly Nampijinpa Daniels, and their work is shown in major contemporary exhibitions.

  Shannon appears in my camp at regular intervals, drawn by the prospect of real coffee brewed in my espresso coffee pot. She is a beautiful ex-Melbourne waif who says she does not plan on making it past thirty. She has been sacked from Balgo and is now working with the women at Yagga Yagga in the desert south of Balgo, helping to record their stories.

  —I don’t know how to make the stories interesting to whitefellas, she says.

  —Nothing happens. They walk along, somebody sees something, they sit down under a tree, they walk a bit further. The most exciting thing so far is when Tjama saw a sheep and thought it was a clump of spinifex walking around.

  Shannon is good company, funny and mercurial and streetwise. She has about her a flavour of urban toughness that is familiar and refreshing.

  The Western Australian Minister for Aboriginal Affairs is flying in this afternoon, so there will be a big performance tonight. At the moment the kids are rioting in the spotlight.

  PATRICIA LEE COMES TO MY camp in the evening. She is Ronny Bumblebee’s sister. The Tanami women are camped next to me, although I didn’t know who they were when I chose this spot. Not such a coincidence, I suppose, as we come from the same country and chose the spot nearest to that place. Patricia and I have been watching each other ever since we became aware who the other was. Margaret is Patricia’s mother, a very tall woman, stately and graceful. She is a big law woman. There is an old blind woman who crawls around, watched by the others. Usually she is led, or deflected before she comes to any harm. Sometimes, disgruntled, she crawls off and is left to her own devices, having worn out the patience of her caretakers. Somebody brings her back, having found her crawling among the feet of the dancers in the middle of the arena.