Someone told me that Australia boasted over two hundred different species of gum or eucalyptus trees and it looked like Graeme was endeavoring to find an example of each around our dusty camp.
Fortuntately, he noticed my sweaty, tired face.
“Jeez, Dave, y’look bushed, mate. Listen, we’ve got things to do for a while. Why don’t you just kip down and we’ll take a drive later on when it cools?”
If I was in the habit of doing so I would have hugged him. But I compromised with a grateful smile and a weary nod.
He suggested a place shaded by the trunks of a group of trees and gave me a hefty canvas “Kimberley Swag.”
“Y’see one of them before—right?”
“No—I don’t believe I have.”
“Aw, these are great. Real outback kit. Here let me show you….”
He carefully undid the leather straps and buckles and opened up a broad piece of green canvas, around nine feet square, to reveal an instant bed—pillow, thin foam mattress, two Velcrosealed pockets for valuables, and a long, sewn-in mosquito net.
“Okay, mate. Get a bit a kip and I’ll wake y’up with a cuppa later on.”
I didn’t believe it. I was actually being invited to sleep after three days of almost constant movement. As soon as my head sank into the little foam pillow I was gone.
Evening was all an outback evening should be. A great crimson ball of sun sinking slowly toward the western ridges, stroking the plains in a translucent orange light and casting long, thin shadows of spinifex and thorn tree. The bulk of the Bungle Bungle looked more majestic now, its towering sandstone cliffs glowing with such violent intensity it seemed that the light came from within the ancient rock itself.
I remembered something else I’d read in D. H. Lawrence’s
Kangaroo
. He wrote of “a subtlely remote, formless beauty, more poignant than anything I’ve ever experienced before.” I was beginning to understand the feelings behind his words.
Something was watching me. Something quite close by. I lifted myself up slowly from the swag and saw a four-foot-high rotund ball of fur with a face something like an interbred deer and rabbit with delicate little front paws clasped together as if about to make a speech, and a rotund haunch, ending in a long, leathery, wormlike tail.
A young wallaby. At last!
My eyes were still full of sleep and I must have moved a little too clumsily trying to reach for my camera. The creature gave a kind of frustrated sigh—and vanished.
“Did y’see him?” asked Graeme, carrying a huge enamel mug of hot tea over to my swag.
“Only just. He didn’t seem to want to hang about.”
“Aw—he’ll be back. We’ve seen six already. They’re always a bit nervous at first.”
I drank the tea and watched the shadows ease across the dry sandy earth. Birds fluttered and chirped in the trees. Graeme murmered their names (without the Latin this time): “Couple of willie wagtails there…a jacky winter…restless flycatcher on that branch, y’see it…rufous songlark…there’s the little friarbird…a honeyeater, yellow-tinted…a young nightjar…there’s a kookaburra out here somewhere, but I can’t see it…two sulphur-crested cockatoos earlier on, they’re gone now…couple of blackfaced wood swallows over on that bloodwood….”
The tea, very strong and very sugary, was doing what tea does so well.
“Listen,” Graeme said, “You wanna have a quick wash? Dinner’ll be ready in five minutes. Murray’s the bush tucker-stuffer, the camp cook, tonight so it won’t be fancy. We let you sleep. You were fagged out. So—forget walking tonight. You can start early tomorrow.”
Over thick steaks, mushy peas, mashed potatoes, and damper (a basic form of campfire bread made from flour and water and little else), I met two men who were very different from the angry, almost racist bigots of the early morning. Both Graeme and Murray had traveled widely across Australia and their colorful tales of outback adventures made me salivate with anticipation.
But eventually—inevitably—conversation returned to the constantly niggling “problem” of the Aborigines.
“Y’know, we really fucked ’em around,” said Graeme with a gentleness I hadn’t noticed before. “I mean—dammit, it was their country. For over forty thousand years—who knows?—m’be much, much longer if you believe some of them Sydney anthropologists. And then we come along…hell, our Australia was nothing but crooks and shysters from Britain and penal colony governors and guards who were as bad as the riffraff they carried here in convict ships. Not much of a way to start a country, eh?”
“I suppose not,” I said, sensing dangerous ground ahead. “I’ve felt a lot of repressed anger about those early days, even in the short time I’ve been here.”
“S’not so bloody repressed,” mumbled Murray. “Doesn’t take much to set us off, ‘specially if there’s a bloody pommiebastard around…” he hesitated, “no offense, Dave.”
“None taken, Murray. But the anger seems to get in the way somehow. I’m never quite sure when it’s going to surface. There’s a kind of in-your-face feeling…if I make the slightest slip of the tongue, particularly with my British accent, it’s like I’d better be ready for a punch-up.”
“That’s Australia, Dave,” said Graeme with a gentle smile. “It’s the ‘no one’s better than me and no one’s worse’ attitude. We can’t stand people who are stuck up, y’know, bloody pompous. We don’t like ‘knockers’—people comin’ in and criticizing the country. We’re still a pretty rowdy bunch—‘least some of us are—we like mavericks—guys that take on the system and win, and we like our beer—when you hear people talking about driving across the outback they’ll describe it in terms of how much beer you’ll need—‘That’s a five-stubbie trip, that’s a ten-stubbie trip’…that kinda thing. We eat all the wrong foods, but you’d better watch out if you say so. We do dumb things like—well, like dwarf-throwing contests and that kinda stuff, y’heard of them…what else?—Well—Slim Dusty sings about them—he’s like our Australian country cowboy—listen to some of his songs.”
“No wonder the Aborigines get a bit confused,” I said. “I’ve noticed how they just seem to sit and watch as if they’re curious to see what the whites’ll do next.”
“Poor buggers,” said Graeme with a sigh, a genuine one. “I mean, they had the whole thing all set, all organized. Maybe just like Europe was in the Middle Ages when everything was all laid out nice and neat—y’know, y’had your kings and barons and lords and bishops and priests, y’had your workers, your serfs, and then y’had God—right on top of the pile—God telling you what to do and how to keep things straight. A nice neat system.” He suddenly seemed a little embarrassed by revealing that he’d obviously done some reading, and some thinking himself. “Well tha’s how it seems to me, anyway. What y’think, Murray?”
“Yeah,” said Murray.
How nervous Australians seem about revealing knowledge, qualities, and talents that may differentiate them from the mythical “ordinary bloke.” There seems to be a deep fear or certainly suspicion of overt “tall poppy” success (unless it comes from beating the system) and flamboyant demonstrations of education or ability. An abiding assumption of equality and the ordinariness of mankind is the great unspoken leveler here. Not quite so evident as the
kerekere
spirit of South Pacific Islands, where all individual achievements and possessions are considered the property of the communal family or clan, but enough to mute men and minds and encourage the pub-bound spirit of beery bonhomie. An odd contradiction in a country that superficially glorifies the individual. “Be your own man,” Australia seems to say—and then adds, “But don’t think or show you’re better than any other man.”
“So—you think the Aborigines got a rough deal, then?” I asked.
“No kiddin’, they did,” said Graeme, glad to be on safe conversational ground again. “Down in Tasmania they wiped out the lot of them in less than a hundred years. Up here we shot ’em, like rabbits—pests—we pushed ’em further and further into the outback just like the Americans did with the Indians. Plowed up the sacred sites, built towns over their graves, gave ’em a few handouts to keep ’em happy, gave ’em booze to mess up their minds…. We really did a job on them.”
“But earlier on this morning you were criticizing them for not living like other Australians.”
“Yeah, I know, Dave, I know. Most Aussies feel the same way. Sort of mad and sorry at the same time…. It’s guilt, I suppose. Guilt at what we’ve done and guilt that they’re still around to remind us what we’ve done. A hundred sixty thousand of ’em, most trapped in that old poverty crunch—cheap booze, bad health, poor education, and no jobs. That’s why all the money’s spent on ’em, pamperin’ ’em with things most of ’em don’t want. We’re sick of hearin’ about their Dreamtime and their songs and their sacred places…. I suppose we wish they’d just go away. We give ’em big chunks of the outback—I mean, real big, some the size of Britain—and hope they’ll just bugger off into them and stay there.”
I remembered something I’d read in the reprinted 1770 journals of Captain James Cook, one of the first “discoverers” of Australia, then referred to as the fabled Southland. This hot-tempered son of a Yorkshire farmhand was not known for gushy sentimentality and yet his brief description of Australia’s “noble savage” was the precursor of many later expressions of admiration for—and regret—for the decimation of indigenous cultures during that volatile Age of Discovery:
In reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted with not only the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe…the Earth and sea, of their own accord, furnishes them with all things necessary for life.
No wonder there’s guilt in this new land. Guilt at almost destroying a complex culture, guilt at the nation’s one-time “white Australian” policy which resisted Asian and Oriental immigration with such phrases as “Two Wongs don’t make a white,” even guilt at the low-brow tone of rampant our-Australia-wrong-or-right “ockerism.” There’s plenty of guilt to go around here and you can sense it, crawling and festering behind the reassuring piles of middies and tinnies and stubbies and the buoyant cynicism and braggadocio of yarners and spielers in any tin-roofed, clapboard-walled, sawdust-floored outback pub.
Murray had been sitting silent for a long time, playing with a lukewarm beer.
“You know many Aborigines, Murray?” I asked.
“Some…yeah, I know some.”
“You think it’d be better just to let them get on with their own lives in those reserves—whatever you call them?”
“The Lands. The Aboriginal Lands.” He was thoughtful for a while. “Hell…I dunno. I agree with Graeme, though. They have different ways of seeing things…everything. I mean…listen to the names they give places—thousands of places. They’re different from ours. They sound different. Sort of like poetry. Like they give them names that sound like how they look. We call our places after people—like Geraldton, Darwin, Sydney, Melbourne, Gladstone, or after towns back in Britain and Ireland…they have names like Kambalda, Yalgoo, Cooloomia, Ningaloo, Kalkariaji, Kununurra, Nulunbuy.”
“Beautiful names,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Murray. “Different.”
I could see he was still hesitating, not sure how much to say.
“Tell me about the Dreamtime.”
“Aw, I dunno, Dave…it’s not easy…. Graeme knows much more.”
“C’mon, Murray,” said Graeme. “You’ve been in the outback all your life…. You know it.”
“Well,” said Murray slowly. “It’s just a story. Sometimes I think they just made it up to get us riled.”
“You really think that?”
He laughed a kind of naughty-boy laugh. “Naw—not really. But y’wonder sometimes…. I mean, it’s just so…well, it’s different thinking, different way of seeing things…. They see everything as kinda alive, y’know, rocks, mountains, rivers…. They’re all like living things and they’re sort of in there with them…y’know, like a part of all this living land. They believe that their ancestors who’d come up out of the ground had ‘sung’ the earth into life…. They’d made it perfect but told the people, the Aborigines, that if they wanted to keep it that way they’d got to keep ‘singing’ it…. They’d got to walk along thousands of invisible lines that kept everything together—they called them the songlines—and they’d got to remember special songs, chants, and remember all the places, the landmarks, places where the ancestors, who were like early animals, had passed and made the land. And where they’re still sleeping under the ground. That’s what the Aborigine ‘walkabout’ is…. We used to think it was just a bunch of boongs goin’ off for a booze-up in the desert…some of ’em did…but for the others, it was more serious. Like a way of keepin’ the world right. They’d walk sometimes hundreds of miles, singing the chants and that. And all those special places…they call them strange names—a big pile of round rocks they’d call eggs—the eggs of the Red Snake, or a mountain with a pinnacle—that may be the tail of the Golden Lizard…things like that. Other places they’d name after honey ants, kangaroos, the bandicooks, the witchetty grubs, cockatoos, fire, wind…what else, Graeme?”
“Something I once read, Dave,” said Graeme. “It said, ‘They wrapped the whole world in a web of song.’ That’s nice. Forgot who wrote it.”
I looked around, through the lacy filigree of the ghost gum leaves, out across the vast emptiness of the desert, falling away to horizons sheened in a soft dusk light. What to me was a beautiful but featureless flat plain would be, to many Aborigines, an infinitely complex interweaving of invisible songlines and sacred places, each one a vital part of a huge complex whole. Their earth, as they knew it.
Was it just one more way for man to deal with terrible loneliness of being, in a cold, disinterested universe, and particularly on this ancient, worn-down, empty land they now call Australia? The need to give a reason, an explanation, for things around us? The fear of the ultimate unknown—death—that makes us build elaborate fantasies of imaginings to convince ourselves that we are not alone, that we have a purpose, a function, a reason for being? The “walkabout” as the primary purpose of existence? All driven by that great cry of realization, bursting out with joy, fear, and hope—the eternal—“I AM.”