Tracks (22 page)

We camped later than usual the next night. I unsaddled the camels and my heart skipped about five beats, then thumped around in my chest like a kangaroo, making up for lost time. Where was my gun?
MY GUN? ‘EDDIE, HAVE YOU GOT MY GUN
?’ No gun. I had become so dependent on that rifle. In my mind’s eye I pictured being sat on by a host of giant bull camels. Eddie said he would wait while I rode back to look for it. For some unaccountable reason, I had slung the scabbard over Zeleika’s saddle, which was not designed for it, and the rifle had slipped out. I resaddled Bub and headed back down the track into the delicate blue and pink glow along the eastern horizon. I rode maybe five miles, wondering when Bub would throw me to the ground and break my neck; he was shying at rocks, birds and trees, in fact anything the imbecile could use as an excuse.

A Toyota drove up, at which of course Bub leapt six feet sideways. The car contained a geologist who had not only my Savage .222 over-under rifle, but several Mars bars and a soft drink as well. Wonderful. And through delicious squishy disgusting mouthfuls of chocolate I argued with this man for half an hour about mining uranium, out there in the middle of nothingness, with a large moon bulging over the horizon.

Bubby wanted to bolt back to camp. I let him pace. ‘OK you little sap, if you’re so full of energy, you can carry half Zelly’s pack tomorrow.’ He was by far the most unreliable of the three adult camels. Perhaps because I had trained him badly, perhaps because he was still young and silly, or perhaps because it was in his genetic make-up to be brainless. He had almost sent Eddie flying one day. He started to pig-root for no apparent reason and although I was leading him, he was difficult to bring back under control. Eddie clung on through it all like a monkey. I couldn’t help laughing. He did not lose one iota of dignity.

People often asked me why I didn’t ride more during the trip. Three reasons. One was Bub. It is unwise, when you are three hundred miles from the nearest person, to be thrown off a camel, break your leg, and watch your beasts tearing off into the dusty distance. I would have much preferred to ride either of the other two but their saddles were not designed for it. The second reason, and the most foolish, was that I thought my camels were carrying more than enough weight as it was, without adding an extra nine stone. The third was that although feet can get very painful, bums can suffer even more.

I rode triumphant into camp. By this stage, I had told Eddie about the rifle that would be waiting for him in Warburton. Our conversations at night always ended up centred around this rifle. Was I really giving him a rifle, would it be exactly like this one, was I sure it was for him and not somebody else? Over and over he would repeat these questions, then break into a cackle when I had reassured him that it was true. Every night it was the same. I also tried to tell him about Rick and
Geographic,
but what’s the Pitjantjara word for American magazine? I was worried about seeing Richard in Warburton. I knew Eddie would not understand why a thousand and one photographs were really necessary. Knew he would not like it. I didn’t want to jeopardize my relationship with my new friend. On the other hand, I was looking forward to seeing Rick again. And Warburton was close.

Eddie was uncharacteristically voluble that night. He talked about the country we had been through, the story places, the things that had happened to us. Over and over the funny incidents were repeated, all the things that had gone right or wrong were discussed. Then the inevitable talk of the rifle and Rick and so on. Then silence. I was about to go to bed when the old man sat me down beside him again, and produced a small water-worn pebble. He folded my hand over it, and went into a long monologue, only parts of which I understood. It was to protect me against perishing, or so I thought. I put it away in a safe place. Then he gave me a small chunk of ironstone. I had no idea what that was for and he said little about it. Then we went to sleep.

The next night was our last together on the track. Eddie insisted that he would find a reliable old man in Warburton to continue on with me to Carnegie station. He said that it must be an old man, an elder, a
wati pulka
(literally ‘big man’), someone with a grey beard — not any young fellow. Definitely not. I was ambivalent about this. I loved being with Eddie but the next section after Warburton would be through completely wild desert, and I wanted to be on my own — test out this newfound confidence. Four hundred miles of spinifex wastes known as the Gibson Desert, without a particle of water that I knew of. And how would that old man get back to Warburton? Eddie was OK, Glendle was coming to pick him up. But even without that, there were enough relations travelling back and forth for him to get a lift with them. But Carnegie was a cattle station, and Warburton was the last Aboriginal outpost in that country. I decided against it. Eddie, although not pleased over this decision, accepted it.

Richard arrived in our camp at about three a.m. How he managed to find us is beyond me. He is one of those enviable people upon whom good luck falls like snow. He always managed to find me, usually through a series of unbelievable chances. His whole life runs like that. The coincidences that constantly follow him defeat statistics. He had been driving for two days, hadn’t slept and was brim-full of zippy energy and enthusiasm. Every time he came out, he was the same. The culture shock he must have experienced, after just finishing some high-pressure cover story for
Time,
then plonking himself down in this silent desert, would have totally befuddled anyone else. It usually lasted a day. He had brought mail and Eddie’s rifle. We began chattering and laughing together, but it was plain that Eddie wanted to get back to sleep, and didn’t quite know what was going on. We decided to leave the opening of presents until morning.

We all woke early. It was like Christmas morning. Eddie was ecstatic over his new rifle. I feverishly read messages from friends. Rick took photos. I had primed Eddie enough for him to expect the odd photograph. But this? Rick was sitting, kneeling, squatting, lying down, click click click click click. Eddie looked at me and scratched his head. ‘Who is he, what does he want, why all these photos?’

I tried to explain, but what could I say. ‘OK, Rick, that’s enough.’ Rick pulled out another camera. ‘Look, I’ve got the perfect solution.’ It was an SX 79, an instant Polaroid. He took a photo of Eddie and handed it to him.

I was furious. ‘Oh, I see, sort of like beads for the natives. Look, Rick, he doesn’t like being photographed, so quit it.’

It was unfair. I knew that Rick had not meant it that way and was hurt. ‘The only reason I brought it’, he said, ‘is because photographers are always promising to send photos and they never do. Besides, it’s an exchange — a sharing of the image immediately.’ But I knew Eddie would see it as a cheap trick. And he did. He didn’t like Rick, didn’t like being photographed, and certainly didn’t like being handed this useless bit of paper with his face on it, as a bribe. Tension.

Rick drove a couple of miles up the track and Eddie and I packed up in silence. He asked me again why this was happening and I tried to explain. Hopeless. What I had feared might happen was happening, and out of control.

We walked up the road together. There was Rick’s car with Rick standing on top, a long lens poking out of his eyeball. I decided to let Eddie handle the situation. As we approached the car, he lifted his hand, and said in English, ‘No photograph,’ then in Pitjantjara, ‘It makes me feel sick.’ I laughed. Rick captured that one moment and then desisted. When we had that photo developed much later on, there was a woman smiling at an old Aboriginal man, whose hand was raised in a cheery salute. So much for the discerning eye of the camera. That one slide speaks volumes. Or rather lies volumes. Whenever I look at it now, it sums up all the images of the journey. While I love the photos Rick took, they are essentially of his trip, not my own. I don’t think dear Richard has ever understood this.

Later in Warburton, Glendle asked Eddie what he would do with the Polaroid of himself. ‘Oh probably burn it,’ he said nonchalantly. We cracked up.

But all this is unfair to Richard. He was good-natured and tried hard not to intrude. He never pushed or imposed as most would have done. And if he didn’t quite grasp why photos were a no-no, that was understandable. He had never spent time with Aboriginal people, and if he felt left out and frustrated at times, he handled it well. The difficult situation resolved itself much more easily than I had expected.

Warburton was a hole. After the magnificence of the country, and the charm of the tiny settlements I had passed through, it came as an unpleasant shock. Every tree for miles had been knocked down for firewood. Cattle had eaten out the country around the water-hole and dust rose in suffocating billowing clouds. The flies carpeted every square inch of skin, even though it was mid-winter. And in the middle of this desolation, surrounded by the lean-tos and shanty town humpies of the Aboriginal people, was a hill where the whites’ buildings clustered together, fortified (presumably against Aboriginal aggression) by high cyclone fences and barbed wire. But the children were there, bursting with life as usual, and, unlike the older people, loved having their pictures taken. Rick handed out Polaroids by the dozen.

Despite the pervading gloom of the place, a party atmosphere persisted for the whole time I was there. Glendle arrived, there was Warburton’s school teacher, and Rick. Eddie took me down to camp constantly to introduce me to his friends and relations, and we would sit in the dust, letting time waft gently by, talking about the trip and where I was going and what a good time we had had and camels, camels, camels. One old man asked me if I had slept with Eddie. I was momentarily taken aback, then realized that he meant it literally. Sleeping next to someone in the same wilcha connoted friendship, togetherness.

When it was time for Eddie to leave me, he looked sideways at me for a moment, held my arm, smiled and shook his head. He wrapped his rifle in a shirt, put it in the back of the truck then changed his mind and put it in the front, then changed it again, and laid it carefully in the back. He waved out the window and then he and Glendle and Glendle’s friend
wala karnka
(‘fast crow’) were swallowed up in the dust.

I spent a week in Warburton, floating with happiness. I could not remember ever associating that emotion with myself before. So much of the trip had been wrong and empty and small, and so much of my life previous to it had been boring and predictable, that now when happiness welled up inside me it was as if I were flying through warm blue air. And a kind of aura of happiness was being generated. It rubbed off on people. It built up and got shared around. Yet nothing of the past five months had been anything like I had imagined. None of it had gone according to plan, none of it had lived up to my expectations. There’d been no point at which I could say, ‘Yes, this is what I did it for,’ or ‘Yes, this is what I wanted for myself.’ In fact, most of it had been simply tedious and tiring.

But strange things do happen when you trudge twenty miles a day, day after day, month after month. Things you only become conscious of in retrospect. For one thing I had remembered in minute and Technicolor detail everything that had ever happened in my past and all the people who belonged there. I had remembered every word of conversations I had had or overheard way, way back in my childhood and in this way I had been able to review these events with a kind of emotional detachment as if they had happened to somebody else. I was rediscovering and getting to know people who were long since dead and forgotten. I had dredged up things that I had no idea existed. People, faces, names, places, feelings, bits of knowledge, all waiting for inspection. It was a giant cleansing of all the garbage and muck that had accumulated in my brain, a gentle catharsis. And because of that, I suppose, I could now see much more clearly into my present relationships with people and with myself. And I was happy, there is simply no other word for it.

Richard described this as magic. I laughed at him for it, teased him for using such suspect language. But he was deeply affected. I look back on that time now with a kind of yearning disbelief. We were actually beginning to talk in terms of magic. Fate. We both of us secretly believed in an external power that one could tap if one were in tune with events. Oh dear.

I
LEFT WARBURTON SOMEWHERE
around July. I had approximately one month to go before I could expect to see another human being. Despite the fact that this leg would be the first real test of my survival skills, despite the fact that if I was going to die anywhere it would most likely be along this lonely treacherous stretch of void, I looked forward to it with newfound calm, a lack of fear, a solid reliance on myself.

The Gunbarrel Highway (Australians have such a strange sense of humour) was two parallel ruts that sometimes disappeared, but generally ran dead straight and due west through a most inhospitable waterless patch of nothing for hundreds of miles. It had originally been built as a survey line, and could now expect an average of six four-wheel-drive vehicles a year.

I put on a new pair of sandals. I had tried every type of footwear, but these were incomparably the best. Boots were too heavy and hot, running shoes were comfortable for about an hour in the morning, before the sweat and sand formed ridges under the balls of the feet. Although loose sandals did not protect my feet from stakes and prickles and spinifex spines, they only required a day or two of agony and blisters to be broken in. Besides, by this stage I was so fit, I was virtually immune to cold and pain. My threshold had reached absurd heights. I had always been jealously in awe of people (particularly men) who could hurt themselves, and pretend they didn’t feel it. Now I was the same. I would cut or scrape a great wedge of flesh out and just murmur ‘oops’ and promptly forget about it. I was usually too preoccupied with what I was doing to be able to afford to dwell on it.