Tracks (6 page)

At first, some of the men at the camp had not understood a woman living alone. Along with one or two desperadoes from town, they sometimes came up in the middle of the night in the hope of some drunken dalliance. I had bought myself a gun, a .222 high-power rifle and 20-gauge shotgun, over-under — a beautiful instrument, but all I knew about it was that the bullet came out one end, while you held the other. I never, but never, loaded it. This, however, poked out of the door with a few curt words behind it, did not fail to make an impression. My friends were horrified when I told them I had actually pointed a gun at someone. Well, not directly at someone, I hastened to assure them, but rather aimlessly through the door and into the dark. I could see they thought I was losing my grip but I defended this growing hill billy mentality of mine, which seemed perfectly reasonable given the conditions I was living in and given my highly developed sense of aggression and property. I learnt later that the gun episodes caused endless bouts of hilarity tinged with respect down at the camp and I never had any trouble again. In fact over the months their attitude changed totally. I was now protected if anything, watched out for and looked after. And if they thought I was a bit daft, it was with an overlay of good humour. I was, through Joanie, Frankie, Gladys and Ada, getting to know them all better, beginning to overcome my shyness and my white guilt and to learn more and more about the complex problems — physical, political and emotional — all Aboriginal people have to contend with.

There were approximately thirty camps in and around Alice Springs, squatting on parcels of crown land or on camping reserves on the outskirts. These had been set up over the years as traditional territorial sites for members of different surrounding tribal groups, who visited the town from their home settlements, up to several hundred miles away in the Northern Territory and South Australia. One of the main attractions of town was the easy access to alcohol, but there were other important regional resources to be found. These included Aboriginal Legal Aid, Health Services, Aboriginal Art and Craft Centre, Department of Aboriginal Affairs offices, second-hand car lots specially designed to rip off Aborigines, and other assorted bright lights. There was fairly regular movement between these Alice Springs domiciliary sites and the home settlements, although some people became permanent dwellers and built themselves huts of bush timber frames, second-hand galvanized iron, and whatever other makeshift components they could find in the municipal dump. There were five water taps to serve all thirty camps, and many people were so destitute they lived out of garbage cans, off discarded food they found at the dump and by cadging hand-outs in the street. Many were alcoholics, so whatever money they got went straight into a flagon of cheap wine. Children and women suffered the most, from malnutrition, violence and disease.

Mount Nancy was the most economically successful, well-organized, socially cohesive camp in town. Small houses (financed by DAA) were beginning to replace the humpies, and an ablution block was being built. The worst camps, by comparison, were those in the dry river-bed of the Todd, right in the centre of town. The people here had no access to water, sanitation or shelter, had nothing to sustain them but alcohol. Because of the rivers land tenure, this was a primary camping ground for itinerant Aborigines. They were under threat from the town council which had been trying to extend the leases of the properties bordering the river out into the river-bed itself — a tidy way of getting rid of the camps and making things clean and nice for the tourists, who, after all, spent considerable money buying fake Aboriginal artefacts from the shops.

From what I could see at Mount Nancy, people survived by sharing up what money they could get from part-time cattle work, child endowment, widows’ and deserted wives’ pensions, and the rare, very rare, unemployment cheque. Gambling was a way of redistributing wealth rather than acquiring it. One of the myths concerning Aboriginal people is that they are chronic ‘dole bludgers’. In fact, fewer blacks receive social services than do whites, despite ten times more unemployment.

Even the few part-Aboriginal people who live in town as whites do, suffer from subtle forms of racism. It is a daily experience for blacks in Alice Springs. It reinforces their own feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. The constant frustration in not being able to change their lives makes many of them give up hope, turns them into alcoholics, because that, at least, provides some form of release from an untenable situation, and finally, grants them oblivion.

As Kevin Gilbert writes in
Because a White Man’ll Never Do It:

It is my thesis that Aboriginal Australia underwent a rape of the soul so profound that the blight continues in the minds of most blacks today. It is this psychological blight, more than anything else, that causes the conditions that we see on reserves and missions. And it is repeated down the generations.

Education was always a problem. Schools were mixed, white with black, and tribe with tribe. As if having to read books about Dick, Dora and their cat Fluff, and studying history books stating that Captain Cook was the first person in Australia, or that ‘blackfellows’ who ‘form one of the lowest races of mankind in existence … are fast disappearing before the onward march of the white man,’ was not enough, apart from having to take bricks wrapped in brown paper to school instead of lunches because there was no money and no means to make them, apart from being bawled out at school for not doing homework (is it possible to do homework in a rusted-out car body by firelight?), apart from having perforated eardrums and eye infections and sores and malnutrition, apart from having to deal with the inherent racism of many of the teachers, apart from all that — they might well have to sit next to some kid who might be a traditional tribal enemy.

It was little wonder that children did not want to experience this alien and threatening environment. It taught them nothing they needed to know since the only job they were likely to get was itinerant station work, which did not require the ability to read and write. Little wonder that they were termed hopeless, unable to learn, sow’s ears. ‘Ah yes,’ the whites shook their heads in sadness, ‘it’s in the blood. They’ll never be assimilated.’

Before large mining corporations began lusting after Aboriginal Reserve land, ‘assimilation’ was virtually a non-policy. It made little difference to the way Aboriginal people actually lived. Now, it is a means of getting Aboriginal people off their land, the only thing they have that grants them any kind of self-worth, and into the town where they cannot find work and where they must depend more and more on white institutions for survival. It also provides the government with a handy PR exercise, so that the Prime Minister can speak out against apartheid in South Africa, maintain a clean international reputation, and still carry out a policy which appears on the surface to be antithetical to apartheid but which, on closer inspection, produces identical effects. That is, a policy which ensures that Aboriginal lands go once again into the hands of the whites (in this case multinationals), that a cheap labour source is made available by removing all trace of black ethics and culture, leaving the white races pure. This is exactly what apartheid was set up in South Africa to accomplish. Assimilation is anti-land rights, anti-self-determination, and blacks do not want it. Kevin Gilbert again:

Every … Aboriginal, when asked, repeats over and over again that the only way that an answer can come is when white Australia gives blacks a just land base and the financial means to allow communities to begin to help themselves.

The problem of schooling, like so many others, could have been remedied so easily by a little bit of expense on the government’s part — the introduction of a modified mobile school. Predictably, instead of increasing the budget to deal with this kind of problem, the present government has made enormous cuts in Aboriginal spending. (The Department of Aboriginal Affairs has recently been conducting a survey of Australian Aborigines. In the housing section, the question was asked, ‘How many Aborigines are homeless?’ In another section ‘homelessness’ was defined as not including people living in humpies, lean-tos, tin shelters or car bodies.)

Frankie had a friend called Clivie who was younger but far more worldly-wise. He was an incorrigible and expert thief, which was OK with me; in fact, given his condition, it seemed like a fairly sensible thing to be doing except that he was stealing from me. Poor destitute me, who was saving up at the rate of fifty cents a week to buy things like boxes of rivets and screwdrivers and leather and knives, all very attractive knick-knacks for young boys. This was difficult for me to deal with. On the one hand I knew that their attitude to possessions was totally different from mine; that is, material objects could not be owned by one person, they were a shareable commodity. On the other hand, when things disappeared from Basso’s they usually disappeared for good, or were brought back by an apologetic mother, battered and broken. So I constantly chivvied Clivie and Frankie for their light-fingeredness, which caused temporary bouts of apology but essentially did no good at all.

I had returned from town one day, and was quietly walking back to my room from the kitchen. I kept one room locked, with my most treasured possessions inside. Frankie and Clivie were busily trying to get through the window. They were whispering together like jewel thieves. It was all I could do to repress my laughter, but I held it until I’d gained proper control, then I put a very stern look on my face and said, ‘And what do you think
YOU’RE
doing?’

I swear I have never seen anybody leap out of their skins before. It was as if they’d touched a live wire. There was a respite in pinching for a while.

Some months later, Clivie went on a real binge. I don’t know what brought it on, but he did some pretty stupid things. He stole knives and a gun, I think, and rounded it all off by taking a bottle of whisky from the police department, then going to live on his own in the bush for a couple of weeks — terrified, no doubt, by the possible consequences of his actions. He finally struggled home, was pronounced a delinquent by the welfare department and police, taken from his crippled mother and all his relations, who, the authorities said, were not able to look after him properly, and sent to a boys’ home somewhere down south. Clivie was eleven.

During this time, a kind of misery, a feeling of defeat, was building almost unnoticed in my head. The joy of being on my own, of living in a fantasy place, and of dreaming about the trip without ever coming to terms with the reality of it was beginning to pall. It dawned on me that I was procrastinating, pretending, play-acting, and that was the source of my discomfort. If everyone else believed I would eventually take the camels out into the desert, I did not. It was something I could put at the edge of my mind to play with when I had nothing better to do. It gave me a superficial identity, or structure, which I could crawl into when I was down, and wear like a dress.

This unease was put into abeyance by the daily welter of details and little problems. Both of my camels were ill and required constant attention. I would hobble them out at night to feed, get up at seven to track them down (which could take hours), bring them home, doctor them, train Zelly, make halfhearted attempts at getting their gear ready, and so on until it was time to pedal the three miles in to the restaurant, and the three miles back again at midnight.

Zeleika was dreadfully thin — she had lost all her condition after she was brought in on the train following her capture. She had been squeezed in with a dozen or so frightened wild animals, put in a yard, thrown, hobbled, and left to think about it for a few days. She had been terrorized and banged around badly, and as if that wasn’t enough, she had then been nose-pegged. Bringing camels in from the wild is a cruel business at the best of times; sometimes half the herd dies either from the exhaustion of the chase or from falls and broken limbs.

Kate had not had to endure this experience. She had been used as a pack animal years before, treated abominably, something which she would never forget, then put out to rest in her dotage with a friend on Alcoota Station. Sallay had picked her up from there, leaving the friend behind. She remembered humans and hated them. She was hopeless as a riding camel, fighting the nose-line all the way, and too old and set in her ways ever to change. However, she was a good pack animal, strong and patient, and I figured I would train Zelly for riding and use old Kate for carrying load. Although she would never dream of kicking, her great ugly yellow fangs would chomp out in every direction when she was displeased, which was always, until she was persuaded out of that nonsense with a few solid clouts across the lips. Poor Kate, she gave in so easily, but no matter how kind or loving I subsequently tried to be to her, she would never trust or like me. She had a ‘personal space’ of ten feet, and if any homo sapiens stepped inside that radius she would roar her head off until that person exited that space. She would stand placidly, great mouth open wide, and roar and roar like a lion, only pausing to draw breath. If you stood there for two hours, she would roar for two hours. She was also obscenely overweight. I led her down to the truck weighing-dock one day, and she clocked in at about two thousand pounds — not bad for a stumpy-legged old cow. Her hump was a great mountain of deformed gristle perched on her back, and her massive thighs rubbed together and jiggled when she walked. She was altogether a most awe-inspiring beast.

I brought the vet out within that first week to look over my girls. It was to be the beginning of a long association with the animal doctors of Alice Springs. Hundreds of dollars went into their respective accounts before I left, even though many of them didn’t charge me for the consultations, out of pity. There was to come a day when these wonderful men would run and hide when they saw me entering their clinics, or, if caught, would sigh and say, ‘Who’s dying today, Rob?’ and then wince when I told them of the latest developments in cameloid problems. But they taught me a great deal in that time, how to throw needles into muscles, how to jab needles into jugulars, how to lance, incise, stitch, disinfect, castrate, patch, bandage and clean and all that with the detached coolness of a hardened professional.