Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  Patricia knows who I am.

  —You grew up on Mongrel Downs?

  —Yes.

  She is a plump, strong, intelligent woman in her early thirties. Her daughter Beverly is here with her, a girl of about ten.

  —Beverly was crying to come and see you today. I want to go and see Kim in her camp, she was saying.

  —She can come, any time.

  —Your father was killed in a helicopter.

  —Yes.

  She considers this.

  She talks, tells me about the plans they have for Mongrel Downs, to establish a clinic, a little school. The soft, seductive threads of the story weave around me, draw me in.

  —Maybe you can work for us. You can stay here. You know this country. Later we want to go to Inningarra, there’s a woman’s place down there. We want you to drive us.

  We sit in the darkness, the campfire reduced to coals. Beverly has crept over and is sitting at her mother’s feet. The words are part of the darkness, part of the country that folds around me.

  —When do you want to go to Inningarra?

  —In two months, maybe six months.

  —How many want to go?

  —Maybe twelve. Some old women from Lajamanu. Maybe fifteen.

  —It would need more than one vehicle.

  —We can get the Balgo Toyota.

  The Balgo Toyota is a point of contention. Whenever the Tanami women borrow it, they refuse to give it back. There is nothing in the world as desirable as a Toyota. Toyota dreaming is beginning to crisscross the country. I want to do the Inningarra trip, but I know it would be hell to get two overloaded vehicles of mostly old women through the trackless spinifex down to the Inningarra range and back. Not that I am afraid of getting lost. Some of the women know the route, and their recall of country is peerless.

  Patricia tells me there is a path of important sites through the eastern part of Mongrel Downs, through Lake Ruth down to Inningarra. I tell her I have commitments in Queensland but that it might be possible for me to come back. Part of me wants to stay, wants to submit to this deep subtle grip of the country and its people. It feels like fate is coming full circle. But at the same time I cannot trust this desire, contaminated as it is with all kinds of baggage and sentiment. There is a saying in the country that the whites who work with the Aborigines come in three categories. Missionaries, mercenaries and misfits. I wonder where I would fit? Possibly a touch of all three.

  I do not want to come back here. I do not want to live here. I came back in order to free myself from this place, but it leaks through my bloodstream like a disease.

  IT IS STILL DARK WHEN Patricia wakes me and takes me to sit with the Tanami women. This is the big performance. This is when the dreamtime is invoked and made visible even to outsiders like me. I crouch down with the women. It is bitterly cold, and small fires spring up everywhere. After the casualness of the past few days there is an intensity of focus which is palpable. I am tucked in, close and warm, bodies leaning into one another. Beverly has crept in under my arm, Patricia sits next to me and tells me the story as it unfolds.

  The singing begins, a sound that wells like blood or water from the ground. They are singing the country, and the country sings back. That unearthly, familiar sound collects in several hundred throats, resonates and fades, building to an intensity which must invoke some sort of manifestation, and does. Outside the cleared circle in the rising dawn two naked figures advance. They wear hair-string veils and loincloths, their bodies glisten with oil and ochre. One of the dancers is Margaret. I recognise her because of her height. But it is Margaret transformed from the graceful, gentle, homely woman in a cardigan and woollen beanie to a figure of hair-raising power. The bodies loom out of the dreaming with a form that matches the forms of the country. I want to weep for the beauty of these women, and my teeth are chattering violently. Behind the singing the watching women begin to wail and sob. Patricia tells me they are weeping for these ancestral women who travelled through this place and are dead now. An archetype of femaleness is stepping its truncated rhythms in the half-dark, raising puffs of powdery dust. The seated watchers fling up handfuls of dust and the wailing intensifies as the dancers approach. I want to howl, crawl, tear my clothes. I hug Beverly, and feel icy tears on my face. I am seeing the ancestors dance, but they are not my ancestors.

  The women fade back into the dawn. The dance is over.

  And now it is our turn. Everyone has red ochre rubbed onto the face and arms. Sarah, who is a law woman and healer for the Tanami mob, takes my face and hands in her little claws and rubs the ochre into my hair and skin. Patricia is plastering all the vehicles with it. Once the binding agent for the ochre was goanna fat, but now it is cooking oil in plastic containers, which litter the campsite from end to end.

  Shannon comes looking for me. With her hair and arms dyed red she looks more than ever like a red Indian. I feel as if I have been branded. I brew a coffee, ask her for a cigarette. We sit by the fire and watch as the camp begins to break up and mobilise. The ceremonial objects are assembled and carefully packed away. Most of them seem to be kept in broken vinyl airline bags.

  Patricia tells me they have been deciding on a skin name for me. I tell her I am named already.

  She asks me—Who was your skin mother?

  —Nancy Napaldjari.

  —You Napurrula then.

  —Yes.

  —I told you, she tells the others.

  —I told you she was Napurrula.

  Patricia and Beverly are coming with me in the Suzuki. In fact the whole mob seem inclined to crawl aboard, but there is simply not room. One old woman is folded up and poked in on top of the load beside Sam, the rest are to come in the Balgo truck. The cavalcade sets out for Billiluna, about forty vehicles in all, mostly Toyota Landcruiser troop carriers. All the vehicles are daubed with red ochre. We look like a tribal migration in a Mad Max movie. The Balgo vehicle won’t start, and some of the women are left behind. Patricia takes the small truck back to pick them up, but there is a fiasco of boiling radiators and broken down vehicles, and the final ceremony at Billiluna takes place with both Patricia and Margaret absent. A small group of men sit cross-legged on the ground, looking distinctly uncomfortable, while four hundred women dance slowly past them, singing and brushing them with branches.

  This noisy, lackadaisical, unromantic horde of women flies in the face of the mythic convention of the laconic white male protagonist who moves alone through the landscape, reading its mystery and responding to its imperatives with stoicism and competence. I recognise my father in this convention. Most of these women would not dream of moving alone through the country, Aboriginal people being susceptible to and easily frightened by its manifestations. But the black women effortlessly marshal its energies to protect their mysteries, and the laconic hero, in the guise of the helicopter pilot, is vanquished almost as a side effect.

  LATER I ASK PATRICIA IF it is all right to write about the ceremony. A book for kardiya, I tell her, so whitefellas know that the black women are still strong. She considers this.

  —You can write what you saw. You can write about the dancing and the singing and how we come together to share the dances and for family and telling stories. You can tell the kardiya how we come together for the country.

  Margaret says—You are lady and you belong to the country. You can write down story for the country.

  15

  MY FATHER BRIEFLY MANAGED Billiluna, acting as a sort of travelling overseer while bores were being sunk and the homestead site established on Mongrel Downs. It was during this time that my father and Bill Wilson, the owner of Billiluna and partner in Mongrel Downs, returned to the homestead to discover the staff had been on a drinking spree and had broken into the house.

  The Billiluna break-in belongs to the early pages of the station diary. I have heard the more dramatic tales of those days many times. I had always imagined them occurring over a period of months or years, each event self-contained
, strung at sensible dramatic intervals along the storyline. Instead, when I examine the details in the diary I discover them telescoped, overlapping. The mad cow assault on the mission occurs at the same time as the break-in, the plane crash on Lake Ruth a few days later. It was a busy week.

  Billiluna was in one of its feckless frontier phases, with a motley selection of itinerants working as ringers, horsebreakers, boremen and the like. The boundary between order and anarchy, always fragile in these outposts, needed only a nudge from alcohol to breach it. Everyone was somewhat sorry for themselves in the aftermath of the break-in, and there was little resistance when Bill and my father loaded them onto the truck and took them into Halls Creek police station, although several had to be handcuffed to the tray. As always my father does not elaborate, beyond the mention of the piece of trace chain wielded by Bill Wilson and the 22 pistol, or squirt, which my father generally carried in the door of the Toyota.

  Station diary. Saturday, 26th October, 1963

  Bill’s mob camped a mile away and perishing.

  Discussed the cleanskin angle etc.

  Have little hope of Bill’s success in getting the mob through.

  Saw them off camp.

  Back to station and found house broken into.

  Sacked mob.

  Sunday 27th

  On radio.

  Sacked Elsie and took the staff to Hall’s Creek police station.

  Bill Wilson had some trace chain and I had a squirt.

  Charged them with breaking and entering.

  Stayed out of town.

  Monday 28th

  Got stores. Straightened out the cheque business.

  Blokes all got 20 pound fines and costs. Two of them got supply charges and are in for 3 to 6 months.

  We’re not very popular at the moment.

  One of the miscreants, who received a sentence of several months for breaking and entering and for supplying alcohol to Aborigines, howled at my father through the bars of the Halls Creek lockup.

  —Hooshta, you Afghan bastard. I’ll follow you to Alice Springs if I have to to lay strychnine on your tucker!

  It was a common assumption that Mahood was an Afghan name, and my father had the colouring and profile to make it convincing. A few months later the same man asked for a job on Mongrel Downs. He twitched and shuffled his feet, the light of a poisoner in his shifty eyes. He didn’t get the job.

  The old Billiluna homestead is gone, burned down some time in recent years. It is where I spent my first Christmas in this country, en route to Halls Creek on my father’s quest to silence the cattle-thieving rumour. The homestead was made of concrete and tin, full of dark interior rooms, most of the life lived on the concrete slab verandah which extended on all four sides of the house. The verandah was cluttered with perfunctory bits of furniture—various battered armchairs and benches, a number of cyclone stretchers without mattresses, on which guests could throw their swags. The kitchen was located some distance from the main homestead, in case of fire, an ineffectual precaution as it turned out.

  CHRISTMAS DAY IS AT BILLILUNA, with the Adamsons. There are numerous Adamson kids and black and white staff members, as well as the Mongrel Downs contingent of Aboriginal stockmen, Malley, Ferdie, the girl and her father. This is where most of the stockmen come from, so they have gone down to the camp to take on their traditional roles and responsibilities. For the next couple of months their lives will be spent in the bush on ceremonial business.

  There is a present for the little girl under the tree. Someone has remembered, and her package contains the same articles as the presents for the Aboriginal housegirls—scented soap, a face washer, a coloured bandanna. She is delighted, particularly with the bandanna. In the afternoon some of the men bullfight on the lawn. They get down on all fours and snort and bellow and throw up clouds of dust, then lock imaginary horns until one of the protagonists is driven backwards by the weight or strength of the other. Ferdie and the girl’s father invent a new dance called the Mongrel Stomp. The dancers face in opposite directions and lock necks and shoulders together, high-stepping in a circle until the feet of each dancer get further and further apart and the whole structure collapses on the lawn. Ferdie giggles and collapses immediately, but Malley is agile and can maintain his balance for a long time.

  MALLEY HAS TOLD ME THAT Harry and Daisy’s son Anthony is living at Billiluna, married to a girl who is almost white, and has two small children. There is a queue at the store, and while Shannon and I wait I notice a young man driving a white ute. There is a look about him that reminds me of Daisy—straight fairish hair—a fineness of feature that is Harry’s. It has to be Anthony, and when I see the little fair-skinned girl with him, I am sure. I watch for a while, curious as to what I will find to say to this young man whose early life was so bound up with my family, who as a child sat at the table and called my father Dad because everyone else did.

  When he comes into the store I ask him—Are you Anthony Hall? He is startled, says yes. I tell him who I am and ask him if he remembers the family, remembers coming to Queensland with us. He says yes, he remembers. He is surprisingly small, both his parents were quite tall people. He tells me he is learning to be a teacher and that his father is living in Halls Creek. There is really not much to say, this young man has nothing to do with the delightful child we all loved. I don’t ask him about his mother, because I don’t know if she is dead or alive. I ask him to tell Harry when he sees him that I was asking about him.

  There is a general exodus now, vehicles begin to pick up their human cargo and head out, north-west, south-east. The two staked tyres on the Balgo truck have to be mended, so I stick around to lend a bit of moral support to Annette and Shannon.

  Shannon attacks the tyres with the bead-breaker, gets them off the rims, and pregnant Annette pulls out the tubes, finds the holes, attaches vulcanising patches. The Balgo women sit in a nearby patch of shade playing cards. Shannon is in bad odour with them for throwing all the swags off the back of the truck. I get annoyed that they don’t lift a hand to help, and more so when there are no tools in the truck and mine are borrowed. Annette says she can’t leave tools in the vehicle because they immediately disappear.

  A couple of the women have come to help with the tyre-mending, and now I am watching out for my tools. This makes me feel like a neurotic whitefella, but I can’t risk the trip with any tools missing. I know I don’t have the temperament to work out here with these women. It would turn me into a martinet and a fascist.

  The tyres are mended, a second wheel is put on the rear dual set and the truck is reloaded. But no-one is ready to move. There are card games to be finished, exchanges to be completed. It is not time yet. The energy to move accumulates slowly. Somebody collects something and throws it on the truck; someone calls out to a small group sitting in the shade some distance away. Several younger women wander back towards the store. Grubby bundles materialise. Cards, money and tobacco are stuffed into a remarkable assortment of handbags. With no discernible transition things are happening. The truck is loaded, boarded, moving. It happens when it is ready to happen.

  AT BALGO I TRACK DOWN Sandy, a young schoolteacher at whose house I am to spend the night. I park the Suzuki close to the mesh-enclosed verandah and unload most of its contents onto the verandah. There is a band of kids who spend most nights on the rampage around the community, and stealing from visitors’ vehicles, or stealing the vehicles themselves, is a favourite diversion. I am carrying two jerrycans of petrol, which is no longer available on Balgo since petrol sniffing reached epidemic proportions.

  Sandy grew up in the north, was educated in Perth and has come back to the country to teach. She loves it but acknowledges the almost insoluble difficulties it faces. We talk of our own ambivalence, our backgrounds in the pastoral industry, our urban education, the influences which pull in so many directions and contradict one another. How it is impossible to come back and belong to it fully and unquestioningly, how it is impossible to go awa
y and leave it behind. We talk too of the traps of mythologising, how endemic it is in this environment. She tells me a story of a young man she knows. He had a strange and remarkable adventure, which he survived with endurance and courage. The story was retold, written and filmed. These days he lives in the character created by the myth and is a parody of the resourceful boy whom the adventure befell.

  Shannon arrives late, to shower and change. She is persona non grata at Balgo and will take the Balgo truck with some of the women down into the desert outstation at Yagga Yagga tomorrow morning. I roll my swag out and sleep on the verandah near my gear.

  Over breakfast Shannon tells me hair-raising stories of her life in Melbourne. I try to convince her that life after thirty has its compensations. I am sad to say goodbye to her, but we are bound to meet again some time. Long Johnny is at the store, and we say our goodbyes. He chooses a photograph of my youngest brother Jim and his baby son as a memento.

  BALGO IS A DIFFICULT PLACE, one of those locations where one feels something volatile and even inimical in the landscape itself. The community is a confrontation between all that is still alive in traditional culture and all that has gone wrong with the various religious and political forays by whites into the troubled terrain of white–black relations. Whitefellow dwellings all have steel mesh enclosing the verandahs, and the whites live in a state of quasi-siege brought about by petrol-sniffing youths. Fuel bowsers look like trapped Daleks, immobilised in multiple layers of welded steel. It is Garcia Marquez country, surreal, larger than life, alarming. The fact that it continues to produce vivid and remarkable art is a homage to the people who, in spite of extraordinary difficulties, maintain a profound and vital link with their country and their heritage.