Lindsay said to me once that she would never visit Australia, as she wouldn’t learn anything while she was here. For a long while, I glumly agreed.
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
Tara, Neutral Junction Station
They still call me Max at Neutral Junction even now. If I’m in polite company I say I named myself after my childhood hero – the protagonist in ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ but really, Max is short for Maximum Penetration.
I couldn’t call myself Dave you see, because a fella called Dave had just died. Tara is a traditional Aboriginal community, so during the mourning period, you can’t use his name. The house where he died had to be deserted and smoked out, all images of him removed. They’re serious about it too. We blotted out Dave’s name with Nikko pen on all our lists, and I changed my name from Dave to Max, after my childhood hero.
We stayed in workers’ quarters, on the station. John, the ringer, was spending a lot of time in the community store because his mother-in-law was visiting: “She keeps cleaning! She’s vacuuming the fuckin’ nails out of the floorboards ! She walks into the laundry, and the washing machine starts backin’ into the corner.”
A black fulla walked in. John wrinkled his nose: “Did you step in something mate?”
The Countryman shyly shook his head, and John sprayed him down with Glen 20. I couldn’t really argue with John though – he smelt of curdled sweat that stings your eyes. They call soap ‘Sunday’ round here apparently.
Tara is a tiny place of ten or twelve houses, on Neutral Junction Station. Maybe fourteen houses. The last white fellas who came to Tara were kidnapping their children. Like a desert storm is heralded by a massive dust cloud, our arrival was heralded by Aboriginal families fleeing into the desert, or up the secret tracks to Utopia – that heat-blasted area to the north. We had to find these people.
Stage One was clockwork. There’s nothing lures a black fulla out of his home like the smell of sausages and onions. We fired up the barbeque. First came the camp dogs, many of them leatherbacks, hairless and slumped. Those people that hadn’t fled to Utopia, mostly men, soon followed. We had our meeting, and signed the agreements with them, while Nelly, cut-snake, stormed around, lashing at the leatherbacks with a cane.
We discussed with John the problem of the mothers having fled into the desert.
“Haha ! It’s simple. They can live out there, hunting, for weeks on end, shooting wallabies and chasin’ goannas up trees in their four wheel drives. But there’s one thing they can’t go without. Beer.”
So that was that, the three of us, we encamped around the Barrow Creek pub, like lions stalking a waterhole.
And when the 12pm bell rang, the ladies appeared like goannas from their holes, and we pounced on them with our laptops and our agreements.
The Erldunda Roadhouse
I opened the car door, and a crushed Victoria Bitter can clattered to the ground. There were some emus behind a fence. An aboriginal kid was hittin’ one with a stick, while the parents sat nearby sharing a tin of bully beef. Who’s to say actually if they were the parents – you never can tell with black fullas. I thought Sam was going to say something to the family, but she didn’t. In the pie-warmer in the back of the roadhouse they had a few limp pies that looked like they’d been bashed and robbed. A bit of steak-and-kidney gravy had squirted free from one, and dried to the outside like a scab.
Honest Dave: “I’ll get one o’ these triceratops pies thanks.”
Samantha Yeates: “What do you mean triceratops pies?”
Dave: “Well they look like they’ve been around since back then.”
Sam: “That’s true.”
Dave: “I’ll get a pterodactyl chicken wing as well.”
Sam: “And I’ll get a dodecahedron pasty.”
Girl-behind-counter: “Well listen, if you don’t like them, you can cross the road to the cow paddock, and help yourself to one of Paddy’s Pies – they’re free.”
Dave: “They’re no doubt fresher – That sounds like a well-practised line – not the first time people have complained about your produce?” I handed over the money.
Girl: “You payin’ for all this yourself?”
Dave: “Sure am – no pie is too good for my sheila. What about beers?”
Girl: “The Ringers Bar’s round the back.”
I walked into the cozy little place. Corrugated iron. Crappy aboriginal dot-paintings festooned the walls along with other vital outback commodities like furry kanagaroos and those koalas that clip on the front of your shirt.
“Sixpack a VB thanks.”
“Sure, there you go.”
Sam: “What ‘dja get VB for ? What about Coopers?”
Dave: “Coopers Gay Ale? If you closed your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
Sam: “Hundred bucks says I would.”
Dave: “Hundred bucks? That would almost cover the price of this sixer. Fuckin’ Territory.”
Sam: “Yeah, well it’s the…”
Dave: “…I know I know, the freight. If I had a dollar for every time a Territorian told me that, I could almost afford this six-pack.”
Sam bought herself Coopers and we headed back to the car. I made some space for my feet among the ankle-deep jingling carpet of brown stubbies and greencans on the car floor. Sam mentioned that I should be throwing the cans out the window as we drove, in case the cops pull us over. It’s the Territorian way.
Sam: “VB is fuckin’ foul. I won’t drink the shit. Well, not until I’ve finished my Coopers anyway.”
Dave: “Such restraint is an inspiration.”
. . . . . .
Magela Creek, Kakadu
I sat down by the river, and shared my Barbeque Shapes with an Aboriginal woman. She smelled pretty strongly, such that it was making me sneeze, and making my eyes itch. So when I say I was sharing my Shapes, once her hand had penetrated the box, I pretty much left her to the rest. Her family was upstream casting nets and handlines, the children were leaping from the ¬‘DANGER – CROCODILES’ sign, into the water.
The woman laughed, “Crocs don’t have good eyes. They can’t see our black skin. But you white fullas shouldn’t go in the water. You glow like lightbulbs. And we have women’s business where we slap on the water’s surface – this annoys the crocs, and they go away.”
I asked her to show me this dubious science of ‘women’s business’ to which they trusted the connectedness of their limbs, but she looked to the ground and fell silent, and her hand, which up to then had been relentlessly shoveling Shapes into her mouth, dropped to her lap. I apologised, and moved the subject, as always, to fishing.
“Black fullas’ lazy,” she said. “Everyone knows that. If you want to know the easiest way, ask a black fulla. When you are fishing it’s not just you and the fish. The insects and birds can help you fish if you ask. All of the world acts on all other parts of the world, all the time. Always be thinking of how it does.”
A sea eagle alighted on a high branch. “To find a fishing spot, watch for the sea eagle. He sits in the top of the tree, watching the water for fish. Sea eagle, he’s a good fisherman. So we look for the him. When we find him, we sit under his tree. Here, we throw in a handline. No sweat. And when you catch a fish, throw the sea eagle a piece of it, thank him, and he will help you next time.
“That plant there, white fellas call it the billygoat plum – when the flowers blossom, the barramundi and turtles are fat, so we fish for them. In the month when the plum is ripe, we stop fishing, and eat the plum instead – easier. In the Dry, when the creeks stop flowing, we crush the bark of the billygoat plum and soak it in the still pools – it poisons the water a bit, and the barra float to the top. Easy.
“Paperbark tree, best tree in Kakadu. See that bulge at the side, it’s full of clean fresh water, drill a hole, take a sip, and plug it back up with bark. The paperbark tree can help us fish too. Go down the river at evening time, just before the mozzies come, you know? Peel off a bit a bark, and wrap it up into a candle. Stick it by the water’s edge, and light it. Go away for a walk for a while, maybe go check the traps. When you get back, the mozzies and insects, they come for the light and smoke – and they fly round like crazy. Sometimes the insects hit the water and die. So then, the little fish come for them and eat them. Then the big fish come, and they eat the smaller fish. And soon the barra will come. Throw in a line, and haul out one a dem big barras. No sweat.”
The Mackenzie Country, New Zealand
The winds off Antarctica scour the Mackenize Country bare. The high country is primal, spindly, mighty and barren. A tremendous silence echoes from the mountains. Massive hydro plants link the lakes – it seems that New Zealand has learned to harness power from the country’s very stillness, her peace, her eternity.
Stags, and Himalayan thar rove the mountains. American trophy hunters prize them – the stags for their antlers, the thar for their magnificent manes. Sensibly, due to the region’s scorching cold, safari season tends to be in the summer.
What the postcards don’t tell the tourists, though, is that in the mildness of summer, the thar have no need of their precious manes, and shed them.
This is where Spinner comes in. Friends say that Spinner earned his nickname from all the bullshit he spins when he is pissed. Spinner insists it comes from his prowess on the cricket pitch. There’s no denying that he’s a great cricketer, but strangely, he’s a pace bowler. When his parents went back home to England he had to quit school, and joined a shearers’ gang. He did this for decades. The problem was: “It’d happen too often: I’d be shearing, and the fuckin’ sheep would kick me in the shin, or in the balls, or across the jaw when I’m on the long blow. And I would hate that cunt of a sheep. And I’d grab it. And I’d hold shut its nose and mouth and try and suffocate it. But while it’s thrashing round in my grip, I’d kind of… realise it’s my job to get that sheep down that chute, shorn. And while it’d probably take me, I dunno, two or three minutes to suffocate it… well, it’d only take me a minute and a half to shear it. So I would.
“I realised I had to give it away. I started to come to hate the sheep. I hated them for being fucking stupid sheep. The smell of them made me hate. One winter I went up into the mountains – started killing thar. I spend every winter up there now. I shoot ‘em, scalp ‘em, and sell the manes to the taxidermist. Then when those tourists come on safari, when they have the heads of their kills mounted on the wall, they attach my manes to their kill. Cos they always come in the summer when the thar don’t have their manes any more, dickheads.”
In the summertime, when he’s back in town, if you want to kill something, or have something killed, you talk to Spinner. Need to have a lamb slaughtered? Possums in the roof? Neighbour’s dog keeping you up at night? Speak to Spinner.
Well, me and Dad wanted to kill some trout. So we spoke to Spinner. Spinner took us up, high up, through the farms, into that desolate Mackenzie Basin – every stream, every valley, every paddock, held a memory for Spinner of something that he’d killed.
We were bobbing in the tinnie in Lake Benmore, lines cast, the slap of the water the only sound. As always while fishing, the conversation went from espousing the beauty of a sunset, or birdsong, or a river’s bend, to catching fish, to shooting pigs. But I just couldn’t relax – he was wearing the tiniest pair of denim shorts – there seemed the constant danger that one of his testicles was going to sproing out the side, every time he shifted in his seat. I was beset by a teetering worry, like when your kids are playing by the highway, or when you are drunk around your great aunt Madge, and you know at any moment a swear word is going to fall, unsolicited, from your lips.
He was elaborating a story (which was further impressing on me that I want to be on his side when the revolution comes) when a black shag alighted on a branch to clean her feathers. Spinner snatched into a new tale:
“We were fishing for brown trout this day. Nothing. We weren’t getting a bite, nothing. All fuckin’ day we sat there. The sun was setting and we were getting hungry, and it was pissing us off. But those black shags were all around us all day dive-dombing the water and pulling up trout. Those black shags would eat their own weight in trout every day, and they didn’t even have to pay for fishing licenses.
“So, bein’ a bit cheeky, I picked off one a the shags with me rifle. Then me mate did. It was fun, and I reckon we killed about 20 or 25 or something that night. Thing is, after we stopped and that crack of rifle fire stopped echoing off the mountains, we heard this insane squawking coming from everywhere. Yeah we soon realised it was coming from the shags’ nests. It was their babies, their chicks poor buggers. There was nothing for it – they were orphans now, wouldn’t survive, so we took to the nests with shotguns until all the squawking stopped.”
He sat back, one wrinkly bullock about to erupt from his shorts like a spudgun: “Next day but, when we went out in the tinnies, let me tell you, no sweat, we caught some fucking trout.”
. . . . .
Gunbalanya, Arnhem Land
The pilot’s descent toward the airstrip seemed far too vigorous for my comfort. When he saw my concerned gulp, he pointed down, shouted above the engine noise, “Brumbies. Here yesterday too. Hiding from the fires.”
Wild horses littered the runway. The airstrip fence was only on three sides. When Gunbalanya Council applied for the government grant for the fence, they miscalculated the length required, so it doesn’t completely surround the airstrip. Our pilot buzzed the runway, the brumbies scattered, he banked.
Across Arnhem Land, a half-dozen craters of fire unfurled stalks of smoke that mushroomed across the sky. The whistling kites, known as firebirds, swarmed these great towers in a bustling explosion of dive-bombing, as they hunt for small marsupials and reptiles and insects escaping the flame. When the fire gets hot enough that the prey are dying rather than escaping it, the whistling kites collect flaming twigs and drop them elsewhere to start their own smaller fires. I shit you not.
That’s the Territory right there, death coming at you from all angles. Sitting on your back porch in the dry season, there’s six enormous fires stalking the eucalypt forest out there in the darkness. Your house and fence are made out of kindling and match-heads, and you’re wondering if one of those conflagrations is gonna come your way, wondering if this is going to be the last night of your life. And it’s just you and your brother-in-law and the hose, shovel, shotgun and esky.
The hose puts out spot fires from the raining embers.
The esky keeps the beer cold. Der.
The shovel takes out the snakes that are fleeing the fire and onto your property.
And the shotgun takes out those fucking whistling kites that keep dropping flaming fucking twigs into the yard !
The pilot landed the plane hard enough that it put my back out.
The top end of the Northern Territory has, of course, three seasons.
The Build-up – you virtually need gills to breathe during this time. Clouds, like great continents, march toward you over the Arafura Sea, formed from the moisture the sun is sucking from your very cells. Any attempt at perfume or deodorant is futile as torrents of sweat just flush it away. A piece of A4 paper will go limp like cloth. Sometimes you’ll do a toilet stop for no other reason except to wipe.
The Wet – those clouds finally break, and the lowlands flood. Hills become islands, and most places are cut off except by plane. Accompanying the rising floodwaters are the crocodiles, who rule the Top End during the Wet.
The Dry – what was underwater during the Wet, burns during the dry. This time of year there are mountains of smoke on the horizons. On the highway you’ll drive past a bushfire whose heat you can feel through the walls of the car. Fire is a season in the Top End. The Dry and the Wet may as well be called the Fire and the Flood.
Spinifex grass secretes a flammable gum. The Central Australian desert is rife with the stuff. Any spark, and that spinifex whips it into a frenzy of flame, and lashes it across the desert like gossip across a beauty salon. The fire acts as an agent of destruction, by razing the scrub and small trees to ash, but also as a medium for rebirth. The hot wind and smoke carry with them a freight of spinifex seeds, that plant themselves in that ash.
Black fullas understood fire. As the boys become men, as part of their men’s business, first trick they learn is to make a fire from rubbing sticks together. Only a man may start a fire, only a woman may transport it. The women store the coals in hollowed out roots, like didgeridoos, where they smolder slowly when moving between camps.
They have always burned off land to prevent a dangerous build up of tinder, and that’s still the policy today – those fires you see out your car window were mostly started on purpose.
The Aborigines would also use the same trick as the whistling kites, and start a fire to flush out the kangaroos, which they’d ambush with boomerangs and spears.
That night in the beer garden of the Gunbalanya Sports and Social Club, one of Australia’s great pubs, my back still twinged. Keith Urban on the telly, I was speaking with the Council about the agreements. The Club was girt by orchards of flame. The speargrass was brown, and the fire was roaring its crackling and pitiless applause. No-one else in the pub, the local fellas, the road crew guys, seemed concerned, so I drowned my apprehension with beer. In fact it seemed to them no more worthy of interest than the sound of traffic, or a distant car alarm. But while my right hand was on my beer, my left was in my pocket on my car keys, key to the driver’s side door at the ready.
By the meatworks, a pandanus palm was shriveling to an arthritic claw as the fire guttled it. The setting sun glared red onto the heat and dry haze and smoke and dragonflies and hayfever.
As night arrived, so did the mozzies and the cane toads. While the white fellas sprayed on insect repellant everyone at the table put their hands over their beers, as subconscious and practised a motion as scratching your stubble or biting a hangnail. The floodlights came on so the people gathered around them, not for the light so much, but for the entertainment. The lights quickly attracted thousands of insects which would cyclone around the illumination in a great whirling funnel off into the darkness. As they spiraled spastically some would strike the lights themselves and their fried remains drop to the grass below, food for one of the dozen cane toads sitting in wait – it would flick out its tongue and reverse-vomit the insect.
But the cane toads’ free buffet was not without its cost. Although one of the kids had a cricket bat, the others were just using planks of wood to smash and kill the toads. This would remind me every time of that golf club I have back at my apartment – I never use it, I should give it to one of these kids to use.
At 7pm the curfew siren blew, so those kids, and the violent drunks (identifiable by their brawl-scarred faces) filed out with slung shoulders.
Out there, the scene was hellish, the fire cast menacing spears of shadow through the night.
I said to Isaac, I said, “What’s with all the fire? Are people hunting?”
“Nah,” said Isaac. “I think someone dropped a cigarette.”
Darwin, Northern Territory capital
The most powerful truths (and thus, the most dangerous) are those that, once revealed, seem self-evident.
In the late eighteen hundreds, Darwin’s theory of evolution was inflaming the imaginations of white men. Religion was dead, but no longer needed. Galileo had given religion the first bullet by showing that we weren’t cupped in the Lord’s palm with Heaven above and Hell below; but were rather a speck spiraling and wobbling out of control in an endless and unknowable void. Charles Darwin gave religion the coup de grace by teaching that we come, not from Eden, but from monkeys.
So, on encountering the Aboriginal people, the Europeans, their thoughts enslaved by Darwin’s newfound science, figured it went like this – amoeba to tadpoles to fish to dinosaurs to monkeys to gorillas to black fullas to white fullas. At best, Europeans considered Aboriginal people primitive, degraded and abject – a situation from which to be rescued. At worst, they considered them proto-human, or the ‘missing link’.
The scientists’ understanding of the truth of evolution was malformed and foetal, and they wielded it dangerously. In fact humans are not evolved from monkeys. Monkeys and humans, blacks and whites alike, are evolved from the same ancient creature, one that no longer exists. Never, through the momentum of evolution, was man ever a monkey.
Meanwhile, Darwinism itself was evolving. Rulers, throughout time, had used religion as a goad to send people off to war – Pope Urban promised eternal life to the Crusaders who fell against the Muslims. The Conquistadors, the Inquisition both used religion as an excuse for their acts. Islam flew from the Arabian Peninsula across the world on wings of war and violence.
Since no-one believed in God any more the kings and queens needed a new doctrine to coerce their subjects to kill.
Social Darwinism became the newest creed to justify violence and colonialism. Social Darwinism says that human beings are part of nature, and the exigencies of nature’s laws govern our behavior. Struggle and competition are inevitable and are, in fact, vital for our progress. Conflict is irrepressible, inexorable. It’s not war, not racism, it’s survival-of-the-fittest.
So sharpen your bayonets boys, and stoke your muskets. If they can’t stand up for themselves, it is our civilisation’s right, our duty, to wipe them out, to purge the weaker part to preserve the strength of our species as a whole.
The Aboriginal people of Australia didn’t hold up well against these ideologies, and were slaughtered. To be honest though, ideologies shmideologies – these were just so that the soldier would sleep better at night – the truth is the blacks were on territory the British wanted. All the Aborigines who lived on land considered valuable or fertile were butchered. The high-water mark of blood is Far North Queensland, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory, whose landscapes of swamp and flood and desert and crocodile and heat and fire and snake are so vast, rugged and unrewarding, that by the time Europeans had secured dominion over it, conscience had overtaken our bayonets, and those black fullas who lived here were able, to a degree, to hang on.
Darwin is the name of the Northern Territory’s capital, which shows the reverence which those early colonialists felt toward the man. These days, if you google ‘Darwin’ and ‘Aboriginal’ to discover the consequences of his discoveries on their people, you get links to a heap of backpacker tours to Aboriginal sites heading out of the capital, and stores that sell boomerang key-chains and stubbie coolers emblazoned with dot paintings.
. . . . .
Cahills Crossing, East Alligator River
The East Alligator River is tidal, so the currents and water levels are ever-changing and treacherous. We were taught, before fording a river in your vehicle, to first cross it on foot to test the depth. Well, the East Alligator River is called that for a reason – and I ain’t risking getting torn apart by crocodiles for my twenty-five bucks an hour plus travel allowance. So in reality, in the Top End, how one negotiates a river crossing is to wait for someone else to drive across it first.
And while you wait, you fish. The East Alligator defines the border of Arnhem Land, Aboriginal land. So the western bank is crowded with white guys, the eastern with a few black families (known as bininj in this region), while the sea eagles appraise the scene from the treetops. It’s not enough just to hook a barramundi – once you’ve landed it, you gotta fight the sea eagles for the damn thing.
It was only last week that I’d seen two crocodiles having a fight out in that river, just a few metres out. And today, there are tourists waist deep, confident in their fisherman’s waders; and Aboriginal kids down in the shallows casting nets and handlines. Wouldn’t catch me down there – I’m standing so far back from the river’s edge, that half of my casts don’t even reach the water.
It was only a few minutes before an Aboriginal family drove across the river in their rusty and bouncing Falcon. We all piled into our 90 thousand dollar Landcruiser, and followed in their wake, into Arnhem Land.
Arnhem Land
Like all good Aussie signs, the Welcome to Arnhem Land sign has been taken to with a shotgun.
Until I came here, I didn’t even know Arnhem Land was a real place. I just thought it was that fairy-tale land where kangaroos got their tails, where the crows got their black feathers, and where Tiddalik the frog vomited up all the rivers and the billabongs.
The Australian government has returned the whole enormous slab of Arnhem Land to the Aboriginal people, the traditional owners. I always thought this a wonderful thing – that this country, this Arnhem Land, would forever be kept in its pristine state, preserved by its hereditary custodians. Thing is, in the end, the black fullas do what you and I would do with a heap of resource-rich land – they lease it out to the mining companies, squabble over the royalties, and spend their share on beer.
Our mission this time was to hit the outstations, impossibly remote communities of a half-dozen or so families. Thing is though, we didn’t account for the secret men’s business – the gunapipi – that had just started. Just our luck, it was the first in a decade or more. Men’s business is a ritual coming-of-age, where the men take the boys off across the countryside, teach them where to hunt, how to hunt, how to make weapons, how to make fire. They teach them the songs, the stories, the dances. Gunapipi is some kind of sea monster earth-goddess, who swallows the boys, and when she regurgitates them, or the sea eagle slits open her belly, the boys emerge as men.
The thing about secret men’s business is, it’s secret. No one who ain’t involved is allowed to see it. If someone sees men’s business, they get payback. And whatever the crime, there is only one punishment in the Aboriginal culture – to stand there while everyone chucks spears at you.
Only one dusty road crosses this part of Arnhem Land, like a rusty and mostly healed catscratch across the desolation. With secret men’s business on, that road got closed just in case (God forbid) we should catch a glimpse of the men performing their ceremonies.
So that was it for us, with that road being closed, we’d just kick back in Gunbalanya, do some fishing, or hang with road crew, and still get paid our twenty-five bucks an hour plus travel allowance. I am most certainly the motherfucker for that job.
Balanda Road, Gunbalanya, Arnhem Land
I sat in Steve and Charlie’s yard on Balanda Road – White Fella Road – drinking a boot-legged can of VB, gaping at the view. Part of the sell to get a white fella to work in Gunbalanya is this view. The whistle of the kite and the twist of the pandanus palms frame the reflection of the sacred escarpment Injalak in the sweeping billabong. The heat is your constant companion – it softens your bones and roars in your ears and smothers your motivation, and the first sip of a cold beer runs like silver across your tongue.
Steve’s beard and gut were truly prodigious, so you knew he was someone important. He worked out at the Ranger Uranium mine. “Yeah,” he confided, “I’m head chef out there. Worst job in the place – you know, soon as a bloke isn’t content with his lot, what does he start whingeing about? The food.”
His missus, Charlie, pulled up in an ambulance: “The bininj have blocked off the road with their men’s business, so I couldn’t get back til now. I mean, I’m a doctor ! They won’t even let us through ! They’re makin’ us fly everywhere. Insane the shit we let ‘em get away with.”
“And for what?” Steve commiserated. “You know what those gunapipis, those ceremonies, are about don’t you? They’re out there in the bush, wearing loincloths fuckin’ ritual scarring and circumcising each other with oyster shells. I kid you fuckin’ not,” he turns to me. “Just be glad we’re in the Top End near the estuaries – in the Central Desert there aren’t no oysters. They’re mutilating each other’s genitalia with sharpened flint, or bone shards or some shit like that. “
Charlie was getting her boots off, tripping over herself in her eagerness to get at a can of that ice cold contraband, “Well, I mean the clinic offered to help them out with it, but they wouldn’t have it. Which I’m not unhappy about – I’ve never had to do a circumcision. The parents don’t get it done any more. I mean white parents don’t – Aboriginal families are still doing it – and not when they’re babies either – those kids out there right now are, like, thirteen or something.”
“Fuck, darl, sorry, I always forget, I shoulda gone grab you one when I heard the car,” but Steve’s chair sat low, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Charlie, with a grunt, got the last bit of boot off, “But while you’re in there, can you grab me and Max one? I digress. White kids nowadays, if you tell them that when we were young the doctor used to cut the ends of all our penises off, the kids wouldn’t believe us. At school when we used to play sport, we’d divide the teams up into whether you were circumcised or not – skins or helmets. Hey, it was boarding school, so everyone knew. And the numbers were pretty much fifty fifty. These days there’d be no helmets team at all!”
Charlie arrived, brandishing fresh beers, “So was either group ever embarrassed? Like, were you ashamed of being a skin or a helmet if there were girls around or something?”
“Well, you were only ever as good as your last game.”
Charlie had brought out two beers for herself. Cracked one, guzzled it, then took out the insect repellant. Mine and Steve’s hands screened the mouths of our beercans while she sprayed the toxin over her skin. She cracked the second, sat down, “Steve is quick to slag off at the bininj traditions – circumcision, scarification, moiety, the stories, the dances.”
I piped up, “I always thought that circumcision was just some weird Jewish tradition, but here, as far from Jerusalem as you can be and the black fellas, the bininj (I said awkwardly), are doing it as well. And I mean they do it as far away as Africa – fuck in Africa they even take the scalpel to the women don’t they? What is it with the entire human race hacking at each other’s privates?”
Charlie wiped her mouth with her sleeve, “They say that back in the day, circumcision was useful to prevent infection. These days, as long as you give your old fella a wash in the shower each morning, it’s not really necessary. Although I still think un-circumcised ones look a bit stupid – they remind me of Beaker off the Muppets. But you gotta remember that Aboriginal people never had science. Before a people develop science, they rely on their routines, their traditions, for their survival. In ancient times, customs and religions became successful if they preached good habits, good hygiene. Judaism taught monogamy and dietary laws. Islam taught ritual hand-washing. Hinduism preached purity of the body, mind and spirit. Hinduism even teaches not to share a cup, and to use different utensils to prepare different types of food, though they didn’t even know about germs back then.
“So when a bout of syphilis struck town, the monogamous Jews weren’t affected. When some intestinal worm from the pork was killing everyone, again, the Jews were sweet. Cholera swept through Arabia, but the Muslims who washed their hands each day, lived through. Salmonella was making everyone sick in India, but the Hindus, who chopped the veges over here and the chicken over there, were less susceptible.
“And as those civilisations endured and bred, their culture and those life-saving traditions passed down through the generations, and began to dominate. The positive customs were rewarded by their survival. The people didn’t understand science, they didn’t know about infection or bacteria, they felt that their rituals pleased God, who allowed them to survive. For every religion that has survived, who knows how many have been weeded out. For every mob of Aborigines out there, a hundred have died out, a thousand maybe, through starvation, or thirst, or wild animal attacks or inbreeding or war, flooding, fire. For every religion that taught you to wash your hands, a thousand that taught harmful or pointless practices, like, I don’t know, human sacrifice or medicinal bloodletting, have been weeded out. This Aboriginal mob we’re looking at now, their customs of diet, travelling, hunting, moiety, age of consent, their punitive measures, their taboos, their health, their hunting and foraging sites are truly sacred, more sacred than anything we Eurpoeans can understand. They have helped them to survive the generations in some of the fiercest environments in Australia. But ask them why, and they won’t have an answer that we white fellas will understand.”
A weighty wetness slapped on the corrugated iron roof. As one unit, Charlie and Steve heaved themselves to their feet. Charlie fired up the barbeque, Steve grabbed the umbrella and the ladder. When I returned from the kitchen with beers and alfoil, Steve was up on the ladder fending off an eagle with his umbrella, fighting over some prize on the roof.
A sea eagle had snatched a fish from the billabong, but it’d proved too big for him midflight, so he’d dropped the thing on the roof. Steve climbed down, triumphant, carrying a fat barramundi, which got unceremoniously wrapped in alfoil and dropped on the barbeque. “Welcome to Balanda Road.”
While we waited for the barramundi that was wriggling on the barbeque to cook, Charlie continued on the topic, “When you ask a white guy, a balanda, why do you cook fish before you eat it, or boil river water before you drink it, he’ll tell you that’s it’s to kill harmful bacteria or parasites.
“Ask an Aboriginal woman why she does it – and keep in mind that a bininj wouldn’t ask why – she’ll say it’s either because if I don’t they’ll chuck spears at me, or because it’s what the ancestors have taught us in their stories and songs. Or, because it’s what my mother and grandmother and all my ancestors did, and they survived. And this third answer is the most important of all. Balanda proof, our reasons, exist in science. Bininj proof exists in the fact that hundreds of other tribes have died out, but ours has survived. The reasons aren’t important. If we continue in this manner, we too will survive. Evidence is the white fullas’ teacher. The past is the black fullas’. Innovation is not only pointless to them, but dangerous.”
Gumarrirnbang Outstation
After a few days, the council gave us permission to use the road to Gumarrirnbang. The outstation was built by the state government, so it looks vaguely like a primary school, except all kicked in and smashed and scorched and covered in poorly-spelled graffiti. The people loll around in the heat. The camp dogs swish their bodies and dig craters in the dust to keep cool.
The word ‘aborigine’ comes from the latin ab origine, ‘from the beginnings’ or ‘from the source’ – it’s like when the world was formed, when the first piece of slop slithered from the primeval muck, when God chased Adam out of Eden, the Aborigines were already here, checking the crabpots and carving didgeridoos. I found Mrs Maralngurra, my contact and interpreter. She was sitting in her front yard. The women all sat in a circle in their bright floral dresses, chatting, gossiping, picking nits out of each other’s hair. They looked so perfect, so primeval and epochal in their environment. They looked eternal, like the rivers and the trees and the rocks and the stars, so aboriginal.
I sat with them, and chatted for a while, I handled their enquiries, and got them to sign the agreements. One lady wanted to know where the pension money she got every fortnight actually came from. Another wanted to know the dates of birth of her children, so she knew when to get them birthday cake.
Mrs Maralngurra was ancient. Aboriginal people have the lowest life expectancy of any group in the country, and yet some seem to linger forever. To me, this township looked fetid and awful, but Mrs Maralngurra spoke with pride of their football team, and of her boy in school in Darwin, and of the rock band that practises all afternoon, keeping everyone awake.
I said to her, “You know these days you can just get shampoo to kill lice, and it’ll get their eggs too so they won’t come back – you don’t have to sit there picking them out with your hands.” The silence hung with the unspoken phrase, “like fuckin’ monkeys”.
Mrs Maralngurra was rare, in that she would be confrontational, which is one thing that made her useful as a guide. But still, she was uncomfortable. Her hands grasped together, and she looked to her lap, “I watched my boy do school play in Darwin. There was lots of scenery, they made trees and mountains and rocks from cardboard, and at the end of each scene they moved them around. That’s how white fellas think. All of the nature is a stage, and you move it around how you want. Kill this what you don’t want. Farm this what you want more of. We bininj don’t think like this – when we do a play or a dance, one person plays the hero, one the goanna, one plays the tree, one the mountain.”
She moved up close, her breath smelt like guts: “I remember when the first supply plane came from white fellas’ government it was like a miracle for our people. Older people used to say this was Jesus bringing us food and they would say prayers for the planes to come. And the plane came every two weeks. Later, government introduced the dole money, the sit-down money, for us mob. So then a second plane, the mail plane would come and drop us off our dole cheques, and then the supply plane would come the next week, and take our dole cheques and swap it for food. But the people didn’t understand what the dole cheques were, so we’d lose them. And then when the supply plane came, they wouldn’t give us the food because we didn’t have the cheque. So where before there was one plane that kept everyone fed, now there were two planes, only feeding half the people.
“We try and keep stuff pure out here. It’s hard, specially when government keeps handing us free stuff all the time, free money. I seen so many kids in front of their Nintendos, too shy and afraid to come outside any more. I seen utes full of people drive into trees, drunk men destroying their families, and their selves. We’ve sat in these circles under these trees, right here, in this Arnhem Land, picking the lice out of each other’s hair and crushing them between our fingernails, for a thousand generations. We Aboriginal people, who live out here in the outstations, we try to keep our simple lives, and try to remember the lessons taught by our ancestors. We know that one day those supply planes and that sit-down money are going to stop coming. And we have to be ready.
“A thousand generations us mob been here. 60,000 years they reckon. I wonder if you balanda, even with your remote controls and your panadols, even with your lice shampoo and your cash registers, I wonder if you can last in this country even half so long.”
. . . . .
honest dave