Tracks (16 page)

Next morning, I fiddled with the pack, designed Zeleika an elastic nose-line hoping she would not hang back on it, put Bub back in the lead, and headed off for Curtin Springs, where I spent a couple of days trying to restuff Dookie’s saddle. The pack was not yet perfect.

After that the tourists became just too much, so I set a compass course for the Rock and headed off across the dunes. Trudging across that solidified sea of sand was exhausting me, so I decided to ride Bub. And then I saw the thing. I was thunderstruck. I could not believe that blue form was real. It floated and mesmerized and shimmered and looked too big. It was indescribable.

I slid down the sandhill and pushed Bub quickly across the valley through a forest of desert oaks and up the next incline. I held my breath until I could see it again. The indecipherable power of that rock had my heart racing. I had not expected anything quite so weirdly, primevally beautiful.

I entered the tourist village in the afternoon, and was met by the head ranger of this vast national park. A nice man, whose job was not as enviable as it appeared on the surface. He had to protect that delicately balanced country from an ever-increasing number of Australian and overseas tourists, who not only had no knowledge of desert ecology and the effect their very presence had on it, but who insisted on picking wildflowers, throwing cans out of their car windows, breaking trees for firewood, lighting fires where they had no business to and then not dousing them out, and driving off the perfectly good road leaving wheel ruts that would last for years. He offered me a caravan to rest in, which I accepted, showed me a good place to hobble the camels, and told me he wouldn’t mind if I later camped by the Olgas for a few days.

The great monolithic rock was surrounded by fertile flats for a radius of half a mile which, because of the added run-off water, were covered in lush green feed and wildflowers so thick you couldn’t step between them. Then the dunes began, radiating away as far as the eye could see, orange fading into dusty blue.

The bush fire had swept through this country too, which, although making it now look prettier and greener, I thought might cause problems with the camels. Many desert plants, when they first shoot up out of the ground looking so deliciously edible, protect themselves with various toxins. While I knew Zelly would know what to eat and what not to eat, I wasn’t too sure about the others. Many an early exploratory expedition had failed because camels had been poisoned. So that my animals wouldn’t stray too far, Zelly and Goliath now took turns at being tied from the hobbles, with a forty-foot rope, to some trees. This was because Zeleika was unequivocally the leader, and without her the others would go nowhere. But it also meant that she would not be there with them to teach them what to eat. I hoped that there was enough good feed around so they wouldn’t attempt anything new. They were in fact very careful about this, as I was to discover later.

I sat up on the first sandhill watching the gathering evening changing the bold harsh daylight colours to luminous pastels, then deeper to the blues and purples of peacock feathers. This was always my favourite time of day in that country — the light, which has a crystalline quality I have not seen in any other place, lingers for hours. The Rock did not disappoint me, far from it. All the tourists in the world could not destroy it, it was too immense, too forceful, too ancient to be corruptible.

There were very few of the Pitjantjara mob left here. Most had moved away to more private tribal areas, though a few remained to protect and look after what is an extremely important site in their mythic culture. They were making a meagre living by selling artefacts to the tourists. Uluru they called it. The great Uluru. I wondered how they could stand watching people blundering around in fertility caves, or climbing the white painted line up the side, and taking their endless photos. If it had me almost to the point of tears, how much more must it have meant to them. There was one miserably small fenced-off section on the western side which read, ‘Keep out. Aboriginal sacred site.’

I asked one of the rangers what he thought of the blacks. ‘Oh they’re all right,’ he replied, ‘they’re nuisance value more than anything else.’ I was coming to expect this, and there didn’t seem much point in stating the obvious, that it was the tourists who were the nuisance value — that they were invading sacred land that did not, could not ever, belong to them, and which they could not even begin to understand. At least the man did not despise them.

Rick arrived the next day, all bouncy and enthusiastic and full of energy. I had been out exploring and wandering through the bloodwood forests of the southern side. He announced that he had a surprise for me and led me back to the caravan. There on my bed, leg bandaged and crutches resting by the pillow, was my dear friend Jen. My initial reaction was one of great relief, surprise and happiness. The next one was a petty little voice saying to me, ‘Are your friends going to follow you all the way?’ I did double takes like strobe lighting. Jenny, being an acutely sensitive person, read this in my face as clearly as if I had screamed it at her, although I tried desperately to hide it. It set the tone for the rest of that difficult day — a subtle intricate unspoken tension, which both of us preferred to take out on Rick, rather than each other.

Jenny had fallen off her bike at Utopia and had lain in the dust for some time, unable to move, staring at her own bones beneath her ripped flesh. This had naturally enough set off several shock waves and dwellings upon the frailty of human life, from which she had not yet recovered. She was not up to handling the conflicting emotions that reverberated through the caravan that night like drums in a canyon. None of us was.

Rick showed us the slides of the departure from Alice on his projector. We sat there, Jen and I, like those sideshow clown heads — mouths open, heads swivelling. They were gorgeous photos, no complaints there, but who was that
Vogue
model tripping romantically along roads with a bunch of camels behind her, hair lifted delicately by sylvan breezes and turned into a golden halo by the back-lighting. Who the hell was she? Never let it be said that the camera does not lie. It lies like a pig in mud. It captures the projections of whoever happens to be using it, never the truth. It was very telling, to see how the batches of images changed radically as the trip progressed.

At first, I found it difficult to talk, to tell them anything, because it seemed that nothing much had in fact happened to me. I had just walked down a road leading a few camels, that’s all. But as we sat together that night, in the heavy air of the caravan, my brain started to crack open, spewing forth bits of cement and chicken wire and I knew that the trip was responsible. It was changing me in a way that I had not in the least expected. It was shaking me up and I had not even noticed. It had snuck up from behind.

The next two days buzzed and sizzled. Jenny was in tears waiting for the plane to take her back to Alice Springs, I felt like pummelled dough and Rick took pictures of us. We despised him for it — saw it as a form of parasitism, voyeurism. We were unable or unwilling to see that it was simply his way of handling a situation in which he felt totally out of his depth. And then I was left with him.

It did not help that the magazine had insisted that he get new and exciting shots of the Rock. I posed in caves and walked back and forth across sand-dunes. I led the camels over escarpments and I rode them through wildflowers. ‘What about honest journalism?’ I shouted, and set my face into cement-like grimaces as I stamped along. Poor Richard, how I made him pay. I think he was truly frightened of me at times. But he was certainly game. I put him on Dookie for a ride, while I rode Bub, who started to shy and pig-root. I yelled at Richard to hang on, but through the fracas, I could hear the steady clicking of his camera. I have noticed this trait in many photographers — the ability to be much braver when they are looking through a lens than when they are not. Interesting.

I had been looking forward to seeing the Olgas for years now. They were the sisters to Ayers Rock, and they looked like great red loaves of bread that some giant had dropped out of the sky. From the Rock, they were a cluster of lavender pebbles along the horizon. I wanted to spend a few days there, away from the tourists, wandering, exploring and just enjoying the lack of pressure, and the time to myself so I could sit and think and sort out my tangles, without worrying about having to get somewhere, or be concerned for anyone else. I wanted to get away again, recapture that feeling of freedom that I had thought would be permanent when I left Redbank Gorge. It was not to be.

I walked the twenty miles, through country that should have mended me but which I did not allow even to penetrate. I was depressed, I felt cheated and put upon, and my face looked like a viola. I hated Rick and blamed him for everything. Besides, he didn’t like the desert, couldn’t see it. He didn’t belong and he couldn’t light fires, or cook, or fix trucks. He was like a fish out of water and he thought the countryside boring. He would listen to music or read until I came into view, then he would take his photos using the magnificent earth as a backdrop.

The other difficulty was that, while my reaction to tension is to let it build up then explode it away in a fit of fury, Rick’s was to sulk. I had never met such a terminal sulker. I couldn’t stand it. By the end of the day I would practically grovel at his feet in an effort to get him to talk, or fight, or something. Anything. And Diggity adored him. ‘Betraying brat,’ I thought, ‘and you usually have such good taste in people.’

We arrived at the Olgas that night in a tight silence, and set up camp directly beneath them. They glowed orange, then red, then iridescent pink, then purple, then turned into a black cutout against glowing moonlight. Rick called the ranger at Ayers Rock, to test his radio, but not only could he not contact him, a mere twenty miles away, but he had a crackly conversation with a fisherman in Adelaide, five hundred miles to the south.

‘Oh wonderful. Wonderful. Just as well we brought radio sets, eh, Rick? I mean when I’m bleeding and croaking out in the middle of woop-woop a mile from the nearest station, it’s nice to know I can always have a pleasant chat to someone in Alaska. Wouldn’t you agree, Richard? Richard?’

Richard remained silent.

That night I couldn’t stand any more. I grabbed Rick by the hand, sat him down beside me by the fire and said:

‘OK, mate, you win. I can’t take any more. We’ll have to work something out because this is just plain ridiculous. Here we are in the middle of a most magical desert, involved in something which should be giving us joy, and we’re acting like children.’

Richard continued staring into the fire, a stricken look around his eyes, and his bottom lip protruding, just a fraction. I tried again.

‘It’s like this story about the two monks you know. They’re not allowed to have anything to do with women. Anyway, they’re walking along together and they see this woman drowning out in a stream. And one monk jumps into the water and carries her to the bank. Then they keep on walking for a while in silence and suddenly the second monk can’t hold it back any more and he says, “How could you touch that woman?” And the first monk looks up surprised and answers, “Oh, are you still carrying the woman?” Well you see what I mean, Richard, we’re both the second dumb monk and it’s stupid and it’s driving me to drink and I’ve got enough to worry about. So, either you leave right now, I send the money back to
Geographic
and we forget the whole thing, or we reach some better understanding of what we both want and how to go about getting it, OK?’

We talked. We talked for hours and hours about every subject under the sun, ending up laughing and being friends which was a great relief. I understood and liked him much better — he would turn out all right, that one. There were many lights hidden under his bushel.

I had also said he could come along with me to Docker River, five days away, and although I desperately wanted to be on my own again, it seemed churlish to send him away, given that he wanted to get photographs of Aborigines, and this would probably be one of the few places he could do so. Although I felt disturbed by this prospect (I knew Aboriginal people were thoroughly sick of having lenses stuck up their nostrils by insensitive tourists) I thought that any press coverage they could get, at this stage in their demise, would be a good thing, providing it was done with their consent. Besides, the relief of having Rick talking to me again, of having dissipated the tension, was worth almost any concession.

I did not perceive at that time that I was allowing myself to get more involved with writing about the trip than the trip itself. It did not dawn on me that already I was beginning to see it as a story for other people, with a beginning and an ending.

We spent a few days at the Olgas which, although pleasant enough — how could they not be in such a place — for me were clouded by a feeling of being bound, kept back, hemmed in. I constantly imagined what it would be like, how much better it would be, if I were on my own. I was no longer blaming Richard, however, but myself. I knew I had to take full responsibility for his being there, had to come face to face with the fact that this trip would not, could not, be what I had planned and wanted it to be. And instead of seeing the potential that was there, I mourned for the loss of my hopes.

A day out on the track, and the pressure was starting to build again. This was because, after I have loaded fifteen hundred pounds of junk, walked twenty miles, unloaded the junk, gathered firewood, lit a fire, cooked a meal for two, and cleaned up after the meal for two, I get a wee bit titchy. Perhaps it’s the low blood sugar level, I don’t know. I do know that anyone who crosses me after such a day had better expect an explosion, especially if all that person has done is take pictures of me doing all those things, instead of helping me with them.

I seethed with secret rage one night, then threw a bundle of garlic at my companion and yelled, ‘Peel that if you haven’t got a broken arm.’ We were back at square one, with Richard in the sulks, and me thinking up ways I could murder him without getting caught.