Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  Before I leave I look at the selection of paintings in stock. Many of the best artists, who know the law and the country, will not go back to the country it is their right to paint. They are old, dependent on others to drive them, and the lives of the younger people are taken up with other things. The stories of country are here now, on canvas. Some of the journeys they depict have not been travelled for a long time. But the knowledge will remain, transcribed in paint. The paintings have become the journeys they no longer make to their ancestral sites. The dots and lines and circles that describe waterholes and bush tomatoes and yams and dreaming tracks are more and more a form of imagined or remembered journeying.

  Some of Johnny’s work is here, but it is not what I am looking for. I choose a work in which a rectangular inner boundary encloses the main features of the painting—human and animal tracks, and claypans of a vivid acrylic blue. The boundaries which have been making themselves felt in my own work are felt by others. There is a reproduction of a work by one of the best-known of the Balgo artists. She uses a squared-off motif to designate claypans. The painting is a grid of linked squarish forms, asymmetric but perfectly balanced, with dark centres and ribbed edges of ochre and green. It is the abstract space which I continually encounter, impenetrable and irresistible.

  It is odd to think of the fate of many of these paintings. They go, the best of them, to galleries and collections all over the world. A nondescript piece of ironstone country, punctuated with a claypan and the guttering trench of a small gully, will quietly dominate a New York living room. Many of the people paint, though some are better than others. They paint for money, but in spite of the income they receive the economy of their lives does not seem to change very much. One feels beneath the surface of the culture in this place the intractable oppositions of thought structures, of ways of understanding the world, which have ground helplessly and inevitably into each other.

  16

  THE ROAD BETWEEN BALGO and Ngulipi is a channel of pink sand. Long blue escarpments dominate the horizon. As I approach the double landmark of Ngali Kudgera, the Two Hills, known in my father’s time as McGuire’s Gap, it shrinks to low hills with a vivid stand of ghost gums at the base. Davidson remarks disgustedly in his journal on this habit of the country to mislead.

  Sighted the supposed high mountain ranges, some twenty miles out of position. These proved a wretched failure, being nothing but a short run of low hills …

  The Basalt Range was like the high mountain ranges—a fraud—proving to be a sandstone and grit tableland … Gave the geological map of the Territory best after this failure.

  These sentiments are echoed in my father’s stock-route report as the land party inches its way west through sand bog and drizzling rain.

  The sandstone hill was the best landmark for thirty miles around, but it wasn’t marked on our aeronautical map. As it was only thirty miles off the Tanami road it didn’t give us much confidence in our maps for the rest of the trip, as the only landmark shown anywhere near our route was noted ‘position doubtful’.

  The country continues to slip through the nets with which we attempt to control it. One morning when my family was still living out here my mother intercepted a distress call from an expedition lost somewhere near the border. She helped them locate their position and asked them who they were. The somewhat embarrassed reply identified them as a field team for National Mapping.

  The ghost gums at the feet of Ngali Kudgera are too good to pass by, so I pull off the road and boil the billy in their broken shade. I spread out all my maps and they are cool and green, a symmetry of grids which keep the country in order. If I can find my place on the map I am safe from all this dry red space which surrounds me. So long as I can stay inside the map, I can imagine myself reaching any point on it. I am here on this thin dotted line a few centimetres from the edge of the map, which ends at the 129th parallel. That edge tells me I am a stone’s throw from the Western Australian border, somewhere around the heart of the dead sheep with its legs in the air that is the shape of Australia. I sit in the red dirt at the heart of the dead sheep with all my maps spread out around me.

  My maps are all green rectangles, but the space I see from where I am sitting is a red circle. I begin to draw on the clean green paper, pushing graphite and ochre and dirt into the glossy surfaces until the grid lines and names and locations are lost under a layer of earth and spit and pigment. Now the maps look like the place I can see.

  But the other maps, which chart invisible country, are not so easily remade. Like mediaeval Mappaemundi, with their mythical beasts and fabulous journeys and their aspirations to provide a moral order, they shift with the terrain.

  The first part of the journey was undertaken with little idea of the hardships to be endured. The journals and maps of our predecessors prove to be misleading, describing landmarks at once familiar and strange, as if they came upon them from a different aspect. At times it seems we are travelling through an altogether different landscape from the one described by the maps we carry.

  We travel from daylight to dark and seem to make no progress. The horizon torments us with images of water. In this country of shifting landmarks the light plays strange tricks, investing the landscape with mirage and apparition. It seems we have been travelling forever. It is at times difficult to remember why we embarked on this journey.

  The gaps of silence through which the mapmaker’s voice makes itself heard have been filled these last days with the sounds of women singing. Her voice speaks from the place where maps reflect like water and conceal strange depths. Between the twin hills a band of travellers passes. Once I might have pursued them, calling out for them to wait, to tell me their purpose and their names. Now I sit quietly in the shade of ghost gums and leave them to their own journey. I know well enough that our paths will cross again.

  I ARRIVE AT NGULIPI HOMESTEAD early in the afternoon and wash most of the red ochre off the Suzuki, leaving some as a protection for the rest of the trip. We spend the evening talking, until it is time for Oriel to go and watch one of the television soaps to which she is addicted. It is possible to get three channels out here now. Here among people who knew me twenty years ago an identity is gently forced onto me. It sits awkwardly, like an ill-fitting dress. I ring a friend in Sydney and we talk for a long time. Briefly I have the illusion of familiarity, that there is a real world somewhere to which I belong. But when I put the phone down it feels like just another badly fitting garment, of a more contemporary cut but still made for someone else.

  In the morning I walk down to the yards, where for the last couple of years Malley has organised a local rodeo. From the number of dried-out carcasses littering the flat, the attrition rate on the animal participants is pretty high. On the other hand they may have died in the drought. There is a curious-looking structure nearby, rather like a Hills Hoist mounted on a hexagonal steel frame. It proves to be a primitive merry-go-round, with a rotating bar which can be attached to a motor. To ride on it a child would have to perch on the metal crossbars and cling to the central pole. This pared-down artefact from the iconography of childhood pleases me. Beside it lie two cow skulls. I cannot resist suspending them from the frame. It gives the merry-go-round a satisfyingly ironic and faintly sinister quality. Away on all sides stretches the red ironstone flat, punctuated by a scatter of white bones and shrivelled rust-coloured hide.

  DO ALL CHILDREN RECOGNISE in merry-go-rounds this quality that is both magical and sinister. The first merry-go-round I remember was a wagon wheel on its side, pinned into the red sand ‘playground’ of the Finke school. Finke, on the edge of the Simpson Desert, was little more than an idea continually being rescued from the hurtling flurries of red dust which threatened to cover it. It consisted mostly of sheets of rusty corrugated iron held down by old tyres.

  The playground was limitless, but by a kind of local consensus it went to the edge of the long low sand ridge which stretched away behind the school. We would ride the wheel, feet
kicking to keep it spinning, hanging on until prised off by others waiting for a turn. Sometimes my mother, who had established the school, chased a recalcitrant child over the dune when he decided he had had enough of school. She could run like the wind and always caught him. She would have been just over thirty.

  When I dig for the origins of my view of the world, or of an aesthetic or mythical sense of the land, I always find myself back at Finke. When my family went there I was two and a half years old. It is the first place I remember clearly. Right through the fifties the Centre was in severe drought. Finke, situated on the north-western edge of the Simpson Desert, where the Finke River begins to channel its way out into the true desert, was always in danger of disappearing under the weight of drifting red sand which blew in off the desert. A single strand of wire was enough to cause a dune to build up over time, and fences always had a heaping of sand along them which slowly crept higher and higher. After a really good dust storm the drinking water in the tanks was stained red and a film of dust had infiltrated between the bed sheets. The red dust of the desert was a perpetual element in our lives. We drank it, we slept in it, we breathed it.

  My parents and I lived at first in one of the fettler’s cottages, the characteristic fibro railway houses that one saw with their backs to the railway in every community along the line from Adelaide to Alice Springs. My father’s jurisdiction as stock inspector covered a large part of the Territory south of Alice. Our neighbours in the other cottages were fettler families. They were a cosmopolitan lot, part of the 1950s assisted migrant scheme which required a two-year national service on the immigrants’ arrival in Australia. There was a German family, and a Czechoslovakian family, and a couple from Southern Italy who spoke almost no English. There was usually also one of those itinerant poor white families who drifted along the line, never staying too long anywhere, the six or seven or eight children gleaning bits and pieces of education where it was available. It was the arrival of such a family in Finke a year or so after I reached school age that provoked my mother to establish the school, for she could not stand to see children not being educated.

  The father of the German family told us how they came to arrive in Finke. Back in Germany he had been given a choice of locations along the Ghan line and along the line which ran across the Nullabor. On his map of Australia he could see that the town of Finke was located between two big rivers, the Finke and the Goyder. He thought that since he was uprooting his family and taking them off to the new world, he could at least take them to a place where there was water and greenery and nice places for picnics on weekends. The rivers did not run at all in the two years the family spent in Finke, and he would look out across the treeless wasteland to the south-west and the spinifex-covered dune to the east and shake his head and chuckle.

  The Czech father was not so philosophical, and he lacked humour, so he drank a lot and beat his wife and daughter from time to time to cheer himself up. What I remember of those railway houses is how much the same they all were, and yet how subtly different. The German house was light and bright, while the Czech house was dark and grim and depressing. I would not go inside, in spite of the fact that the daughter was my friend. The Italian house was friendly, an easy place for a child to visit, and I do not remember the lack of language being any sort of barrier. However, when I discovered the kid goat pegged in the back yard was to be killed and eaten, I enlisted my tiny brother’s help to steal it and take it back to the goat yards. The poor white house was a wreck, flywire pushed out, piles of cans and rubbish thrown off the edge of the verandah, the yard a dustbowl scattered with broken toys and discarded clothing.

  A government decision determined that the stock inspector’s new residence be built on the site where the local mailman had his camp. The town’s Aborigines camped there as well, so the area was a cluster of humpies, old sheets of tin, scattered bits of the mailman’s defunct trucks and the general detritus of an Aboriginal camp. Rather than alter the site for the building, bureaucracy decreed that the mailman and the Aborigines had to move, which they did, as far as the boundary of the new dwelling.

  This frontier is the measure of my childhood. I am standing on the pristine flywired verandah of our new house, looking across the red sandy expanse of the back yard. A cyclone-wire fence delineates the boundary between the domestic order of my home and the dangerous vitality of the camp. To begin with the anarchy is held at bay by the fence, although the frequent dust storms plaster sheets of rusty corrugated iron and scraps of ragged clothing along its length. And then the wind begins to worry at the sandy hummocks that have been fenced in, and strange buried things come to light. The back yard is a treasure trove of ancient truck parts. An entire chassis emerges like the bones of a squat and clumsy herbivore, some tortoiselike giant beast trapped by sand as it grazed slowly across the spinifex. The remnants of an ancient mechanical civilisation are exposed—truck springs, old batteries, carburettors, radiators. And then another storm blows in and buries it all again.

  Meanwhile the life beyond the fence goes on. The camp dogs tear to pieces a joey kangaroo pulled from the pouch of a doe brought back by the hunters. Naked children pilfer chunks of damper and charred goanna from the coals of the cooking fires. The blue smoke of campfires punctuates the red clouds of approaching dust storms. From my verandah the skies of my childhood are filled with portents.

  There is a steady traffic between the camp and the house. The mailman’s de facto Aboriginal wife comes to help my mother in the house and look after my little brother. She also has a proper Aboriginal husband who is the mailman’s offsider and the father of her third son. Her eldest son is the result of her rape as a girl by a white pastoralist. My mother collars this child, literally reaches over the back fence and pulls him across to join me in the makeshift classroom on the verandah, where she has begun to teach me by correspondence. This is before the arrival of the publican with his wife and five children, the fettler’s straggling tribe, the Germans and the Czechs. We are the only school-age children in the town. With the arrival of my brother I have lost my status as the town’s only white child.

  In the mornings the little Aboriginal boy sits at the school desk my father has mended and painted and learns to read and write. I take a certain satisfaction in my superior skill in this area. In the afternoons I climb the fence into his world, and the roles reverse. Here I am always the one who doesn’t know. We go for long walks in the sandhills, and he shows me a plant with a taproot which can be chewed for water. His mother teaches us the stories scribbled on the dunes. Every track tells the tale of a particular creature. The desert, which in daylight seems populated only by crows and camels and lizards, is a place full of nocturnal adventures.

  We visit the groups of card-players who sit in the only substantial shade available, cast by the huge steel railway tank which provides water for the Ghan. I share my first chew of pituri, a mildly narcotic weed which is mixed with coolibah ash and kept in wads tucked behind the ear. The Ghan arrives at intervals, a mysterious visitant from another world, and the passengers stare curiously from the open windows of the carriages. When the train has gone we put our ears to the steel tracks and listen to the sound which travels along the line long after the train has disappeared.

  AT MALLEY’S REQUEST I PAINT a logo of an Aborigine spearing a bullock on the door of the Ngulipi cattle truck. Later we drive down to Buffalo Hole, at the beginning of the salt-lake country. Approaching it we come to a watercourse winding through dense ti-tree, and I recognise a place described by my father. He walked through it with several of the Aboriginal stockmen one afternoon, searching for the waterhole. Some domestic pigs had been released in the area and gone wild, and the stockmen were very nervous. At one point when they were separated from my father on a parallel path he made muffled pig noises. They bolted, and he had to yell to reassure them. They refused to look at him for the rest of the day, though would occasionally burst into slightly hysterical shrieks of laughter.

  T
he watercourse is in limestone country and has eroded the limestone into isolated cliffs and islands, with red sand dunes on the eastern side. If I had a more reliable vehicle I would attempt to follow it down to the beginning of the salt lakes. My father did it once and said it was like coming upon the end of the world, or its beginning. I am still following his voice.

  Or maybe it is another voice and my father heard it too, the voice of a mysterious stranger who rides at the periphery of the mapmaker’s tale. His name is Chance, or Luck, or Risk, and the mapmaker speaks of him with ambivalence, even distrust. He shadows her journey as she shadows mine.

  Chance speaks even less than before. He rides beside me like an apparition. When he turns towards me I can no longer see his face. Sometimes I feel as if he is another part of myself, my cast shadow moving always a little ahead of me, inseparable from me yet always out of reach. His presence is not reassuring, merely inevitable.

  The lakes pull me like a magnet. Maybe next trip (except that I am not coming back). Maybe in the heart of white Australia is a dried-up salt lake and a dream of redemption, tempered with irony.

  TODAY I TRAVEL WITH MALLEY to the place we know of as Mt Phyllis, and the rockholes of Lorna Springs. These names, given by the stock-route party after the wives of Bill Wilson and Milton Willick, are no longer in common usage, and I do not know the Aboriginal names.

  Reading Davidson’s description of the Tanami rockholes, I think at first that he is describing Lorna Springs.