by Kim Mahood
How long after this was it that she crossed that sexual boundary and encountered at first-hand the vulnerability of men, as well as her own? I welcome back the sharp-edged girl whose body has not been softened with experience and empathy. She has a kind of clear courage I have given away. She is a primitive. I don’t regret that I have become civilised, but I need her fierce emphatic selfishness.
Sam is complaining that it is time I did something about him. If I am not going to let him off his lead, then I can at least take him for a walk. Reluctantly I get out of the swag, preoccupied, my mind swerving towards making the work, this process which for me has become the means through which I explore and engage with life. The body, using the body, the physical presence within the work, the defiant statement among the network of structures which so easily take control. A way of beating the intellectual tangle in which I inevitably become enmeshed. A way of holding together the thinking process and the unthinking process in a kind of poised tension.
I walk with my geriatric blue dog along the fence line, dragging him away from the old dried bones he finds irresistible, explaining that it is for his own good. He grins his comical toothless grin and tells me in his dog-language of musical wails that it is a dog’s responsibility to investigate bones. For breakfast I make us both a treat, a stock-camp breakfast of johnny cakes made from damper mix, fried on the hotplate and drenched in golden syrup. Tonight I had better use some of the dried vegetables in the tuckerbox, or I will come down with scurvy. A flock of galahs take turns to sip at the water trickling from the overflow pipe on the stock tank, shuffling in an orderly queue along the pipe, erupting periodically into furious quarrels when one attempts to jump the queue.
Such luck, such a privilege to be here like this.
TO THE NORTH-WEST I CUT my earlier tracks at the Macfarlane’s turnoff. A little further on is a tripod and pump-jack, which on my new map is marked as Century Bore. There is no storage tank, just a pipeline running to tanks which provide watering points through the extensive perennial grass plains to the south. These form the heart of the good pastoral country on which the Tanami Downs lease is based. Some time in the eighties the lease was bought by the Aboriginal Central Land Council, and it continues to run as a cattle station, usually under white management. When a new goldmine was developed on the eastern edge of the lease, along the ancient Warlpiri dreaming track which runs between Tanami and Inningarra, an agreement was struck with the traditional owners, who were entitled to royalties. Margaret Napurrula, Patricia’s mother, had the stories of the country from her father and grandfather, though she was born in the Gordon Downs country to the north. This story is becoming more and more common since the dispersals and displacement of people from their traditional country. Once the place of conception conferred the birthright, but now it is more and more the handing down of stories and knowledge of traditional homelands. Margaret came back, with her adult children and extended family, and they live now in a small outstation a few kilometres from the homestead, threatened intermittently by land claims from other Warlpiri groups.
It seems that the last of the traditional people for this country moved away in the fifties and found their way north to Hooker Creek, south-east to Yuendumu and west to Balgo. This would always have been tough country to live in, entirely without permanent water before the stock-route bores were sunk, and a run of dry seasons would have curtailed movement through much of the country. Davidson’s 1900 account makes reference to sighting smokes to the south-west of Mt Tracey, which would have put them on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, and records the next sighting near the Smoke Hills to the north of here. By the time my family came here there were traces and remnants, but the people had gone. The stockmen who worked for us came from the north-west and went back to their own country for ceremonial business.
I am glad that the people have come back, and appreciative of the many ironies that are encapsulated in this isolated pocket of the country. Gold and cattle have made it possible for them to return, and now they are the employers of white managers to handle the white man’s business of running cattle, and are recipients by virtue of traditional right to the spin-off of the white man’s hunger for gold. I move about the country with their permission, readily given, since I too have come back for the country, with my own stories.
I drive south through the great yellow sweep of the plains, the day’s direction dictated by a set of wheel tracks that will bring me to another site, another set of memories. A by-product of travelling alone is the steady erosion of reference points, of identity and personality. There is no-one on whom to exercise a personality but Sam the dog, and as long as I provide him with regular meals and a little yellow truck to ride in he does not care whether I am clever and witty, charming, morose or downright mean. The tracks I follow provide a structure for my days. The landmarks and intervals of the country I am crossing dictate the shapes of my emotions and my thoughts. To understand how much a sense of identity depends on being reflected in the eyes of others is a sobering experience. I have prided myself on having a clear mind, but the space out here has invaded it, breached the skull so that the thing I call self has got loose and is wandering about on the brittle plain, stalked by something primitive and wild (something that was always out there, or is it too something that has got free of its boundaries in my mind?).
The scattered dark shapes of cattle interrupt the plains. From this distance they could be anything—zebras, lions, camels. Lions escaped once, not so far from here, from a travelling carnival, and in the days before their recapture sightings and tracks were reported everywhere. There is a ripple along the line of the horizon, a band of mirage which separates land from sky. As I drive it shifts and changes. Magic water, we called it when we were children. Somewhere behind its reflection the travellers keep pace with me.
We are passing through a place described on the maps as lion country. I think it is so-called in order to give a name to the forces which inhabit this place. They are not lions, of that I am sure. I think they are the demons we carry about in our own minds, loosed by something in this place, so that each of us is beset by our own secret terror. Only the child and Chance seem unaffected. I can only hope we have gone beyond this region of chimaera before the expedition loses its resolve.
The mapmaker’s tale radiates across the landscape. It is a glancing narrative, its structure spatial rather than continuous. Along one of its trajectories a mysterious stranger rides towards the point of departure. Along another, two border women bring a child they have discovered in the desert. The man and the child must arrive to complete the imperative for the new journey. The people are restless. Children gather to throw stones at the mapmaker, and leave to seek their own unmapped places. A band of horsemen, bathed in icy light, ride out in pursuit of shadows and return from some bloodstained encounter. On the periphery of each event squat the mud men, watching.
These travellers have been with me a long time. I know that they have set out to retrace an ancient seasonal route, recorded in their songs from a time before the lakes of their homeland dried up. I know the mapmaker’s uneasy knowledge in some way complements my own, and that she must make the final stages of the journey alone. The travellers’ tale has an inner logic that intercepts mine, but I do not examine it too closely. Although they pass from time to time through the grooved contours of my mind, their pilgrimage is independent of mine.
The first sand dunes become visible on the horizon, and I leave the lion country behind.
25
I CAMP AT THE FOOT OF A low sandstone escarpment to the south-east of Pedestal Hills, a belt of dead gidgee giving me the best campfire I’ve had for the whole trip. Every time I make camp I’m aware of the legacy I have inherited. The way I make camp is the way my father did it, the way I carry the axe and walk out across the water-washed flat to the belt of low dead trees. The way I am here, in this country. The way I lay the fire. How old was I when he taught me these things? The billy balanced on a co
uple of good-sized sticks to let the flames get under it. The coals lifted out of the fire, beautiful gidgee coals, laid in a pile between a couple of small logs, the camp oven resting on them. The way I move about the camp, stoke the fire, check the billy.
I wonder when humans domesticated fire. When I look into the flames of my campfire, here in the desert, my adult self remembers the campfires of my childhood, and with the memory of campfires comes the memory of voices, talk and stories which move across time and fill the darkness of my solitude. And there is always the other campfire, a little distant from the one at which I sit, and the stories and the laughter cross the space between us in a language I don’t understand. And behind those memories is something more primitive than memory, a flame that illuminates a cave wall, that holds off not imagined but real danger, a darkness that is not benign like this darkness which surrounds me now.
The gidgee fire has made me very cheerful, which makes Sam happy. He lopes after me and hooks a paw around my leg, trying to trip me up. This is a favourite trick, which he used to try out on passing joggers when we went to the beach. I would deny that I had anything to do with the battled-scarred, cauliflower-eared, toothless, stone-deaf animal which seemed to claim an acquaintance with me. I shadow-box him and he grabs at my arm with his gummy jaws, and barks and barks gleefully. This good-tempered, bad-mannered dog has been a point of reference for me on this trip. No-one can have a dog like Sam and take themselves entirely seriously.
While the billy boils I set my Walkman on the bonnet of the Suzuki, plug in the tiny portable speakers and play Aaron Neville. His voice spills into the night like indigo silk, to match the colour of the sky. I climb to the top of the sandstone escarpment and dance along the edge. The last red ember on the western horizon goes out, and the soul music weaves with the smoke from the fire. I yell at the top of my voice. Tonight I will vanquish the melancholy, because for my companions I have a gidgee fire and a foolish dog and the voice of a man whose singing distills and transforms that melancholy into an invocation of beauty and faith. The night sky is a magic carpet which seems blue black, but as I look deeper and deeper I see that there are no spaces without stars. The deeper I look the more I see nothing but stars. In fact I am looking at a carpet made of light, which looks like darkness.
On the edge of the low cliff I stand and address the stars. This is the biggest audience I am ever likely to have, and I am not going to waste it. I tell them why I am here. I explain about the trip.
My father died, you see, and I had a dream. In the dream I carried my father’s body on my back, searching for the right place to put it down. He was frail, but even so I had difficulty carrying him. I stumbled and struggled along the slope of a hillside. His limbs flopped and dragged, and I was angry with him that he had not taken better care of himself. I laid him down for a while in order to rest. The countryside rolled away in all directions, a place I had never seen before. I considered leaving him there on the side of that strange hillside. The look on his face was tired and a little sad. After a while I lifted the body onto my back again and kept on searching.
They say fathers invent daughters, and daughters invent fathers. The father I invented held my life in thrall for years. I felt as if my first loyalty must always be to him. I chose lovers I could leave, so I would not be faced with choices too difficult to make. I’m here alone like this because my father taught me that important things must be done alone. I believed that to need other people was a weakness. He made me believe that really important experiences could never be shared. Other people couldn’t be trusted to understand, they only devalued the precious moment. I remember how special it made me feel, being the only one who was exempt. Later I drew back from this favoured position, but something of it always flavoured the relationship between us. I felt a great responsibility towards my father’s idea of me. I knew how far short of it I fell, but I could not bear it that he might see how foolish and cowardly I really was. I invented myself for him again and again, until I did not know how to be anyone else.
He died, and I grieved for him intensely, but I did not want him to be alive again. He had to die before I could begin to escape his idea of me. But I know as well that his belief in me is what lets me do things like this, to take off into the desert on a lone pilgrimage, to choose to be an artist, to determine to live life on my own terms. In the very act of trying to free myself from him, I am aware that he made it possible for me to do the things necessary to free myself.
—Help me! I say to the stars.—Help me to put his body down.
Their light is cold and limitless. They don’t encourage me in this folly of patricide. I feel self-conscious and a little foolish.
Sam has gone away down to the camp and the fire, where he waits pensively for his dinner. This is a dog’s life, going hungry while his person is up there on the hill talking to the stars. She doesn’t do this sort of thing very often, though he knows better than anyone the brunt of her rare rages. Such is the purpose of dogs.
I stand for a while, looking out towards the silhouettes of the Pedestal Hills. In the darkness they are low blunt shapes against the horizon. They are presences, not threatening but impassive, distinctly alive. I wonder what ancestral drama created them, what beasts crouch inside their sandstone skin. I am struck that so few people have stood here, that this is one of the least populated places on the earth. Davidson approached with his camels from the north-west, naming the country as he came. He did not see the evidence of some primordial scuffle scattered across the landscape. Instead he recognised in them the iconography of his own culture, and named them accordingly. I’m sure he didn’t stand on a cliff and recount his dreams to the indifferent stars. A cool wind is coming out of the west. Soon it will drive me off my sandstone soapbox.
LIVING OUT HERE SET US APART. The mysterious glamour of isolation rubbed off on us, made us special. This country is mythological, ancestral. You can’t live in it and not be touched by it. It is a curious experience to grow up in mythological country. It is possibly like being very beautiful. It is the thing people notice about you, that makes you different and unique. It becomes the way you identify yourself. This is where I come from. This is my country. This is me.
Families who live in isolated places become a world unto themselves. There is no peer group to dissipate loyalties, no role models beyond the immediate circle to suggest that there are other ways in which to interpret the world. Neighbours, hundreds of kilometres away and seen rarely, are the same in kind as one’s own family, sometimes more so. We are small tribes, passionate defenders of our particular identity.
There was nothing adversarial in our relationship to this place. Even in the worst stretches of heat-stricken, windless January, when we did nothing but drag the pump-jack from bore to bore in a desperate bid to keep the water up to the perishing stock, we were never against the country. It was home, and we loved it because we had made it ours and because we had consented to the claim it made on us. All the family felt this in different ways. My brothers and sister took it for granted. They left their bare footprints daily in the red earth and did not question the rightness of their belonging to this place. I did not have this certainty, feeling always that my place in it was provisional, that there was another world in which I felt both exiled and seduced. So I loved it passionately, feeling always that I must prove my love, feeling always on the brink of betraying it. This has not changed.
The thing I hungered for, though I could not have formulated it, was the articulation of an interior voice. I knew such a language was possible, for I found it in the books I read. Subtle and suggestive, oblique and revealing, it gave substance to the things which I knew scratched and left their marks beneath the visible surfaces of life. The language of my world was anecdotal, practical, concrete. At its best, in its dark laconic humour, it acknowledged the unsayable. But more often it was alcohol, or the grievances of women, that unleashed some anguished intemperate noise. It emerged misshapen and savage, attacked and
did harm, and went back into hiding. No wonder people feared it.
So I burrowed into the mythologies and stories that grew out of green places in another hemisphere, and acquired an appetite my dry, ochre-coloured world could not feed.
I believed in the myth of the Outback. The solitary hero scratches his iconography of heroic failure. He tells himself into the country with stories of endurance and luck and foolhardiness. It’s heady stuff. But when you start to take the myth apart, you are left with—the myth of the Outback. It is irreducible. The focus may shift a little, depending on your point of view. Its heroes at any given time may be black, or women, or both. The intrepid explorer may be reinterpreted as egocentric and incompetent, the laconic male as an insensitive buffoon, but that is barely relevant in the context of the country itself.
It seems that everyone carries around their own mythology of the Outback, or the inland—an interesting distinction, since one implies going outwards and the other inwards. A myth of extroversion or a myth of introversion. Both have become deeply embedded in the cultural psyche of this country. Men like Davidson and my father lived the extrovert myth, of heroism and achievement and conquest. And yet my father at least was primarily compelled by the introvert myth, of the spiritual quest, the mysterious source. The extrovert myth is presently out of favour, being subjected to the scrutiny of postcolonial interpretation. The introvert myth is still intact, but is becoming progressively confused and conflated with the Aboriginal attachment to land. White Australians are becoming disenfranchised from any right to a deep sense of connection to country, the impulse towards the sacred which has always driven human beings to establish a sense of meaning and belonging.
