Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  It seems to me that the difference between white and Aboriginal myths of country is that Aborigines rarely seek solitude in the landscape. For the most part they are thoroughly frightened by the notion of being alone in it. They have an infrastructure of beliefs and stories and prohibitions which weave them into the country, so that they are as enmeshed in it as they are enmeshed in family, so that they have obligations to it that are as powerful and of the same nature as the obligations to family. The distinction between the practical and the spiritual is not delineated. It is all part of the same thing.

  The most compelling of the whitefellow myths is the myth of solitude. It is about finding some sort of redemption in the solitary encounter with a spiritual domain, which is epitomised by the desert. There is an element of gnosticism in this, the notion of the direct encounter with the spiritual source, the heretic and outsider who chooses to meet god alone in the wilderness.

  The magical darkness that is made of light has taken my words away and turned them into stars. They glimmer back at me, stripped of meaning. The gidgee fire is burning low.

  DEATH GIVES LIFE A PECULIAR clarity. It is as if another dimension opens suddenly into the world. When the death is in your own family, you feel it in the cells of your body, a kind of genetic shudder that recognises the extinguishment of some of its own material. It was as if during those first stages of grief I understood something essential of the poised fragile balance of life. There were other things too, which had no place or name in our sophisticated death-denying society.

  After the accident I went to see the pilot of the smashed helicopter. He survived, with a damaged spine and shattered legs. Partly I knew I had to see him for his sake, but it wasn’t for his good I went, it was for my own. I had to see the man who had killed my father. I sat by his hospital bed, said all the right things, absolved him of blame, and all the while I could feel forces circling like vultures, just waiting for the moment to flap in, relentless and ugly, and pick out the eyes first, and the tongue, and the genitals, soft as a flower.

  I wanted to consume this damaged body and make it part of myself. Poor man, it’s just as well he never knew. He had enough on his plate, with the terrible pain, the wondering if he would walk again, the agony of responsibility for the death of a man. I watched myself, neat and contained, at the centre of these circling things. They had a look of something very old, familiars come to carry out their proper function among the rites of death and grieving. They hulked behind the conventions of good-mannered grief. When I walked along the hospital corridors I felt them flop and scurry behind me, though when I turned to look there was nothing but green linoleum tiles and the late winter light of the tropics falling through tall windows. It was only indoors that they oppressed me, where their harsh archaic substance encountered polished resistant surfaces, plastic and metal, or the tidy shapes of constraint. When I stood among the box gum and quinine and ironbark, shadows moved like the shadows of leaves and birds, and an ancient gaze followed me from the grooves of creased bark. When I stood in the forest and howled, something settled softly around me and carried my grief away into the corners of the forest, so that this tree might contain some of it, and that pile of leaves, and the reddish squat mounds of anthills.

  Now, as I look out across the star-illumined landscape, I see the shapes of grief, settled and quiet, in the crouching hummocks of the Pedestal Hills. Hold it for me, I tell them quietly, hold it for me here in this place which he loved.

  26

  THE FENCE LINES, THE NEW TANKS, the stubble plains are a transparent screen across my mind’s eye, through which I can still make out the contours of the old country. Between the screen that is the present and the memory that is the past lie the twenty years in which my family went away, reluctantly, out of necessity, and made another part of the country home. It is to that place we all return now, touching base from time to time, that country which holds a seam of shared memory longer and deeper than this one. My mother has reestablished her life there, in the place where my father died. Grandchildren have been born for whom it is the family centre, the magic country of adventure. But it is here, where I am now, that continues to be the myth country.

  Myth emerges out of some conjunction of landscape and the human mind. Put us together, people and place, and myth is inevitable. If the place is violent and alienating, then so is the myth. Urban myths are of a different order than pastoral myths. With the pastoral myth goes the notion of harmony, balance, spiritual sustenance, a lost Edenic past. The remnant aboriginal cultures scattered about the world exercise a sentimental grip on the contemporary imagination, and it is not surprising. An old Aboriginal woman, watching a pelican flying low over water, said—That Tjama’s nephew, and then told a dreamtime story of the pelican. The bird continued its slow elegant flight, ancestor and dead boy and bird together winging across blue water, and I had the smallest glimpse, gone as quickly as it had been apprehended, of how it all worked.

  How do I pick my way through the densely woven texture of story, memory and myth? How much does memory submit to the myth, which after all is the foundation of the story? And what is the story I am trying to tell anyway?

  It is in part the story of a place, and of histories intersecting in that place, shaped by it and shaping it. It began with an Aboriginal story, of which I know a little, but not much. Davidson’s journey opened up the Granites and Tanami goldmines. My father’s journey established a stock route and a cattle station. My own journey affects nothing but my own life. Is this because I am a woman, or because of the time I live in, or both? It might be different, should I choose to stay. But I won’t. I belong to an age whose experience is one of displacement and a kind of loss. The thing lost will continue to haunt me, and the idea of loss will be located in a particular place. The loss is part of the myth.

  And what of my story? I can’t tell it all, or even very much of it. Again and again the words dissolve. The myth I thought I had come back to lay weaves around me with its own particular logic. When I sit in the dirt beside Margaret and talk with her she says—You were born in this country, you Napurrula and this country here is your country.

  I was not born here, but the story expands to accommodate me. In a place where belonging to country is a given, where it is incomprehensible that one can survive without belonging to country, the social structure is flexible and generous. With it goes the assumption of responsibility to that country, that you will remember it and care for it. Many people, including those who are not Australian, are powerfully struck by the ancestral nature of the Australian landscape. I wonder if it is because the country has been held in the consciousness of its people in this particular way, this extraordinary identification of people with country so that the two are not distinguishable from each other. Or is it in the nature of certain places to assert a grip on the imagination of all who set foot in it, and to draw out of them whatever they have to offer?

  What have I found, in this return to my father’s country? As I track him he disappears, and I glimpse him instead squatting in the dappled light of the box-gum forest in Central Queensland. I thought I had come back to re-examine his story, even to challenge it, but I find instead that I am willing to let it stand. It no longer seems burdened under a weight of contradictions.

  As I travel through the country I discover that this is not my country, nor is it my father’s country. But my track, my story travels through it and so does his. They make up part of the pattern of the country. By coming back I reinvoke them. At all the points of intersection I feel the other journeys, ancestral, contemporary, historic, imaginary. They are all under my skin.

  27

  I AM AWARE THAT THIS JOURNEY at least is almost over. I want to be gone. For the time being I have used up my small quota of courage. I no longer know what this country means to me, whether I can bear to come back.

  I make my last camp at Lake Ruth. At the homestead store there is a brief meeting with the Tanami Aboriginal women, a little awk
ward. Later they come to the camp for a visit. I hunt out as many cups and mugs as I can find and make a billy of tea. The women spoon in sugar, not too much, laughing, telling me they are all supposed to lose weight. We sit together in the afternoon shade of the ti-tree, and Patricia points out a solitary desert gum on the northern edge of the lake. She tells me it is an old man, one of the ancestors, who healed a group of dreamtime warriors with red ochre after they were burned in a bushfire near the present site of the homestead. In good seasons people camped here, swam and hunted and made tools, dug for sand frogs near the place where I have made my camp. Margaret says that Bullock’s Head Lake is called Windiki, the place of the white heron dreaming. It seems a good place to have left a man’s ashes, guarded by the graceful bent-necked bird. The women ask me if I get scared, camping on my own, and I tell them not usually. Then I tell them about the night I sat in the boat and the dog got scared, and me too, when I felt the presences all about me. They nod their heads and murmur to each other, unsurprised. This is a place where the spirits are strong.

  Later we dig for sand frogs in the pale sand. There is moisture below the surface, and we begin to find frogs a metre or so down. There is nothing arbitrary in the choice of a spot to dig. Patricia points out the almost imperceptible mounds the frogs make on the surface. To an untrained eye they are virtually invisible.

  —Your turn, Napurrula, the women say, and I crouch in the hole, fingers probing, encountering the soft-bodied frogs in their sandy pouches. I hand them up to Margaret, who flicks an expert thumbnail, crushing a spot above the blind-looking eyes, paralysing them. In this climate they would start to rot and stink quickly if killed outright. When the hole I am in seems to have yielded up all its frogs, we walk about among the sprawling ti-tree, searching for another likely spot.

  —Over here, Napurrula, the women call. —This way, Napurrula.

  Sometimes it is me they are calling, sometimes Margaret.

  Dora, Margaret’s mother, strokes my arm with her long hands.

  —Napurrula, she says. —Daughter. Tell your mother you have lot of mothers now.

  —I’ll tell her, I say.

  The women’s voices float among the trees, laughing. A language I don’t understand. My mind reaches back a long way, finds a stray word, and another. Warlu, gnapa, kuyu—fire, water, meat. We take our haul of sand frogs back to my campfire, and the women rake a space in the hot ashes, throw in the live frogs, cover them with coals and ash. A scorched frog that has not been properly paralysed struggles from the heaving ash, crawls blindly away from the heat. Peggy pushes it back into the coals with a stick.

  —Poor thing, she says perfunctorily, a sop to my whitefellow sensibilities. Here and there a tiny arm waves, a hiss of steam as the water-filled frogs boil and pop. This is a priceless lesson in bush tucker, I tell myself. But I think I would have to kill them first.

  Finally all movement in the coals ceases, the shrunken roasted bodies are scooped out and dusted free of ash. Patricia asks me if I have any salt. She picks up a frog, breaks it open, delicately picks out the small sac of frog shit. They are mere sacs of guts with leathery vestigial limbs. I know I am going to have to eat at least one. Next to me Peggy prepares a frog, hands it to me, grinning, a partly chewed corpse visible behind her broad yellow teeth. I pick tentatively around the edges of my frog, to the vast amusement of the women. The other Peggy sympathises. She doesn’t like them either. Nyilyapunta—sand frog. I test the word and the women laugh, pleased with my accent. My tongue, trained in babyhood, remembers how to make the sounds. Mangari—tucker. That one I remember.

  I feel curiously diminished among these women. They occupy physical space in a way I don’t. This is not merely because they are mostly much larger than I am. They inhabit their bodies unapologetically. Most of them have experienced physical violence, both as recipients and perpetrators. They are mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Their bodies express a primary femaleness from which I am excluded. I am not overly burdened with vanity, but I am a product of my own culture, with its emphasis on youthfulness, its peculiarly antiseptic notions of attractiveness.

  The old woman, Dora, has a look about her I recognise as characteristic of these desert women when they become very old. The shape of the skull predominates, the features stretch and simplify. The fleshiness of the younger faces is refined and reduced, until what is left is the crafted bone shell which houses knowledge I cannot begin to imagine, which may simply be knowledge of how to continue to survive.

  Margaret would be remarkable anywhere. She is so tall, a shy and gentle matriarch. She is clearly the central strength of this extended family, a woman whose natural dignity makes one draw with genuine humility on the best in oneself. Her skull is recently scarred at the hairline, a shiny bald patch evidence of self-wounding sorry business. My shyness collides with hers, we struggle to cross the barrier of language. Margaret speaks five languages, but English is the least of them. We are both relieved when Patricia takes up the thread. Patricia is clever, literate, her English excellent. She has a dry edge entirely lacking in Margaret. It is this edge which allows her to negotiate the whitefellow world successfully. She does not have her mother’s extraordinary dignity, but is formidable in her own way. Beverly is a child on the edge of adolescence, her inheritance the lineage of power and knowledge passed down through these women. She belongs to the generation which will inherit the new century.

  In spite of the troubled questions raised by land rights, the politics of dispossession, which now crosses racial boundaries, I feel optimistic among these women. Sitting with them, I feel my own ambivalence settle. I know this is temporary, but for a time we all occupy the same sunlit, shade-dappled, woodsmoke fragrant afternoon.

  A SMALL WIND WHISPERS IN the ti-tree. The afternoon light falls on the blue water of the lake. Across the fire from me the other woman sits, her shirt and jeans the same blue as the water. Her body has something of the same quality as the Aboriginal women, in spite of her sunburned leanness. It is stretched, scarred, burned, loosened. It has a sense of itself which is linked directly to the proud girl who faced a man across firelight and did not relent. It is the body which animates the ochre imprints on my groundsheet, which says I am not ashamed to inhabit myself, I am not ashamed of my own anarchy, I am not afraid of the scent on my skin, which is not contamination but simply the smell of being alive.

  You see, her voice says inside my head, this is what I have.

  The voices of children come faintly from the water’s edge, their small dancing figures framed in arcs of spray. From this distance it is impossible to tell whether they are black or white. Do I imagine my sister’s blonde plaits on one of them, my youngest brother’s gingery thatch? An old man, tree-shaped, watches from the northern shore, the burned warriors lie recuperating in the shade nearby. The people are walking in from the north, small family groups, coming down along the track from Tanami. As they reach the water’s edge they laugh and throw down their bundles, and fling themselves into the water. The black stockmen practise high jumping, and let my father win the footraces at the Christmas Eve picnic. My mother watches, suppressing a moment of quiet revolt. The women track a python to its nest in a rabbit burrow, and kill it with a long-handled shovel. I dance with the horsebreaker to the thin wail of Slim Dusty records played on an old battery-operated machine. Later I wade to the eastern shore, the country of the Tanamites, and let my childhood go.

  The women have all gone now.

  —Goodbye, goodbye. See you next time, Napurrula, they say. —You can come back any time.

  The one in blue is the last to leave. Come back any time, she says. I’ll be here.

  28

  THE MORNING IS STILL AND CLEAR. The boat remains where I abandoned it, halfway across the lake bed. Sam tracks me as I walk out and overturn it, then sit cross-legged on its curved base. It is so quiet. Now, in the silence, something longer than memory reaches out and clears my mind. I came back because I could not stay aw
ay. Monkarrurpa, this old, still place, holds me like a cupped palm.

  On a tall anthill near a dry lake a child stands watch. Her gaze is directed toward the sand-ridge country to the south, from where she believes the mapmaker must return. After a time she retreats from her lookout to the camp, where makeshift shelters have been erected, for the days are becoming hotter. From one of these she collects the mapmaker’s leather satchel and carries it to the edge of the claypan. The child takes the objects from the satchel and lays them out carefully on the dry surface. In a pouch she finds a cylinder of soft leather. Unrolled, it proves to be a map. She examines it for a time, her fingers tracing the contours and landmarks it describes. Selecting a tapering polished bone from the mapmaker’s tools, the child walks out onto the lake and begins tentatively to scratch marks on its crumbling surface.

  Travelling away from this country I cannot believe I am really leaving. For hours the road unreels behind me like Ariadne’s thread. For hours I drive feeling the impulse to turn around and follow it back. Somewhere along the track I divest myself of Napurrula. She can stay behind, where she belongs. One day, if I can face the dilemmas and contradictions she poses, I will come back. I feel a kind of tearing, something too deep to call grief. I have raised old ghosts, rather than laid them. They have put on new skins and come up out of the earth to haunt me. By coming back I have begun something which I do not yet understand. Everywhere I have travelled I have seen my father’s tracks. My footprints have overlaid his, but they have not obliterated them. I have stood alone in the places where he stood alone, and felt strange, dangerous things. But they are not the things he felt. I do not know what it was that he felt, in the days and months and years that he was in this place. Such things can’t be shared. I have glimpses, intimations, but that is all. I do not know what sense he made of it. Was there time, in the spinning moment before the helicopter smashed into the ground, to make sense of anything? My own life rises out of the moment of impact and surrounds me like an exhaled breath. The next breath, the inhalation, is my own. The puzzle of fragments I have tried to reassemble frames the shape of absence. The conversation with my father is finished, and I have had the last word. There is no sense of victory. Only an emptiness, a lacuna in the soul, sucking into itself the scraps and fragments of a human life. Mine or his? It doesn’t matter.