Love In a Sunburnt Country (33 page)

In and around Marble Bar Tim and Tania played and worked, and listened and changed. Tania was managing the Commonwealth Development Employment Program (CDEP) in three communities (Warralong, Gooda Binya/Marble Bar and Irrungadji/Nullagine), while Tim worked on a range of projects, including a bio-diesel project for Ashburton Aboriginal Corporation. In both their work and leisure hours they were listening to custodians of the very oldest knowledge about what it means to be human, what it means to work together and all the ways humans, land, animals, plants and spirit interact.

The work Tania was doing is considered one of the ‘impossible' jobs in outback communities. Mostly CDEP seems to not quite do what it is meant to do: that is, provide meaningful work and training to Aboriginal people and get the jobs done that need to be done. Too often a community's CDEP yard is a place where any hope of self-direction and meaningful work must be abandoned at the door, and cynicism and distrust hangs in the air. Even worse, a CDEP program can expand rifts, or even create them, between different groups in a community.

‘When I left the CDEP program the numbers of people turning up for work had tripled,' says Tania. What had made the difference was the fact that Tania didn't see her role as ‘organising and telling', but rather as ‘facilitating and asking'.

‘If there was a problem I'd say, “How are we going to fix this?” and they'd say, “Oh, we could do this, or we could do this.” And I'd say, “So what do you want to do?” and they'd say, “Let's try this.” At the end of projects there was complete ownership of those projects because it hadn't been me saying, “This is what you have to do.” People chose what they wanted to do.

‘And I didn't acknowledge any family issues between any of the mobs. If you acknowledge there's a rift you enhance it. With those that couldn't work together because of the son-in-law and mother-in-law thing, we just worked around those cultural zones. I had a whole pile of jobs that the guys said they wanted to do and I let people pick what they wanted to do and they went off and did it. They solved their issues culturally among themselves. As long as I provided the tools and resources for them to do what they wished, that was all I needed to do.'

‘That's the way I work with farmers and pastoralists, you've got to treat people with a bit of respect,' says Tim. ‘I say this is your place, your life, your problems, you've got a brain and you'll figure it out … we are just here to help.'

Just as there are rifts in Indigenous groups, there are rifts between pastoralists, too.

‘One of the things I did when I got there was go out to the De Grey Land Conservation District Committee and say, “Are you keen to get fired up again?” They said, “Yep,” and early on what we said to the group was, “Look there's going to be disputes among neighbours, so we're going to have to have a way of dealing with it—not ignoring it, but not letting it get in the road of everything else.”'

Tim sees another parallel between pastoralists and Indigenous people: over the last few generations in the pastoral country the relationship between government and pastoralists has been characterised by increasing government control and consequent increasing distrust on both sides.

‘The government's been the landlord, the pastoralist the tenant. The government has treated pastoralists like naughty boys out there trying to rip them off. The pastoralists see the government as the policeman trying to beat them into submission. I found this culture a shock, having come from the wheatbelt freehold land where it doesn't exist. It's really a significant problem, that lack of trust, the lack of power for pastoralists and control by government,' Tim says.

He feels it is a far milder echo of the extreme and ongoing reluctance of government agencies to allow Indigenous people control over their own lives. Tightening government control is not just, he says, a reflection of the modern Australian trend towards tighter management and more and more documentation, but the distrust by public servants of both pastoralists and Indigenous people.

‘Of course, the ultimate disempowerment has been for the Aboriginal people. In both cases we have this power imbalance and control by government that have now been in place for generations. We need to get rid of the deeply ingrained British class culture of power and control and elitism, which we so unfortunately inherited from the Poms and it is still there. That thinking is still ingrained in government. These guys are so sharp and switched on, but they don't get treated that way. The only way to get real change is for people at the grassroots to take responsibility for their own problems and speak for themselves. That's Tania's and my job: to make sure they can speak. But I've found that with these groups when you give them the opportunity to take control, they're very scared and reluctant to take it on.'

At the heart of this reluctance is a lack of trust in the institution offering the opportunity. Both pastoralists and Indigenous people have a history of painfully discovering that opportunities presented have been illusions or have had strings attached.

‘So how do we overcome that, how do we break that cycle and how do we change the relationships? Tania and I have the same view of what needs to happen: it's exactly the same with the pastoral industry as it is with Indigenous society. What I do with pastoralists, and what Tania does with the mob, is to try to create a new culture that breaks those existing power relationships and develops one of collaboration and cooperation in order to create links. You can do anything if you work together, but you have to build trust. We know it works—and when it works it is just so rewarding.'

Tim and Tania are seeing so much speaking up, collaborating and taking control all the time now in the Kimberley and the Pilbara. It's a new way which borrows from both traditional and modern Western cultures—collaborating, for example, is a strongly traditional value, but speaking up is very much a modern Western behaviour. Their favourite example of seeing this culture emerging came in the middle of a project Tim created which brought Tania's connections and work with the mob together with Tim's connections and work in agriculture.

In working with pastoralists in the De Grey River catchment in 2013 Tim had found that the scale of the properties he was working with prevented him from being able to build and hold a mental map of how they worked. Without that encompassing map of the whole catchment, Tim knew that any intervention might work on a small scale but do more damage somewhere else. The scale, coupled with the complexity of the interactions in the landscape, meant a map showing how it all worked was vital.

‘I went from four hundred hectares to four hundred thousand hectares—where do you start? It was just too overwhelming.'

To help him make sense of the landscape over many hundreds of square kilometres, Tim invited Peter Andrews (a farmer who has had remarkable success in turning degraded land into fertile, healthy land again) to work with pastoralists in the De Grey River catchment.

‘Early in my career I figured this out and it is really important: you can't learn anything from someone who thinks like you do, you can only learn from someone who thinks differently. So I like talking to nutcases, the thinkers with radical ideas—like Peter Andrews. He's a genius. He talks about how to read the landscape, these patterns, the water—its movement and control.'

Peter Andrews is considered a land-prophet, a water-whisperer, with a singular concentration that lets him observe, interpret and predict how land and water and plants will relate over many rains. Tim had met him several times over the years, and was convinced that he needed Peter to assist him in mapping the geomorphology of the De Grey catchment, which holds a number of pastoral properties.

‘I've figured out a way to map it, based on Peter's stuff, and it's pretty new, but it's working really well.'

This map is the basis for figuring out how to interact with the landscape: to see how best to send water to an area that has been water-starved due to man-made structures such as mines or roads, or how to slow water down by such actions as altering how animals graze so more plants grow and water can sink into the earth along with the plants' roots.

Tim was aware that while Peter's thinking is cutting-edge in this time and place, Peter also knows his way of seeing land isn't unique to him. When Peter first encountered traditional ‘abstract' Aboriginal art he was amazed by it. He did not see art but a map presenting detailed information about how water moved in the artist's landscape.

‘All the information was presented and Peter could read the message. He was pretty keen to get out and meet some of our guys and talk to them because he'd recognised that this knowledge had been pre-existing in their culture and was expressed in their art.

‘To help me learn this same thing, I was going home and using Google Earth—basically painting out what I'd learned onto Google Earth. Peter can do that from the ground—when you really understand it you don't need to see it from above. Then Tania bought me a painting from someone who lived out near the South Australian border. After my experience using Google Earth, when I saw it, I said, “Whoever painted this has painted a Peter Andrews description of how landscape and water works.” Then one day I was travelling between Perth and Alice Springs and I looked out of the window of the plane from thirty thousand feet and I said, “That's our painting.”'

With this in mind, Tim had lined up both pastoralists and traditional owners to meet Peter and work with him tracking the actions of water in the land, reading the subtle changes in landscape and slope. And it was then that Phillip, an Aboriginal man well into his middle years, began to speak up, to offer his knowledge in collaboration with the group.

‘Phillip's reaction was amazing. There's this old fellow who doesn't normally say anything to anybody and he was speaking up in groups of all these pastoralists, talking about his knowledge,' says Tim. ‘He got what Peter was all about and what he was doing and how he was doing things to heal land. He could synchronise his culture with what Peter was saying.'

Phillip's contribution was powerful, and no-one felt it more than Tim. The merging of that other, older Australia with his scientific world view, which had begun when he'd met Tania, was offering new insights from this still deeper engagement.

‘Their creation story is that this land was all flat, until the snake came along. The snake is the creative spirit that moved through the landscape. And water is the creative and destructive force in this landscape.' The snake Tim is referring to is the creator deity in Aboriginal myth. It has as many names as there were tribes, but it is more popularly described as the ‘Rainbow Serpent'. The Dreamtime stories—and ‘Dreamtime' is not then or now or at some future time but means rather ‘throughout' all times and all spaces—have the snake deity as an all-powerful water spirit, digging into the land, lifting it or levelling it, nourishing life and occasionally dealing death and destruction.

‘The Dreamtime stories make complete sense in scientific terms. I've discovered situations where the Dreamtime story is exactly the story I've had to figure out through a scientific route. It's how the landscape works, what's important and what's not. Some hills don't matter and some do. Some hills have a lot of control over where the water goes and what the river does. The sacred hills in the Marble Bar, the spirit hills, are the critical hills in the landscape for the control of the water. The waterholes that are sacred are also important holes in the river. It isn't surprising these guys figured it out. They've been here for fifty thousand years.'

The wealth of Indigenous Australia was in their observations and their understanding: the rest of us are beginning to know just enough to value that wealth as we should. We have pre-existing maps for water movement in these landscapes, and this is going to be of critical importance. Time, after all, is running short.

‘So when I talk with pastoralists we talk about Mother Nature—how she works, how we bugger her up, how if we understand what she's doing we can get around and help her recover the landscape. If I was talking with the mob, we'd talk about the snake. It's the same story. Where we stuff things up we stuff up the water cycles,' says Tim.

With the knowledge we now have we can reverse injuries to the water cycle and grow more plants, and thus return carbon to the soil. The massive rains in Australia's central rangelands in 2011 produced a discernible drop in the carbon dioxide in the biosphere: in fact, sixty percent of the extra carbon the world stored that year was in our outback. Unfortunately, because that storage was only in grasses (and could only be in grasses because the type of land management and rewards for carbon sequestration Tim advocates are not in place) most of that carbon is back in the atmosphere again. Yet that event has taught us that with political will on our side—and with all we can learn from our land-rehabilitation pioneers and our scientists, including those who are Indigenous—the Australian rangelands could play a central role in cooling our planet.

In 2015 Tania and Tim reluctantly left Marble Bar and moved back to Broome where it all began. Tim is continuing to work with pastoralists and Tania is working back in health. They are grandparents now: David has three children, Sophie two, and both of them are warm and caring parents. This brings Tim real joy, and he and Tania are equally proud of the other two. Scott, with courage and patience, has achieved his goal of supporting himself despite the difficulties presented by a severe illness. Jade has just finished a degree in Speech Pathology and is looking for her first job.

All Tania's little brothers—whom Tim considers also to be his own little brothers—have had children of their own. Broome is not the same place it was when they met all those years ago, but of course, neither are they the same. When Tim met Tania two worlds collided. It happened in the slowest of slow motion, and it is still happening as I write.