White Beech: The Rainforest Years (10 page)

Before I left the south coast I made one last attempt. The local estate agents had a ‘historic’ homestead on the books, so Jane and I went to see it. Our way up into the pastoral district of the Monaro took us on zigzag timber roads over the coastal scarp through the higher-altitude sclerophyll forests, where far too often we could hear the cling-clang of the Bell Miners. As we got further inland the native forest gave way to huge dark plantations of Monterey Pine. The road fizzled out and navigation got harder, as we wove our way through the crisscross logging tracks. We seemed to be driving for hours without getting anywhere. I was convinced that in my obsession for travelling cross-country I had finally succeeded in getting us properly lost when the five-barred gate of the station was suddenly in front of us. I jumped out, stepped up to unhook the chain and open the gate, and froze. Beyond the gate the broad, undulating pasture lay grey and dry, watched grimly by the distant pines. In the birdless, terrible quiet, nothing moved. The sky too seemed drained of colour. It was as if my vision had gone from colour to black and white.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Jane.

I didn’t know. ‘I don’t want to go in,’ was all I said. My hands were cold. My sister studied my face and said nothing. We’d been driving for more than three hours to get to this place, but she didn’t ask even to stretch her legs. I got back in the car, turned it around and drove the three hours back again. I apologised for my strange behaviour. Jane shook her head.

‘You didn’t see yourself. Your face was grey.’

It was many months before I found out that the property we went to see was the very station where, sometime in the 1840s, a whole Aboriginal community was murdered. The story, which has been passed down by one to another manager of the station ever since, is that the Aboriginal people used to sneak into the dairy at night and lick the cream off the top of the milk in the separating dishes. Nothing was simpler than to lace the milk with strychnine. Somebody must have bought the station ultimately, for I see it’s operating once more, but I’m glad that someone wasn’t I.

Thus ended my search for a place in New South Wales.

Desert

What I really wanted was desert. For twenty years I had been roving back and forth over central Australia, hunting for my own patch of ground. Whether stony, rocky or sandy, pink, vermilion or blood-red, whether bald, furred with native grasses, or diapered with saltbush and spinifex, I wanted it. For years I have gorged on the life that pounds within what we were taught to call the ‘dead heart’, from the sudden glitter of dawn, when kangaroos sprang in front of me and emus loped beside me, with my ears tuned to the electric sizzle of the finches’ song against the limitless silence, to the creeping violet fingers of evening. The white heat never seemed all that hot to me, because the desert winds freeze-dried the sweat on my body. Zero humidity and I were made for each other. The more I saw of semi-arid Australia, the more I yearned for it.

This falling in love began when I first drove the Birdsville track from Bourke to Alice Springs in 1970 and camped in the deep warm pink sand of the dry Todd River. I had never had an Aborigine’s-eye view of my country before, and what I saw I loved, until the police raided the beer garden of the Alice Springs Hotel and took most of my fellow campers to jail. After I had followed the sequence of injustices through the magistrate’s court on Monday morning when all my new friends, who had committed no offence, were given custodial sentences, some of them as long as six months, there was no time to venture out of the town and discover the inland for myself. I flew back to Sydney and eventually back to England, but the feel of that warm sand in the dappled shade of the river gums under the cobalt sky never left me. Whenever I found myself in Australia, I took every opportunity to escape from the endless sprawl of suburbia into the vast blue yonder.

Literary description of semi-arid Australia always dramatises its pitiless emptiness. Nicolas Rothwell, who followed the tracks of the explorers for his book
Wings of the Kite-Hawk
, recycles all the clichés. Why do I not feel ‘the stillness of the bush, pure and uncaring’, or the ‘dull monotony of tree and scrub’, in this ‘inhuman’, ‘unnatural’, ‘alien’ ‘world of suffering, exhaustion, danger and death’, ‘the cruellest and most inhuman world that it was possible to conceive’ under the ‘empty blueness of the sky’? I don’t feel the desert as an ‘empire of formlessness and death’; what I feel in the desert is deep comfort. Only in suburbia do I begin to feel frantic and hopeless, suddenly back where I was in my teens, imprisoned, heartsick, revolted by the endless roofscape, desperate for life to begin. Maybe the claustrophobia I inherited from my father, that has disqualified me for life in the brick veneer bungalow on its quarter-acre block, hemmed in by fences on all sides, is quieted only in the desert, where I can wrap myself in the same kind of euphoria that lures divers to their deaths at the bottom of the sea. I am never frightened in the desert, not even when I’m well and truly lost, and God knows I should be. A silk dress and a car key are unlikely to get you out of trouble, should you strike it, but I take a delight in following the example of my forebears who went bush during the Great Depression, with nothing but the clothes they stood up in and a bicycle. If Aboriginal people can get around the bush without four-wheel drives and spare fuel- and water-tanks and air conditioning and roo bars, then so can I. I have never felt that the country was harsh or unforgiving. Whitefellas have always seemed to me the most dangerous animals in it.

When you travel all day through the ranges you become aware that with every minute change of light and orientation the character of the country changes. Different elements become visible and others fade or are burned out. Fissures in rock can turn from blue to purple to black. Depending on the time of day the very colour of the air changes, from magnesium white to misty blue or honey gold or peach pink. When it rains everything is transformed. I have seen Uluru in rainy weather, and it was blue. One of my fantasies has always been to lie in my own bed and watch the desert landscape slowly turn violet while fat yellow stars pop out in the inky sky and owlet-nightjars shake the still-warm sand through their tawny feathers. Or to watch the storms as they ride over the scarps, sending their white-hot feelers raking down the ridges and exploding in sheets of coloured light. I have driven the backroads of the Pilbara when flames were popping all around, and the saltbush and scribbly gum were bursting in showers of sparks that fell in front of my tyres, and still I wasn’t afraid. It’s not that I trust the desert not to kill me; it has killed better people than I. It’s more that I don’t mind if it does. Better a swift agony in the desert than my mother’s long twilight in a seaside nursing home.

Thousands of other people too find the desert comfortable, and far safer than the town. Anmatyerre women will take off barefoot for a day’s hunting, with no more protective gear than wash-cotton dresses plus the full complement of respectable underwear, armed with nothing but a crowbar and a hatchet, with their children and dogs gambolling around them. No boots, no hats, no sunblock, no sunglasses. I was lucky enough to spend a day hunting with them once, because my hired four-wheel drive was just what they needed to get them far enough out in the scrub to find a big goanna. Goanna fat is the essential bush cosmetic; it is the basis for the scented unguents that the women use to keep their skin soft and supple and the insects at bay. To help me recognise the goanna’s track one of the women drew it for me in the sand. She tucked three fingers under her palm, and as she pulled her hand across the sand she rocked it, so that the thumb and little finger made the marks of the scurrying feet on both sides of the trace of the dragging tail.

The Anmatyerre women were as much at ease in the ‘inhospitable’ landscape as if they were grand ladies presiding over their tea tables. They picked clear gum off a small mulga tree and gave it to me to chew, with as much grace as if they were handing around the cucumber sandwiches. ‘Bush lolly’, they called it. It had a faint aromatic sweetness that was enormously refreshing. We dug up the roots of the witchetty bushes and extracted the fat white grubs that are the greatest of all bush delicacies. One of the women used her hatchet to cut an oval of bark to use as a coolamon, sealing it off at the edges with red mud so that the harvested grubs wouldn’t fall out. The children could hardly be dissuaded from wolfing the grubs raw. We followed the flight of native bees to their holes in the eucalypts, and stole their honey with impunity because they have no stings. To me the native bees are a perfect emblem of the gentleness of a country that, instead of lions and tigers, has kangaroos and koalas. Not for the first time I asked myself why the white explorers had felt it necessary to ‘discover’ a country that its inhabitants already knew like the backs of their hands and could manage with minimum effort.

I had met up with the women at Alhalkere on what used to be Utopia Station. When I first heard of Utopia the Aboriginal people had just acquired the leasehold with the help of the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission. I asked an old Aboriginal stockman in the Alice Springs Hotel how the Aboriginal people were getting on with their cattle. He looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘Ate ’em.’

I was shocked. That was twenty years ago. I wouldn’t be shocked now.

Utopia came to the attention of the rest of Australia in the Seventies when the Anmatyerre women began producing silk batiks. In 1990 or so I went there to see their work for myself. When I got to Alhalkere the people had all gone bush, so I hung around for a bit, hoping that they’d come back. It was while I was cooling my heels that I realised that I was surrounded by a breast-deep sea of silky blond grass with feathery tops that swung in the slightest breeze, the like of which I had never seen before. Nowhere else in the Northern Territory had I seen unmunched, untrodden vegetation or clean waterholes where people could drink, rather than acres of trodden mud. Then I knew why the people had killed and eaten all the cattle. In the paintings by the women of Utopia you will see again and again the streamer patterns of the sacred grasses that are the glory of the place. The Anmatyerre are now the freehold owners of their land, and even the hundred or so head that Cowboy Louie Pwerle used to run for his own pleasure are no more. From the Anmatyerre I learned what I would do with any piece of central Australia I might get my hands on. I would leave it to recover from nearly two centuries of misguided exploitation.

Some graziers in the Northern Territory have agreed to set aside small areas of their lease for Aboriginal people to use as campsites; I wondered if Aboriginal people might not do as much for me, but as far as I could see no precedent had ever been set. As freeholders the people of Utopia should be allowed to sell any part of their 180,000 square kilometres, but whether they would be wise to do so after the long struggle they had to acquire it is another matter.

Again and again Aboriginal people showed me the beauty of country. In 1982 I had just wandered out of Port Hedland, going north on the one and only sealed road, the two-lane blacktop that rejoices in the name of the Great Northern Highway, with the intention of observing the mining operations in the Pilbara, when I came across two Aboriginal girls hitching by the side of the road. They said they wanted to go to Derby, but after a while it turned out that they really wanted to go to Marble Bar, where somebody who was important to them was in the lockup. I was only too happy to turn the rental car off the highway and plunge off ahead of a two-kilometre plume of blood-red dust on the unsealed road to Marble Bar, famous for generations as the hottest place in Australia. The girls were as reticent as Aboriginal people usually are. Most of the little they said to each other was murmured in language, but I eventually learned that they were supposed to be at school at a Catholic mission near Cap L’Eveque.

‘Do they know where you are?’

‘Nuh.’

‘Didn’t you tell someone?’

‘Nuh. Just shot through.’

Fleeing from Catholicism. I could certainly relate to that.

We were eighty or ninety kilometres down the unsealed road, at the point where the Marble Bar road crosses the Coongan River, when the girls asked me to pull over. Without a word they jumped out and ran fully dressed into the mirror of water which burst around their skinny dark figures in cascades of opaque turquoise flakes. Nothing I had ever read about inland Australia prepared me for the radiance of that water reflecting the white colonnade of great River Red Gums, or for the dance of the light prisms that veiled the girls as they busily washed their legs and arms, drank thirstily from their cupped hands and tossed the water sequins over their heads. I felt as if I could have broken out my swag and camped on the red rock-shelves under those ancient eucalypts for the rest of my life.

It was inevitable that, with all avenues on the south coast of New South Wales exhausted, I would give in to my deepest longings, and fly to Alice Springs. There I took a charter plane northwards to Delmore Downs, to visit the Holts. If there was anything for sale in the Northern Territory they would know about it. They might even be prepared to let me buy something of theirs, but it was a slim chance. Don and Janet Holt have been important facilitators of the artwork of Utopia and principal patrons of the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Don laughed when I asked him whether he thought his daughters would marry the kinds of men who would choose an uncertain livelihood in the cattle industry.

‘I’m a cattle-breeder. I want to keep my own progeny by me and I will if I can.’

‘Are you going to restore the house at Delny?’