Tracks (21 page)

We left the track that evening — Eddie had decided to take me through his country. For a week we wandered through that land, and Eddie seemed to grow in stature with every step. He was a dingo-dreaming man, and his links with the special places we passed gave him a kind of energy, a joy, a belonging. He told me myths and stories over and over at night when we camped. He knew every particle of that country as well as he knew his own body. He was at home in it totally, at one with it and the feeling began rubbing off on to me. Time melted — became meaningless. I don’t think I have ever felt so good in my entire life. He made me notice things I had not noticed before — noises, tracks. And I began to see how it all fitted together. The land was not wild but tame, bountiful, benign, giving, as long as you knew how to see it, how to be part of it. This recognition of the importance and meaning of Aboriginal land strikes many whites who work in that country. As Toly wrote in a letter recently:

There is a peculiar power and strength in the country here which in many ways expresses itself in Aboriginal people and which I feel can belong to me too. It keeps unfolding and unfolding and is inexhaustible. What you make of it depends on you.

I remember that time now as one of delightful calm. But it is a blur, it is undifferentiated. When I try to separate the days, I find that I cannot. I can remember certain incidents with crystal clarity, but when and where they happened I have not the faintest idea. I did discover, however, that the old goat could walk fifty miles to my ten. He gave me pituri to chew when I was tired which tasted unutterably foul but made me feel like running the next thousand yards, as if I’d smoked eighty cigarettes all at once. He made an ash from certain bushes which he mixed with the plant, so that it stayed in one glob when he chewed it. He would stick this glob behind his ear to be used later, like bubble gum. I offered him wine at night but he refused it, laughing, then acted out an old man being drunk. He told me to stick to my wine and he’d stick to his pituri.

Eddie never interfered with the handling of the camels, which pleased me greatly. Camels are really one-man (woman) animals and don’t take to being ordered about by strangers. Besides, I treated them like glass, spoilt them and fussed over them, and I knew Eddie’s feelings towards them would not be nearly as sentimental as my own. The only time I got faintly titchy with the old man was when he insisted that I should whoosh down Bub so he could ride him for ten minutes, then whoosh him down so he could get off, then do the same thing a mile later. He got titchy in return because, no doubt, he couldn’t understand why anyone would have camels if they didn’t work them; which was quite reasonable but didn’t take into account the fact that they were adored pets rather than beasts of burden, in my eyes at least.

At night, while I busied myself with unsaddling, Eddie would build us a temporary wind-break, a wilcha. This was done expertly and quickly with a minimum expenditure of energy. I think deft is the word. He would drag old trees into a semicircle or three sides of a rectangle, clear a space of prickles for us to sleep in, and build the warming fire. No matter how many blankets I gave him, he never put these over him, but underneath. And after our meal and our talk, he would make sure I was comfortable, virtually tucking me into my swag, then he would curl up, head on his hands and fall asleep. All through the night, he would wake up, check on me and restoke the fire. He accepted the junky food I had with me but would have loved, I know, a kangaroo half-cooked in the coals. This is a delicious meat, and it is cooked by first singeing the hair and rubbing it off, then burying it in a mixture of sand and coals and leaving it for an hour. The insides are still bloody and red, but the meat and the offal sweet and juicy. There are strict rules governing the killing and cooking of kangaroo, in fact of all desert foods. Stories abounded of people who broke the law, by not killing correctly, and suffered terrible accidents because of it.

I had two knives with me, one for leather work and one for skinning and cutting up meat. Eddie asked me one day why I had two, when one would do. I explained to him that the sharp one, which I kept in my belt, was for game.
‘Marlu, kanyala,’
I said and mimed cutting meat. I swear the old man nearly had a heart attack. ‘
Wiya wiya, mulapa wiya.
Tsc tsc tsc tsc.’ He shook his head in horror. He then grabbed me by the hand and proceeded to tell me that I must never under any circumstances cut the meat of a kangaroo, or skin it, or take its tail. He repeated this over and over and I swore I would never do such a thing. And again that night, he made me promise that I would never break the law in this way. I reassured him. In any case it was extremely unlikely that I would shoot a kangaroo for myself. There was far too much meat for one person and a dog and I hated shooting these lovely animals. I shot at the many herds we passed to please Eddie, but missed every time. Rabbits I had no such qualms about. They had been introduced, along with flies, by Europeans, and were now in plague proportions destroying whole tracts of land. Although I thought rabbit the least edible of all the bush foods, Diggity and I ate it often. As far as I knew, there were no stringent rules applied to the hunting of rabbit, since it is an animal that did not come from the dreamtime.

Unfortunately, it came time for us to cut back on to the road. We passed maybe one or two cars a day, and these mostly Aboriginal people visiting family and relations in the two settlements. It was nice to see the flip side of the coin. If ever a car of whites passed, Eddie surreptitiously and suspiciously stood beside the gun, just in case. If it was blacks, it was all laughter and talk and sharing up food or tobacco or pituri. We could usually tell if it was an Aboriginal car coming, because they invariably sounded like sick washing-machines. The process of selling broken-down second-hand cars to Aborigines at exorbitant prices in Alice Springs is a lucrative business. Luckily Aboriginal people are great bush mechanics and can usually keep them going on bits of string and wire. There was one story at Docker River, of a group of young men who bought a car in Alice, four hundred miles away, and halfway home the body of the car literally fell to pieces. They simply got out (all ten of them), took off their belts, tied it all together and drove happily home.

Having Eddie with me was magic in terms of being accepted by Aboriginal people. Everyone knew Eddie, everyone loved him. And because he was there, and because I had camels, they loved me too. We stopped one day at a small camp by a bore, where there were maybe twenty people. We sat down together outside a humpy and talked for hours, drinking weak, cool super-sweet billy tea and chewing damper. Because I was the guest, I was given the tin mug to drink out of instead of sipping it straight from the billy like the others. The mug had been used for mixing flour and water so great clumps of the stuff floated around the top. It didn’t matter. By now my attitude to food had changed utterly. Food had become something you put in your mouth to give you energy to walk, that’s all. I could eat anything, and did. Washing had become an unnecessary procedure by then too. I was putrid. Even Eddie, who was no sparkling example of cleanliness, suggested I should wash my face and hands one day. He was finickity about Diggity too, and refused to let her drink from his mug.

Neither of us liked being on the road after our time in the wild country, because we had to deal once again with that strange breed of animal, the tourist. It was very hot one afternoon, stinkingly hot, and the flies were in zillions. I had the three p.m. grumps, Eddie was humming to himself. A column of red dust hit the horizon and swirled towards us, hurtling along at tourist speed. We swerved off into the spinifex, pincushions for feet were better than idiots at this hour of the day. But they saw us, of course, a whole convoy of them, daring the great aloneness together like they were in some B-grade Western. They all piled out with their cameras. I was irritated, I just wanted to get to camp and have a cuppa and be left in peace. They were so boorish, so insensitive, these people. They plied me with questions as usual and commented rudely on my appearance, as if I were a sideshow for their amusement. And perhaps I did look a little eccentric at that stage. I had had one ear pierced in Alice Springs the year before. It had taken months to work up the courage to participate in this barbaric custom, but once the hole was made, I wasn’t about to let it close over again. I had lost my stud, so put through a large safety pin. I was filthy and my hair stuck out from my hat in sun-bleached tangles and I looked like a Ralph Steadman drawing. Then they noticed Eddie. One of the men grabbed him by the arm, pushed him into position and said, ‘Hey, Jacky-Jacky, come and stand alonga camel, boy.’

I was stunned into silence, I couldn’t believe he had said that. I furiously pushed past this fool, and Eddie and I walked together away from them. His face betrayed no emotion but he agreed when I suggested that there’d be no more photos and that they could all rot in hell before we’d talk to them. The last of the convoy arrived a few minutes later. I reverted to my old trick of covering my face with my hat and shouting, ‘No photographs!’ Eddie echoed me. But as I went past I heard them all clicking away. ‘Bloody swine!’ I shouted. I was boiling, hissing with anger. Suddenly, all five foot four inches of Eddie turned around and strutted back to them. They continued clicking. He stood about three inches from one of the women’s faces and put on a truly extraordinary show. He turned himself into a perfect parody of a ravingly dangerous idiot boong, waved his stick in the air and trilled Pitjantjara at them and demanded three dollars and cackled insanely and hopped up and down and had them all confused and terrified out of their paltry wits. They’d probably been told in Perth that the blacks were murderous savages. They backed off, handing him what money they had in their pockets and fled. He walked demurely over to me and then we cracked up. We slapped each other and we held our sides and we laughed and laughed the helpless, hysterical tear-flooded laughter of children. We rolled and staggered with laughter. We were paralysed with it.

The thing that impressed me most was that Eddie should have been bitter and he was not. He had used the incident for his own entertainment and mine. Whether he also used it for my edification I do not know. But I thought about this old man then. And his people. Thought about how they’d been slaughtered, almost wiped out, forced to live on settlements that were more like concentration camps, then poked, prodded, measured and taped, had photos of their sacred business printed in colour in heavy academic anthropological texts, had their sacred secret objects stolen and taken to museums, had their potency and integrity drained from them at every opportunity, had been reviled and misunderstood by almost every white in the country, and then finally left to rot with their cheap booze and our diseases and their deaths, and I looked at this marvellous old half-blind codger laughing his socks off as if he had never experienced any of it, never been the butt of a cruel ignorant bigoted contempt, never had a worry in his life, and I thought, OK old man, if you can, me too.

We were almost at Warburton. I had not been using maps at all, they were superfluous with Eddie around. Hoping for an exact mileage, I asked some young Aboriginal people in a car how far away the settlement was.

‘Hmmm, might be little bit long way, that Warburton. Maybe one sleep, two sleeps, but little bit long way for sure.’

‘Oh, I see, thanks, little bit long way eh? Right. Of course.’

There seemed to be several categories of distance, divided up like this: little bit way, little bit long way, long way, and long long way, too far. This last was used for describing my distance to the sea. I would tell people I was going to the sea
(uru pulka,
big lake) which none of them had ever seen, and they would invariably raise their eyebrows, shake their heads slowly, and say, ‘Long, long, loooooong way, too many sleeps, too far that uru pulka eh? Tsc tsc tsc tsc.’ And they would shake their heads again and wish me luck, or chuckle and hold my arm and look at me, astonished.

While I was tying Goliath to a tree on a sandhill above our camp one evening, and while Eddie was busily engaged in building a wilcha, two young men hooned up on bikes. They spotted me and came up to sit with me on the sandhill. After two weeks with Eddie I was a different person. I had been conversing with him in mime and Pitjantjara and had entered a different world. I was finding swapping realities from Aboriginal to European quite difficult. It required a different set of concepts and a different variety of small talk. I could feel my brain’s rusty old gears changing, but I was managing OK and they were pleasant enough people. Just as I was settling into semi-normal conversation, Eddie charged over the hill, rifle in hand, a belligerent and deeply suspicious look on his face. He sat down on my left, facing the young men, gun in lap and demanded in Pitjantjara to know who they were and if they could be trusted. There followed the most ridiculous scene. I tried to reassure everybody (the men looked decidedly uncomfortable) that everything was quite all right and nobody was about to shoot anybody. Only the different languages got hopelessly tangled and confused so that I’d address the bikers in dialect and then turn to tell Eddie in English, ‘They’re all right, honestly, I’m just going to make them a cup of tea,’ which I then hastily translated into Pitjantjara. He replied, simply and adamantly,
‘Wiya.’

You don’t have to speak a foreign language to understand a negative, especially from a very stern-looking gentleman with a rifle in his arms. The men sidled like crabs down the hill and roared off into the dusk.

This desocializing process — the sloughing off, like a snake-skin, of the useless preoccupations and standards of the society I had left, and the growing of new ones that were more tuned to my present environment — was beginning to show. I was glad the men didn’t stay, it would have been a strain, trying to make sense to them, trying to remember the niceties of conversation, the triviality of those almost forgotten patterns of interaction with my own kind, who were like animals circling each other — unsure, on guard. I liked, still like, the person who emerged from that process far better than the one who existed before it — or since it. In my own eyes, I was becoming sane, normal, healthy, yet to anyone else’s I must have appeared if not certifiably mad then at least irretrievably weird, eccentric, sun-struck and bush-happy.