By Rod Moss

Again the Healing Centre has scheduled a trip into the heart of the country. Again there have been difficulties in securing men to join the group. There’s twenty-two of us in three vehicles. And though three senior men had indicated their enthusiasm for the event, they all withdraw, for various reasons. But we’re still packing the troupies to the seams.

We’re not looking for ochres or herbal plants this time. The focus is on sitting at Little Well, and for the older folk to reacquaint themselves with their rarely visited homelands, two hundred kilometres from town. Gaining access to this place has been an ongoing saga since I can remember, when many of my deceased friends, relatives of these women, could only get here if I drove them.

Jack, Kat and Marty Bloomfield have spent more than half the first day stocking the trailers, tying down the swags to the roof racks and rounding up the candidates, somewhat anxiously in the case of the men, whose absence disappoints. The trip along the eastern Numery road, which eventually becomes the Colston Track as it bisects the Simpson Desert, has us arriving a little after dark. The gates marking Ringwood station have been gratifyingly replaced with cattlegrids which reduce the need for someone to open and shut them. And the road has been graded, if not upgraded, after the year’s continual rains. We leave the main track and head the last twenty kilometers west towards Todd River Downs.

The dark silhouette of the country’s big dreaming, the angry snake, Uluralkwe, signifies our resting place, pointing its head towards the three houses built on the sands of the Todd river floodplain. These houses were built by Ingerreke Outstation Services after the original sheds were abandoned when Gregory Johnson died.

The swags are soon laid on the verandah; women on the eastern porch, men on the west. Their choice brings them the warming morning sun and keeps them from prevailing winds.

Sunrise supplies a vegetative surprise. A vista of intwerrkere/ keroscene grass, now paled by lack of water lies like a vast frost as far as the distant ranges. Upon this sit flourishing acacias of different kinds, a festivity of greens and yellows, bobbing and swaying in the light and chilly breeze. An endless sky untroubled by clouds, is cut to shape by shrub and these final hills that taper into the dune country further east.

A substantial hunk of elegant acacia/ arlepe bursts upon my near vision. It is replicated a hundredfold in the near acres surrounding the houses. Five years ago, on my last visit, these large shrubs were ankle high on grassless red sands. Bees would thrive on these blossoms closer to town. Here, lack of water forbids their presence. The seeds will harden, drop and scatter by bird and breeze, and populate the plains.

It’s men’s business to make meat and our trusty hunter, Marty is equipped with the big borrowed gun that provided for us two months back. We cut across the floodout towards Kevin Peck’s holding at Pinjee Pound. Kevin has occupied this site all my time in the Centre. Though he has yet to get clearance from Central Land Council to build a house, he maintains his improvised shelters and 4WDs, and hundreds of horses that have occasionally wrought the ire of the Land Council and Animal Cruelty.

There’s feed aplenty now and horses of all possible hue and patterning. But I’ve seen this country when it’s mere powder with its fund of numerous carcasses. They stare at our passing vehicle and trot towards the protection of Pinjee bore and Kevin’s digs. Three roos suffice our quest through the grasslands and thin stands of coolibah. I point out the trees from which Janet Johnson prised a handful of ankerrayte grubs.

The women have wasted no time collecting whitewood branches. By the time we’ve returned to camp, they have settled on the freshly swept ground around a low fire. The wood has been stripped and tomahawked into appropriate lengths for music sticks/terurre. They’ve been advised they can sell them through Ian Conway at Ukaka for ten dollars a throw, twice what the town stores offer.

I’m as greedy for this fresh meat as anyone, slipping through the appetizer of fried liver. Doused in salt its sweet chunks hit the mark. We share the digging of the cooking pit, the gathering of gidgee for embers, the singeing of the fur, the lopping and tin-foiling of the tails.

‘This blaze is our celebration for the meat this country has given,’ I exclaim to Marty.

I’m keen to assure him as earlier, he’d uncharacteristically missed a few shots within easy range. He’d complained of a headache and blurry eyes. Though he’d deferred to me for permission to snap the whitewood leaves for dusting off the singed fur he’d been uncertain of his sincerity.

It’s impossible at thirty metres distance in the dark to discern what we men are doing at the ground oven. Yet the old women stride over from the verandah bearing plastic washing bowls. Had they smelt that the cook was done? Jack studies Marty’s knowing manner of dissecting the cooked roos. Soon he is encouraged into butchering too. It’s hard work with an axe and blunt knife. These senior women sort the prized ribs and amble back to their beds. After concluding my feast with a desert of tail I retire and soon drift off to the choir of sated voices from the old ones.

Marty is first to rise, just after dawn. Twenty tiny wood pigeons swerve low over the cooking fire he’s reignited with a fistful of grass. They hurry to join a similar assembly on a grey leafless corkwood a stone’s throw from us. In the pale light they perch motionless as quiet fruit.

Tea is Marty’s first mission. A great billy of water is boiled into which three handfuls of tea leaves are chucked. Those not still slumbering are propped in their beds muttering their various milk and sugar requirements. Not only the maker of meat and tea, Marty spoils the old women with a tasty concoction of French toast, tidbits of ham tossed in the mix with tomatoe. The younger ones content themselves with fried slices of rib and leg from last night’s roast.

Jack, his partner Steph and infant Tanami together with Marty, me, and the two pre-teens, Christabella and Kaomi, drive to the Hale River on the southern portion of Love’s Creek station. Aggie Abbott leads those women not dedicating their day to painting a large canvas with family stories to rut for witchetty grubs. Eva, her daughters and neices either paint or sear the music sticks with strands of hot fencing wire.

It’s a rough track to the Hale, much damaged by the year’s rains. But the rewards are manifold. Of all the impressive watercourses in Central Australia, this river gets my vote for its generous breadth, spread of cliffs, and massive rivergums. Limbla Spring, presently engulfed in reeds, sits at the base of a great swab of red cliff.

Marty has spotted the markings of an echidna/ inape. He scrounges at a set of roots where he’s felt it retreating in its hole from his probing branch. It eludes him. Not so a duck which Marty is careful to take in the head leaving the body in tact, which would surely have been ruined by the 308. We swim, we picnic, and head back to camp.

As we pass through the gate to the Little Well incision I point to Marty at the small crop of upstanding sandstone in a field of quartz shards. Though grass now conceals the white agates I tell him, are ‘pieces of the moon’/ atnyentye apwerte.

‘I made a painting of myself fighting myself here, standing naked mid-circle of the Johnsons.’ I add.

It’s called the Enigma of the Whiteman. It could have been called the Dilemna of the Whiteman, my pondering of the gulf between our cultures and the sacrifice of entrenched values required to make understandings. How right that the ‘dance’ happens at this men’s site.

‘It have love magic’, says Marty.

Thinking, perhaps, of his need of luck in that department, he alights and lightly rubs one of the prongs.

We proceed the further five kilometres taking a wallaby/kwarlpe en route with a clean shot. Jack and Marty rope the animal onto the bull bar. Marty mimicks the hunched shoulders of the wallaby.

‘You know all that mob at number five, them Webb’s. This is there totem. Can’t eat them ones. You know how they stand like this. I’m tjabe. If them women get grub, I can’t eat it.’

Smoke has gathered since morning in the western sky. It’s faint initially, easy to confuse with cloud. Now it presents an ominous darkness and we are anxious as to its proximity. Kat has driven to Kevin’s place to find if he knows it’s whereabouts. He says it burning at Orange Creek and that the South Stuart Highway has been closed. We are relieved given the distance separating us, and further so when the wind reverses its sweep.

As Marty predicted, the women regard it as rubbish food, too stringy. He heads off with Jack to drop two more bucks on the low rolling sandhill of arntetherrke, the carpet snake flanking the Todd river.

There are no dogs waiting to pounce. Wagtails abound. They flutter and twitch closer and closer to the meat ants which are first to advance on the remnant offal. So too a half dozen crows who provoke the carcasses when our backs are turned. So too, a small eagle which circles above the cooking pit but will not challenge that fierce black fraternity alone.

I’m in my swag when Peter Clavey Johnson turns up in a car driven by a representative from the Sacred Sites Authority. He confirms the fire’s location, that he’d seen it closer up as they drove from Atitykala to pick up the Williams men at Santa Teresa. They need to check if a drilling outfit on Numery Station, their traditional country, will intrude upon their sacred sites.

The following morning a dramatic drop in temperature and cold wind causes Marty and I to shift our swags to the northern verandah, The early sun fires the vertebrae of the angry snake, the ridge of that range whose head squats not five hundred yards distant. From this cliff run twelve shallow valleys at regular intervals and lengths, canting towards the snake’s head in an attractive pattern.

There’s a call from the Johnson women to visit the original site, on the other side of the range. Kat assists old Joany McCormack, debilitated these five years by a stroke, with a short plastic step into the front seat of the vehicle. This venerable woman, Arranye’s eldest surviving sibling, has spent significant time here during her formative years. We wander through the long emptied sheds, whose iron walls bear the graffitied names of family, now deceased, and the dates of their declared love.

Whatever else might have been salvaged in the way of fittings has been long ago achieved. Most of the discarded tins and utensils have been reclaimed by the rusting earth. At the actual well, Eva stoops to pick an emu egg-sized smooth grinding stone. It can be used for their bead-work. But she gifts me with it; a precious memory of this place that has meant so much to me.

This half-hour visit is no Lazarus event. Joany doesn’t dispatch her walking frame and leap over the quartz turf. But no one can dispute the energy she’s gained from being here. It causes me to reflect on this ‘healing’ thing. How expanded have we felt through being here. How opened, informed and three-dimensional. We have store-bought food to supplement any prospective shortfall in Marty’s skills. But how two-dimensional and diminished it seems besides that which has come directly from the place we have walked and slept in.

 Rod Moss won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for non-fiction in 2011 with his book The Hard Light of Day. The illustration is from Rod’s painting After The Shoot at Little Well

Rod Moss at home with journal and paintings. Photo Emma Sleath ABC.

By Rod Moss

Kat at the Akeyulerre Healing Centre has organised a trip for the families back into their traditional country so that the angangkeres can collect healing herbs and visit places associated with healing powers. I’d been invited given my affection and enthusiasm for these places. In the last hours, the trip that had intended to encompass Little Well and Wyeecha has to be revised. We aren’t heading south-east as Dominic, who was to have led the men, was in court Friday for bashing his wife, and is currently spending three weeks at Her Majesty’s pleasure. So Little Well remains on the cards for another trip when he walks. Brushy, the traditional owner of Wyeecha, is too hungover to do that leg of the journey. Visiting the bush tomato altyerre/creation stories would have more resonance in his presence.

Now we opt for the north east to Harts Range and beyond, under the auspices of Marty Bloomfield, a younger angangkere from the area who wants to collect white ochre as a resource for the Healing Centre and the various needs such as grieving ceremonies, that prevail upon it. He has an engaging enthusiasm, jocular and witty. An hour along the Plenty Highway Marty, directs us to a small and dazzling hillock. He is stocky and of medium height and manoeuvres deftly with unexpected strength and agility. Just our ascent is astonishing, the felt-like cushion of feldspar sparkling like glass. We men scramble and scrape from near its pinnacle. It’s been well worked over, and as we bend into our chore of filling a small drum, we know we do what many have done before us. The women stay at the women’s vehicle as we hunt the oily crumbs amidst the quartz, grey soil and feldspar. Marty is singing throughout, asking politely for the ground to give of its riches and thanking it whenever a crumb is unearthed.

We return to the Toyotas, Marty’s face quickly lighting to a grin when he senses our pleasure. We drive on, the vehicles parting ways as the women gather herbs to be cooked down and melded with fat while we four pursue kangaroos.These we sight but on each occasion they evade the cross-hairs of Marty’s gun. The plains are rich in  tjabe/witchetty bush. Finches flittered in loose assembly around them, expanding and contracting in sudden whimsical accord.

Just shy of Hart’s Range and close to the Mt Riddock Station homestead we sleep in a wide creekbed. A cold quarter moon falls upon us with customary indifference, sussing the flecks of mica in the graphite coloured sand and making from them a terrestrial mirror of the flickering sky. A wind assails the camp in the wee hours, roaring through the rivergums and causing me to throttle the hatch on my swag and pull my balaclava across my ears.

Marty is awake at 4.30, huffing over the embers and feeding them twigs. This stirs me and I watch a beetle lumbering over the footprints towards my head. It is beige and emblazoned with a love-heart on its upper body and three delicate arcs scribed either side of its butt; superb. It was as if  one of the women’s fencing wires used to sear the wooden lizards and music sticks had been deployed upon this insect.

Slowly do I rise, reluctant to quit my cocoon of incubated warmth. A dream has broken me into the day. I have been sorting a dictionary where ‘Moss’ is defined as ‘tearing out one’s hair’. The pages flip to ‘Undoolya’, which reports that this correctly should be spelled as ‘Antulye’; which is an accepted fact.

I steady myself on the cold sand, stork-like as I struggle sneakers over socks. David Wiffen’s  laconic baritone rumbles into mind and I, with gathering confidence, voice his, One Step; It just takes one step to start a journey, no matter how far you may go. Just takes you smiling, to fill me with sunshine and change my life ever so; a simplistic country tune coming unbidden as had the dream. Funny how these fragments stitch together.

Harry joins Marty when breakfast bacon is sizzling and the scrambled eggs are submitted to its fat. They break their conference to point into the pinkish sky. The distant range is daunted by large grey flat clouds; usually an indication of a rush of cold air. Yet here, much closer, is its distant relative, a puffy smear of cumulus. Did it issue from the rivergum to whose outline it corresponds? They laugh together at my bemusement. It drifts away. Then another and another succeed it also seemingly breeding from the foliage. We all laugh. I mention the beetle and am told it’s a bush cockroach. I’d never imagined the species would win my admiration.

Marty guides the vehicles to Fox Tank, to hills that house the stories of lightning, of water, and a small edifice frothy with quartz which is nominated in the creation stories as the place of those curds produced by fast rushing river water. The Arrernte names are syllable rich and distinct from the prosaic quality of their whitefella alternatives. The earlier  inspirations are  inevitably linked through metaphorical narratives to geological conditions specific to the place, their regular intonations providing the beat for dancing feet. They lend themselves to poetry and song which, I guess, for whatever his detractors might say about the Arandic songs he created, Ted Strehlow was attuned to.

By mid afternoon the following day we drive into Irrelirre or, Number 5, and settle in a creekbed just beyond its fenceline for lunch. Caileen Webb whose eastern verandah the women will sleep on, joins us there and soon occupies herself downloading songs from Dorrie’s Ipod, while we hit the salad sandwiches. Her daughter paws out a cup-sized declivity, turns her back on it, then plays at flicking her small change into the hole without looking. Above her a budgerigar pair kiss and canoodle occasionally diverting to feed their brood nestled in one of the holes puncturing the great rivergum.

We, or rather our host, Marty, alone among us with rights to shoot, gunned three males on the eastern plains with a powerful 308. The first shot while falling short gives a gauge as to where the sights are set. The report deafens us for a few minutes and Marty is concerned that this big borrowed gun, not only gives his shoulder a mighty whack, but may be unlucky. His next shot takes out two ‘roos, though the adult despite a large hole in one quarter, leaps for cover. Marty, mindful of unnecessarily wasting a round, finds a small rock and aims accurately at the back of the buck’s head, apologising for having drawn out its death.

The second massive male of our tally brought tears to the women who lamented taking out two old bucks, also custodial protectors of the country and their brood. Not that Marty could detect this from over 500 metres. Blood lust was sated. Mine included. In fact I was quite hanging out for some fresh ‘roo, and tell him that I don’t eat shop meat; only meat from country. The sun has disappeared by the time we return to Caileen’s and a chill immediately descends. While the women retire we set the pit and fire for a slow cook, having to keep the eager attentions of a dozen dogs at a distance from the offal. Harry sidles off to join Dorrie while Jack, Marty and I drop our swags in the middle of the single men’s quarters. From the nearest bedroom sails a sequence of hip-hop and rap music from someone’s Ipod. Marty soon puts it to rest. Apart from a mouse crossing my neck en route to an empty jam tin, the night is without incident.

Our re-routed journey takes us north-east into country with connected families which I’d heard about repeatedly, but never traversed. It’s Xavier’s country, beyond Hart’s Range. And, it’s breathtakingly beautiful. Rugged as. The mineral rich soils sprout as especially wide variety of vegetation, the well-groomed beantrees being particularly conspicuous. We labour a couple of times to get across deep mud where creeks still run six weeks after rain.

The heavily stacked camping trailer snaps from the second Toyota on a rough jump-up, just after a creek crossing. Jack and Kat improvise a fresh connection and we continue snaking through the hills. Only a quarter hour after we encounter the deep mud that a grader-driver has advised we’d better avoid by returning along the Plenty Highway. Everyone alights and we fossick for large stones and slabs of gneiss and granite to pave the twenty metres of mud that have caused havoc for the few vehicles that have attempted to ford it during recent weeks. The sense of everyone pitching in to these crises with such an easy sense of joyful, bantering co-operation, is thrilling. So too, have been the shared meals, the packing and unpacking. Nothing comes to mind so much as the caring I experienced with the Sufi Brotherhoods, who silently sensed each other’s needs and provided for them as if by some hidden code.

Marty is a fund of stories of the land through which we drive. Harry is the sole young man joining the entourage from Whitegate. Like me, he’d not been on the track. Yet, inspite of saying he felt uncomfortably ‘cold’ and ignorant about Marty’s country, he knew the significant mountains and what they stood for, who could speak for them, and how they were connected in to his own country. I’m talking at least a hundred kilometres from his own country. He didn’t admit this until we were back inside his familiar zone near Arltunga, and asked me to amplify stories that Arranye had given me. That was some lesson to me about the continuing transmission of vital Arrernte information. He points to a wide bend in the road where some years earlier, Kevin Webb had rolled a car on a grog run from the Arltunga Pub.

“Drinkin’ make the trip quicker. Everyone talkin’ joke ‘an forget travel. Laughin’. But driver shouldn’t drink.”

I mention that Kevin was an accident waiting to happen. That I’d seen him recently in Big House and how much weight he’d put on.

“He didn’t kill that Nyrripe fella. He kill ‘is self. When Kevin go for spear payback at Nyrripe them ol’ fellas don’t kill ‘im ‘cos they know he didn’t kill ‘im. Kevin, he still standin’ after all that spear be in his legs. That prove he didn’t kill. An’ we see that Jesus cloud while we are back at Whitegate, same time. Jesus carryin’ a cross in that cloud. That mean he didn’t do it.'”

The trip was fulfilling, from my account, dare I say, healing, as in its cohesiveness between people and place there could be no other fact than its rejuvenating power. It is such a vivid contrast to the discordant beating of the daily drum in town; and to which we reluctantly return in the gloaming of the third day.

***

After a month’s sabbatical at the outstation, Hayes was back in camp. During the interim Hayes had fattened his formidable list of damage; attacking a woman from the Housing Commission and forcing her to beat a hurried retreat to safety on the bonnet of her car; snapping an ambulance attendant’s trousers; leaping at the throat of a Security Guard who’d’ hit Sylvester Webb on the head with a torch. The blood on his shirt, said Harry, was not Webb blood. He was a jealous fellow, that Hayes. Whenever Dorrie showed interest in another dog or nursed a puppy, Hayes would be onto it. He’d killed several puppies. He’d spent a vigorous night with another dog between his jaws, spinning it like a helicopter blade. Now he was engaged in mouse destruction and his head could be seen in the long grass surrounding the sheds whenever he jumped after the tiny rodents which had infested town and country since the rains.

May 27th, 2011

Rod Moss is an Alice Springs writer and painter. His book The Hard Light of Day won this year’s NT Literary Award for non-fiction and was recently shortlisted for the non-fiction section of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.