Photo SMH. 

Jakamara Nelson, who died last month, was six years older than the community in which he spent most of his 80 years: Yuendumu. The story of his life reflects the huge changes to people and policies that have taken place in Central Australia in those eight decades.

I was fortunate to meet this influential Warlpiri man a few times in his later life, when he shared with me parts of his life story. It began at the pastoral station of Mount Doreen, where Jakamara’s father was a sheep herder. He would have four wives and nine children, of whom Jakamara was the fifth.

The life of his people before the days of white settlement was still close in people’s memories, and Jakamara recalled stories told to him by his famous grandfather, Minyina.

These included tales of a bloody dispute between tribes in the early 1920s. As Jakamara related it, warriors from the north had come down in a raiding party to kidnap women while many of their men were taking part in a ceremony some distance away. When the men returned, they found many old people and children dead.

Jakamara’s grandfather was one of the scouts who successfully sought out the killers and avenged their deaths – as well as getting their women back and taking some of theirs.

A few years later, many Warlpiri were murdered in the dreadful Coniston Massacre, triggered by the killing of a single white man. So perhaps the concept of Yuendumu appealed to the Warlpiri as a safe haven as well as a reliable source of food, water and services.  Jakamara was six years old when his parents told him they were going to move to a rations depot that had been set up there by the government.

As Jakamara told me in an interview for the Central Land Council’s great oral history opus, Every Hill Got a Story: I can only remember my parents saying to me: “Look, the cattle station can’t support us. There’s no tucker, but they’re going to set up a ration depot, or a settlement” — where people from other communities as well, like cattle stations surrounding Yuendumu, were also asked to move in.

Also, people living in outlying countries – their homelands – heard about a place that was built there to bring in all the people, because there was easy access to food, medical needs and also education. So, gradually, people from outlying countries came into Yuendumu and established some community in those early years.

Jakamara’s descriptions of the early days at Yuendumu evoke the decisions people had to make virtually on the run, as they sought to balance elements of traditional culture with the rough serve of western civilisation that was suddenly on tap. Yuendumu offered people regular rations with the expectation of some work from the men in return. Some of this was in building, some in creating and maintaining several productive veggie gardens that supplied the community with fresh fruit and veggies. Meanwhile at night there were large corroborees, and people felt free to engage in traditional pursuits to some extent.

Around about September, October, when they had plenty of rain, that’s when the food was plentiful, like vegetation, that’s when we used to go on what they called walkabout. The extended family used to join up with us as well for an exodus, if I can put it that way, and we used to go on this big trip to certain places where there was plenty of water and plenty of game about, easy to pick. Bush tomatoes, berries, a lot of kangaroos and emus and turkeys.

It was a long time ago, 1947, 1948, 1949. I vividly remember we had a lot of camp dogs as well, that were trained to bring down kangaroos twice their size. It was a pretty good experience for me to watch all these dogs bringing the kangaroos down. They were very strong. We used to call them kangaroo dogs, because they’d been trained to do that particular job.

Another fascinating shift took place in the way people used their leisure time. In an interview for the National Library of Australia sport project, Jakamara described a game men played at Yuendumu when he was a boy, which had been played for generations.

The sport that Aboriginal people enjoyed most was Jabbu Jabbu.

It was sort of rags and grass tied up into a ball, like a ball of wool, four or five centimetres maybe more thick in circumference that they used to pass on to selected members of the team. There were two teams and they didn’t wear any numbers or guernseys, they were naked, but they knew automatically without asking what person to throw the ball to.

It was leisure time for the people when they had nothing to do. The ball was passed from one person to another. No kicking, just throwing and of course high flying. Men used to fly up there to hold on to the ball.

Jabbu Jabbu was on the way out, although it had been  good preparation for what was to come. In the 1950s, Yuendumu’s Baptist missionaries (whom Jakamara praised for the respect they held for Warlpiri culture) and government superintendents introduced the community to Australian Rules. They showed them how to do drop kicks and torpedo punts. In the 60s, along came Ted Egan as the superintendent, described by Jakamara as “the one who really drummed the style of Aussie Rules football in our minds”.

Before long, Jakamara was one of the community’s leading footballers. Dressed in khaki army shorts and white singlets, he and the rest of the Yuendumu team would hop aboard a Government-supplied truck on Friday afternoons and begin the five-six hour journey to meet their competitors in the inter-settlement competition that had been created.

Jakamara’s (and Yuendumu’s) first game was against Haasts Bluff at the age of 18.  He played ruck. As Jakamara recalled, Yuendumu won. It marked the beginning of Yuendumu’s ongoing love affair with football, with the Yuendumu Magpies competing with other communities between April and October and playing amongst themselves in five local teams in the hot months. In the coming decades, Jakamara would see football become a kind of social glue binding disparate communities together through often fractious relationships.

People who used to regard certain communities as being rubbish and people being awkward to live with and work with and play with, by lifting up their standard of football a lot of recognition and praise has been won by those people, who had been in the bad books of our people in central Australia. It’s a healing force, and a sort of forgiveness: people aren’t that bad. They’re very good at the sports, but they’re not good as far as public relations are concerned.

By this time Jakamara had received what he described as a “standard education” at Yuendumu, up to grade five. He recalled that he enjoyed school and he enjoyed attending – which was just as well, because truancy was not a viable option in those days.

The parents were told if the kids can’t go to school, you won’t get any rations. We used to get rations at the end of every week. If the kids missed out on school, the manager or superintendent in those days would be told that so-and-so’s children didn’t attend school, and they’d deduct  maybe tea or sugar. But we knew that if we didn’t go to school, parents would be punished, by not getting proper rations, like flour, tea and sugar, tin of meat, a bit of tobacco, chewing tobacco, jam, butter, those sort of things.

Jakamara got his first job apprenticed as a diesel mechanic in 1959 after he’d left home and taken part in ceremonies. He got extra education from the Baptist missionaries Tom and Daisy (Pat) Fleming. The tuition helped him to become one of the first Aboriginal teachers after he’d finished his apprenticeship.

He spent five years as a teacher, just as the age of self-determination was dawning. In Jakamara’s words: To a certain extent it didn’t work, and some of us just lived on and carried on with the life and accepted the responsibility given to us by the Government with this self-determination and the land rights thing, self-governance.

After five years, Jakamara gave up teaching to become an assistant community advisor. He was also active as a facilitator in the homelands movement, and, in the spirit of the commitment he had made to self-determination, eventually became an outspoken critic of the NT Intervention.  But as he looked back on his life ten years before he died, Jakamara saw himself as a middleman between two cultures, communicating from one side to the other because of his fluency in both cultures.

So, while he sometimes considered himself  “stuck in the middle”,  he emphasised this was “not to say that I should chuck away what I’ve been taught in the western world or forget about my culture.” Like many of his generation brought up under now discredited policies, he clearly valued not only the skills he had learned from both worlds, but also found a unity between those worlds in their spiritual perspectives — while acknowledging they were “kind of different”.

Getting back to the creation … we believe in God and we use the Tjukurpa. It covers everything, the history, the cultural significance, which lies in the history of our present day living, and we don’t ignore that. We sort of grow by that and make a comparison with the Christianity. We don’t know what God looked like. It hasn’t been explained to us. We just use that term Tjukurpa. We follow the dreamtime story of the Tjukurpa. 

Jacinta Price

By Jacinta Nampijinpa Price

Our political leaders don’t live in the bush, they live in cities. Heads of Aboriginal organisations don’t live in the bush, they live in cities. Policymakers don’t live in the bush, they live in cities. Those with the loudest voices pushing to change the date of Australia Day — or for a voice to parliament — don’t live in the bush, they live in the cities.

The cities are where the activists and their credulous supporters live among some of Australia’s most privileged. The cities are where the “progressive” media lives and the frame through which it views and reports to the rest of Australia. The cities are where the universities indoctrinate with much of their politically correct ideological teachings, delivered by academics who’ve never lived in remote Indigenous communities yet who bombard parliamentary inquiries and grant application channels with recommendations that fail to even grasp Indigenous disadvantage.

This is part of the reason decades of attempts to address Indigenous disadvantage have fallen short of accomplishing the outcomes needed to fix the ongoing raft of problems. Indigenous Australians in regional remote areas still face dire circumstances.

The latest research, as revealed in my report for the Centre of Independent Studies, Worlds Apart: Remote Indigenous Disadvantage in the Context of Wider Australia, highlights the vast gap between communities with a high proportion of Indigenous population and the rest of Australia.

The chasm shows in shocking statistics for health and reduced life expectancy, school truancy, subsequent poor education and employment levels, and the horrendous impact of high crime rates, particularly domestic violence and sexual assault.

This disparity is common knowledge to those who live in remote areas. But the rest of the nation also should be concerned that billions of dollars and reams of policies intended to tackle disadvantage are failing.

One obvious area where no improvements have been made since Closing the Gap was first initiated is in life expectancy rates, with a seven-year difference between the cities and the bush. Indigenous women in remote communities live up to 69.6 years on average, compared with Indigenous women in cities at 76.5 years. Indigenous men in remote communities live to 65.9 years on average, compared with Indigenous men in cities at 72.1 years.

The research also highlights the astronomical crime rates. Across all states and territories examined, crimes occur at twice the rate or higher for non-urban communities with 50 per cent or more Indigenous population. Alarmingly, in some states and territories, domestic violence and assault far outstrip the rates of all other crimes.

Crime is interlinked with — and largely a consequence of — welfare dependency, which also sees unemployment sitting at about 19 per cent for Indigenous Australians as opposed to just under 7 per cent for non-Indigenous. Unemployment in very remote communities is bleaker, 29 per cent as opposed to 3 per cent for non-Indigenous unemployment in those communities.

Evidence suggests higher rates of crime and unemployment are seeded by low school attendance rates and the resultant lack of education. Tellingly, Indigenous school attendance has declined across all states and territories between 2018 and 2019 to 82 per cent compared with the rest of Australia at 92 per cent. In the Northern Territory, with a large proportion of remote and regional communities, the Indigenous school attendance rate has declined further, to 63 per cent.

We cannot allow these disparities to continue, and the focus for improving Indigenous disadvantage should be placed where it is most needed — in places where it actually exists.

As highlighted in the Yothu Yindi Foundation’s 2017 submission to the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into GST allocation, funding has been ineffective in alleviating disadvantage because it is allocated where there appears to be more people identifying as Indigenous as opposed to Indigenous people experiencing greater disadvantage.

This approach to addressing Indigenous disadvantage continues despite the recommendations of better ways of approaching policy — ones that allocate funding to target need rather than simply on the basis of Indigeneity.

The Closing the Gap plan has done little to address disadvantage for Indigenous Australians living in remote and very remote communities. Yet our leaders forge ahead with disconnected, politically correct policies for placing Closing the Gap responsibility in the hands of the same Aboriginal organisations that have failed to address disadvantage for the past three decades. And part of the problem is that the people who have been making the decisions, designing the policies and allocating the dollars are far removed from the regional and remote areas where disadvantage is greatest — and is entrenched.

The gap between remote Indigenous Australians and the rest of Australia, including those in our cities who identify as Indigenous, will not close as long as every Aboriginal Australian is treated as though we are disadvantaged because of our heritage. The gap will close once we choose to focus on the true causes of disadvantage and are all treated like Australian citizens. Until that happens, the disparity will increase in an ever-widening chasm.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is deputy mayor of Alice Springs and director of the Indigenous research program at the Centre for Independent Studies. This article was previously published in The Australian.

The RFDS Cafe

An Alice Springs business operator has described a town under siege from uncontrolled petty crime after one of the town’s landmark cafes was trashed last weekend.

Lisa Perry was on her way to Alice Springs to spend a fortnight working with her staff at the Royal Flying Doctor Service Cafe when she received a call from the manager of the cafe informing her of the damage, which she estimated to be between $15000 and $20000.

Vandals had broken into the heritage-listed site, thrown enamel paint over windows and fridges, broken bottles of soft drink and thrown ice-creams around the cafe. They’d also turned off the power, causing the cafe to loose thousands of dollars worth of refrigerated stock.

Ms Perry told ABC Radio she and her manager and staff were “surprised and hurt”  that people could cause such malicious damage to a beautiful old building.

“They were obviously there to create havoc and to cost us money,” Ms Perry said.

Ms Perry, whose home has also been broken into,  said no town in Australia was immune from petty crime. “But the level of it, the malice and the disrespect for authority is real eye-opener,” she said.

“We need the opportunity to talk to our Chief Minister. We’re screaming but he doesn’t make the time to meet with us.

“It’s a really horrible thing. I think people are scared in their homes. People aren’t sleeping well at night. You wake up and go ‘What’s happened last night?’ —  (because) every night of the week something has happened.

“How many houses were broken into last night? How many cars were stolen? We’re constantly getting slammed.

“We should be getting extra help. I know (Chief Minister Michael Gunner)  saying he’s throwing all the help that he can get but it’s just not enough. He needs to talk to the business owners, he needs to talk to the residents who are scared.”

Mr Gunner had told Darwin media the government was doing everything it could to fight crime in Alice Springs, but there was “no silver bullet”.

 “I actually get that there are people out there who’re scared,” he said on ABC Radio Darwin.

“They’re worried about crime. We’re doing a lot, and I get it that if you’re a victim of crime then what we’re doing hasn’t been enough for you. So we’ve always got to keep doing more.”

Police have reported several more incidents of criminal damage since the RFDS incident.

Offenders had rammed and damaged the outside wall of a supermarket on Milner Road in an attempt to break in.

In another incident revealed by CCTV footage on Monday night, two men broke into a supermarket in Braitling, causing some damage and leaving with an empty cash till.

In the town’s industrial area, offenders broke into a truck yard and started up a prime mover, striking and damaging two other vehicles parked at the yard. They drove a truck from the yard before crashing it on Brown Street and fleeing the scene. Police said the truck was extensively damaged.

Strike Force Viper has asked anyone with information which may assist in identifying persons involved in this incident, to contact them on 131 44 or report it anonymously via Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

(Supplied by NT Police)

Additional police resources will be present in the Alice Springs CBD area on a rolling 24 hour period following a spate of unlawful entries in Alice Springs at the weekend.

From 6am Friday 22 January to 6am this morning, police received reports of 25 unlawful entries on businesses and residential properties.

Fifteen of these unlawful entries occurred at business in the Alice Springs central business district, where offenders targeted cash and food, and five of the businesses were repeat victims.

A 13-year-old male has been taken into custody this morning by members of Strike Force Viper in relation to an unlawful entry of a beauty salon in the Todd Mall on Saturday night.

Strike Force Viper have carriage of these investigations and are working to identify and locate offenders.

Two female youth were apprehended at the scene of an unlawful entry of a business in the Todd Mall by members from Strike Force Viper. The pair aged 12 and 14-years-old will be dealt with under the Youth Justice Act.

Acting Superintendent Alex Brennan said it was a shocking weekend of crime for the community.

“I feel for everyone who was a victim of this senseless type of behaviour, which impacts so many aspects of our community,” said A/Supt Brennan

“We understand the feeling of either coming home or waking up to learn you’ve been a victim of crime, and it’s a feeling that sits uneasy with all of us. No one is immune to this type of offending.

“Our members work tirelessly every day to make our community a safer one for everyone, unfortunately there is a minority who continue to conduct this type of activity.”

“As of today the mobile police station will be placed in the Todd Mall providing a 24/7 police presence for that area, and additional foot patrols will be conducted in locations recently targeted by offenders. We will continue to engage with the other government and non-government agencies to identify at-risk and high-risk youth and refer them to the relevant agencies to prevent future offending.”

Police urge community members to ensure offenders do not have easy access to car keys, which appear to be the primary target of offenders.

“Offenders clearly unlawfully entered nine properties targeting car keys. We cannot stress enough that securing and hiding cars keys actively prevents further offending.”

“We also encourage people to keep reporting suspicious behaviour to police first.

“This information is integral in helping police identify trends and behaviour so we can act and put preventative crime measures in place.”

]]> http://aliceonline.com.au/shocking-weekend-of-break-ins-car-keys-targeted-police/feed/ 0 http://aliceonline.com.au/good-news-for-the-bush-peter-latz-interview-part-2/ http://aliceonline.com.au/good-news-for-the-bush-peter-latz-interview-part-2/#respond Mon, 18 Jan 2021 00:23:20 +0000 http://aliceonline.com.au/?p=11507

Peter Latz about to enjoy a freshly picked bush passionfruit on his block.

In the first part of this interview, Peter Latz talked about how increased carbon dioxide has been a boon for the Central Australian desert — while stressing his belief that we need to take action to reduce world-wide carbon dioxide levels.

It’s a view that recognises the complexity of interacting systems, one that doesn’t get a lot of airing by media that prefer to keep it simple and usually focus on the negative. But a conversation with Peter is likely to be full of reminders that the present is complicated, the future is rarely entirely predictable, and change is the only constant in our environments. What is endangered and what is a threat, for example, can change or even switch places within a generation or two.

In his decades living at White Gums, Peter has invested countless hours getting rid of the highly invasive buffel grass from his property, as well as giving his unpaid time to protecting native grasses and plants in national parkland. It’s given him the opportunity to  closely observe natural processes that sometimes confound conventional wisdom. This combination of action and observation has reinforced his natural optimism, as the second part of this interview reveals.

Dave: There is still this incredibly high level of anxiety about the future. Do you think we need to focus more on what we’ve got?

Peter: I blame the media as much as anything, because the media like bad stories. People are not interested in good stories. What we should be doing is saying to the ABC: “For every nasty story you give us you’ve got to give us an equal positive story.” Because there’s plenty of positive stories around, but we don’t hear them. It doesn’t make news.

The other problem we’ve got here is buffel grass and other weeds… but what people don’t realise is (the problems are not intractable)… there’s a wonderful book called Where Do Camels Belong? He (author Ken Thompson) is mostly talking about Europe and North America, but he’s found that within 50 to 200 years, 90 per cent of the serious introduced plants and animals are tamed down and just become part of the system, often change their genes and aren’t a problem anymore. And that’s already starting to happen here with buffel and couch grass, which are the two worst weeds we’ve got.

Is that something you’ve observed or you’ve got evidence of?

Wel,l I’ve been monitoring the plants on Simpson’s Gap National Park for 35, 40 years, and I’ve got permanent plots there. The last rain we had — I haven’t got there after this rain — but there was a quarter increase in native plants more than before. So the buffel and couch were becoming less of a problem.

Was there a corresponding decrease (in couch and buffel)?

Yeah, yeah, you could say a quarter decrease in buffel and couch.

What causes that?

Oh it’s very simple. In the same way as we overcame the rabbit problem —we brought in a disease for it. See the reason introduced plants can take off in new places is they leave their enemies behind where they came from. So in the case of rabbits, we brought some of the diseases across — and I mean even Harry Butler said years ago we must bring in a cat disease, just make sure we inoculate all the tame cats, and of course he had windows broken and so on. The couch grass, for example, is considered to be the world’s worse grassy weed, worse than buffel here, has now got a fungus in it, a fungus that occurs where it came from, and now the natives are growing through it.

But I’m not saying we still don’t have a serious fire problem with buffel. I mean that’s one of the reasons we haven’t had these huge dust storms because the buffel was keeping the ground (covered).

Once again the trade-off.

It’s a trade-off and there’s no simple answer to this sort of thing, there is good and bad. But you’d think we have enough brains to work it out and start pulling our finger out.

There seems to be a lack of consensus that we do, doesn’t there? I remember being surprised when Xavier Herbert said we have to go nuclear. I said: “Are you serious? Why?” He said look: “Genie’s out of the bottle. This can help humanity. We can’t put it back in, we need to use it.” Is that something we should be doing?  Because it seems like a lot of these renewable technologies are very land-intensive; they require a huge amount of resources to create the panels, the windmills, they then create new problems, the windmills are killing the eagles and so on. Do we need to look at more advanced technology such as nuclear?

And again, the Chinese are doing it. They’re producing safer, smaller nuclear power plants that will be handy for developing nations. We don’t need them in Australia. Just the area out of Tennant Creek would give us enough power for the whole nation.

So yeah, there’s no one simple answer. You’ve got to use everything you can.

Tell us about what you’ve done here, on the block.

Well, when I came here there were three of these native passionfruit, which are a really important food for ants and birds and other animals. Now there are 103.  I expected that when I got rid of the buffel and couch, I’d have native grasses take over, and I’d still have a fire problem.

It wasn’t just the grasses that came?

No, and the thing is that in the past, anywhere us humans have settled, we started off here with sheep and decided cattle were better, but every settlement had goats, and goats are really good at getting rid of shrubs and making sure the grass takes over. Now grass is a disturbance weed. You know that before any humans came to Australia, the whole continent was dominated by browsers (shrub-eating mammals). There was bugger-all grass here.

Well, you’ve written about that (in Bushfires and Bushtucker).

Yeah, but the goats round our settlements have helped the buffel take over because they’ve got rid of the competition, so buffel has done very well. So what I’ve done, is by getting rid of the buffel, instead of native grasses coming back — they’ve come back to a certain extent, but you can see there’s what we call chenopods, you know the saltbush family. Ruby saltbush, a whole lot of different chenopods popping up. And my block — I used to be worried because I was surrounded by buffel grass, I was scared shitless I was going to get burned out. I’m safe now, because there’s hardly any grass around anymore. The chenopods are taking over. We’re going back to what it was before humans came here, and fire would have been much less frequent. They would have still had fires — don’t get me wrong — but much less frequently.

So in some ways it’s like we have to have a working relationship with nature and then let nature take over at some point.

Oh, we’ve got to help it because we’ve brought in these introduced plants.

The other thing is they talk about loss of biodiversity. Even in Central Australia we’ve got a quarter more plants than when white people came here. They’re introduced plants; some of them are weeds, but others aren’t. So our biodiversity has increased. Now New Zealand has doubled its biodiversity by having introduced plants come in. Some of them are bad, for sure, but biodiversity is not decreasing, because as the plants settle into their new homes. they often change, become a different species, and settle in and meld in with the neighbours.

The other interesting thing about Central Australia, and talking about global warming not having a big effect on us, is we don’t know of a single plant in an area as big as France that’s gone extinct in the last hundred years. Now where else in the world can you say that about? There are possibly one or two that have gone extinct, but we can’t say for sure. So I’m going to make sure when the buffel and couch is no longer a problem, we’ve got a seed source to reinvade these areas that these introduced plants have taken over.

There are (residents of) three other blocks that are working on it. We’ve got over 100 acres of fertile alluvial soil and the creek just south of us. So there are 42 native plants  that live in this part of the world, and they are a seed source to replace the invaded areas. Olive Pink (Botanic Garden) has been working on the fertile foothills, which is another buffel grass habitat, and the Todd River.  Ken Johnson’s also working on the Todd River. And we’ve also been working on this square kilometre of Mitchell grass country out at the Alcoota Fossil Reserve, which hasn’t had cattle on it for 35 years. There are 44 native grasses out there, many of them different to the ones we have here. So every major habitat that buffel lives in now has areas that have still got a seed source to take over later on.

Do we have any idea how many native grasses we’re looking at?

I would say 60 or 70. I haven’t really worked it out. There’s only a few of them that are really threatened. One of them is becoming quite common on my block. It was a very important food source for bilbies and for humans in the past, and it’s flourishing now. That was almost extinct in Central Australia.

It’s one of the urochloas. (It) has nice big seed. After a fire in Simpson’s Gap,  I measured the amount of seed this grass produced and it was almost as much as the average wheat field in Australia. So that’s how prolific in the right conditions. And the other important one of course for the bilbies and humans in the past was the bush onion. That used to be among my plots in Simpson’s Gap. It’s now totally gone because of the couch and buffel.

We (are trying) to get bilbies re-established in Simpson’s Gap and we’ve had troubles with predators, but now we can’t put them back before we get the grass and the sedges back again.

How long do you think it will be before  we could put bilbies back there?

That’s a good question. Hopefully, it’s  only 10 or 20 years, but who knows? But we’ve got to be ready for the time when it’s possible to happen.

Peter Latz at home

For eighty years, botanist and author Peter Latz has been watching the world change from his back yard, through the prism of his beloved arid zone plants and their ecosystems.

It’s a split-level back yard. At the macro level, we’re talking about pretty much the entirety of Central Australia, an area the size of France, as he likes to put it. At the micro level, it’s a twenty acre block on Roe Creek, 15 km from the town of Alice Springs. Here Latz made his home nearly 40 years ago, and has been able to observe and experience changes at close range through all the variety of conditions the Centre undergoes: flood, drought, fire — and all the peaceful times in between.

His verdict on this ever-changing world may surprise you: We’ve never had it so good!

While the public conversation is dominated by predictions of doom for humans and other animals and danger for the planet, Latz is looking at his world as it actually is, and how it’s changed since he was a boy growing up Hermannsburg in the 1940s.

Well-known for his research into the long back story of humans and plants in the Centre — and what may have come before the humans — the author of Bushfires and Bush Tucker believes the country may not have looked this good for “thousands of years”.

 I sat down with Peter at his block

. What follows is PART ONE of an abbreviated transcript of our conversation — starting with the bad news.

Peter: For the world as a whole unless we change our ways, global warming is really going to stuff up the planet, but the interesting thing is that living here in Central Australia we’re actually better off at the moment — I don’t know about the future — with global warming. The plants at least — and that’s the thing I’m most interested in.

Dave: How can that be?

For a start, desert plants’ biggest limiting factor is water. In the desert when you have more carbon dioxide in the air you have to open your stomates for shorter time to let the carbon dioxide in, and that means you lose less water from evaporation. So in other words, in Central Australia now, and in most of the deserts of the world, plants are favoured by carbon dioxide. It doesn’t work so well for wetter areas, because the limiting factor in wet areas is nutrients, if you’ve got plenty of water. And so extra carbon dioxide doesn’t help you.

Is this something you’ve observed?

Oh yeah. See, in my nearly 80 years, the other important thing is about every 25 years we used to have really bad droughts, and I mean bad droughts. I remember trying to walk home from town one day in Alice Springs and the only way I could find my home was to follow the road because I couldn’t see from here to you for dust. Now we haven’t had one of those for 50 years, so in other words, every 25 years we used to have terrible droughts and now we haven’t had one for 50 years.

We’ve had a couple of very dry years, though, haven’t we?

Yeah, and what’s happened — if you look over there — you can see lovely wattles looking very healthy after the worst drought we’ve had in the last 50 years. In the past, every 25 years, every wattle died— flowered and fruited, produced some seed in the ground, then they all died, every single one of them. Now I haven’t noticed this at all in our last drought.

It’s still quite a short time, to talk about — 50 years — when we’ve got so little knowledge.

Plants have to put up with extra temperature but they’re used to that. Up till now I’ve never seen the country so good. I reckon there’s nearly twice as much biomass in trees and shrubs in Central Australia now as when I was a kid.

Now we have to blame the rabbits, as well, and so it’s not just global warming.

The rabbits having gone, things are coming back?

Yes, they used to ringbark a lot of the trees and shrubs. We’ve still got rabbits, but they’re not a serious menace anymore. So yeah, the plants in the last 50 years are the best they’ve ever been, probably the best they’ve been for thousands of years.

Wow! But, given that and given that you also expressed concern about the planet in general, what should we do, knowing that it’s good for us (here) and it’s good for deserts but it’s not necessarily good all round?

Well, we don’t know what the future still holds. I mean, some of the scientists say that we’re gonna have worse droughts, and bigger floods as well, but that doesn’t seem to have happened here, and of course we don’t have to worry about sea level rise in Central Australia! But yeah, we really have to pull our finger out and do something about the extra carbon dioxide in the air.

You know, the plants were doing OK before the extra carbon dioxide. They’re better off at the moment but who knows what’s going to happen in the future? I’m an optimist. But humans are well-known for waiting until the last minute … we’ve definitely got to pull our finger out. But you know, the other exciting thing is, China and India are the world experts on getting sustainable energy.

But they’re still using the most fossil fuels.

Well, we could not have got to where we are without the use of fossil fuels … especially, places like Africa have got to keep using them until they get enough money or economy to be able to produce (alternatives).

Are you worried about how hot it might get?

Well, as I said, our plants are pretty much adapted to the heat so it’s the humans that are going to suffer more than the plants. I’m not saying that we aren’t in trouble all over the world, that’s for sure. I’m just surprised.  And the other problem with global warming for here is that you get more growth, that means more bushfires, and the heat helps that as well. So we really need to not only pull our finger out with sustainable energy, but we need to work on preventing bad fires.

It’s quite a complicated story, because inevitably there are going to be wins and losses, and winners and losers. Some crops that will grow better, particularly in the northern hemisphere and maybe winters that aren’t quite as savage. How do you feel about children growing up… the Greta Thunbergs… with this kind of despair, that there is no tomorrow?They seem to think they are living in the final days and the planet is doomed.

But isn’t that a great thing, that the kids are worried about it? I’m not saying they haven’t got reason because you know, we’ve buggered things up for them and we’re expecting them to pull us out of it, but at least the young people, being better educated and so on — we wouldn’t have got here, we wouldn’t have been able to educate all our children if we hadn’t had coal and gas energy.

You can’t say it’s all bad, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that we have only obtained …. I mean, we’re living in the best time of the Earth ever! You and I have been so lucky to have grown up at this time in the planet’s history, because there’s now fewer hungry people on the Earth, less war. Really, the world is the best it’s ever been.

Dave Richards.

Watch for the second part of this interview, in which Peter explains why he is optimistic about the on-going survival of the unique trees, shrubs and grasses of the arid zone — and how the threat of invasive species like buffel and couch grass is being checked. You can also watch the first of a series of  Youtube videos of the interview.

CCTV photo released by police

Source: NT Police, Fire and Emergency Services

Northern Territory Police are calling for two people who were in the area prior to a woman’s death in Alice Springs last week to come forward.

Detectives from the Alice Springs Criminal Investigation Branch have released images from CCTV in which a man and a woman can be seen in the area out the front of the Alice Springs Hospital Emergency entrance on Thursday January 7 around 9:23pm.

Detective Sergeant Glenn Bolger said police were calling for public assistance to identify the two people, as it is believed they have information which would assist with investigations.

“As part of our investigation it is integral for us to speak with anyone who witnessed the interactions between the victim and the offender.

“CCTV footage shows these people were in the area and possibly heard and saw the interactions between the man and woman, prior to the woman’s death.”

“We must stress, these people are not considered suspects in any way. We would greatly appreciate their cooperation and urge them to contact police at the Alice Springs Police Station in regards to this case.”

Anyone with information which may assist police in this investigation can call police on 131 444 or report it anonymously via Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

The government says the Jervois Base Metal Project could create 350 jobs.

The mine would include on-site processing and production of a copper concentrate and lead-zinc concentrate, according to a media release from Mining minister Nicole Manison.

Photos and map, KGL website

But it appears prospective miner KGL, which has been investigating the site since 2011, is still looking for financial backers for the project.

KGL Chairman Denis Wood said a  “pre-feasibility study” (PFS) showed the high-grade Jervois deposit would support a “robust” initial 7.5-year mining operation.

“We are confident the drilling about to start in the new year will improve the quality and size of the resource,” Mr Wood said.

The chairman said the new information would be fed into a full feasibility study.

“Work is already well advanced on the FS which we expect will improve the economics of Jervois even further,” he said on the KGS website.

“With the PFS completed and the authority to mine now in place, discussions have begun on project financing and the marketing of the mine’s concentrate.”

Wood said: “Jervois is exceptionally well placed to enter the world copper market as a supplier.

“It is a high-grade deposit 9.4 million tonnes at 2.41% copper reserve at a time of declining copper grades among the major copper mines and constrained copper production generally.

“At the same time demand is expected to increase strongly for copper in both emerging green energy and electric vehicles uses as well as traditional construction, electricity transmission, communication and consumer goods applications.”

A few metres down the street I witnessed an exchange that seemed more in tune with the times, as a woman in her sixties stood behind her gate imploring a man in his fifties to stop hassling her family and leave her son alone. “I’m not f…ing hassling you,” he said. “It’s your son I’m hassling.”  It continued in that vein as I passed. It didn’t look dangerous, but it definitely was not a shining example of peace and goodwill towards fellow humans.

Yet, despite the apparent lack of Christmasness — at least in my perception — there was something magical about that week, and it has continued as we drift into this new year. I suppose it was all about the weather. We had our buckets lined up under the eaves of the house for all five rainy days leading up to the 25th and I carted so much water to our plants that I almost injured myself. What bounty we had! The desert pea that was an inch high where I bought it in early October was now a foot, and the wattles on either side of it, which had hardly grown at all for two years, were busting out all over with new shoots. The resident grey shrike thrushes, usually highly intermittent broadcasters, could not stop singing, and bee-eaters like the one pictured above seemed only to have to open their mouths for Christmas dinner to fly in, so generous was Mother Nature. Just a street-width and a line of houses behind us, the hills turned Irish green almost as we watched. After years of tired dormancy among the red rocks, all manner of life suddenly teemed, from insects and flowering eremophilas to kangaroos in their scores.

It would be unacceptably solipsistic and ethnocentric of me to suggest that this was a God-given Christmas treat, but I feltl entitled enough to discern a message after the clouds cleared to deliver Alice Springs an amazingly mild and perfect Christmas Day. After all, we are all entitled to interpret the signs of nature as we deem fit. It is simple enough at one level: no matter what our trials and sufferings may be as individuals or as a collective mass, we should never abandon hope that things can change.

Taking it one step further, we need to acknowledge that Nature has been and continues to be kind enough to allow us mostly safe passage through our life on Earth. We may have a hot Christmas or two along the way, but the planet is way more hospitable to human life than it has been for most of its four billion years, whether it is climate, disease or the abundance of food and water we are considering. If our children try to tell us we have ruined the Earth, instead of exalting them and saying we are sorry for our profligacy, we need only to apologise to them for having given them the mistaken impression that the human race has such power. A happy new year, free from destructive anxiety about things we cannot change, and open to a close but negotiated relationship with Nature, is well within our reach.

So let’s have one!

Dave Richards

A 1926 climb. This picture is from the Tilmouth Collection in the Alice Springs library. According to handwritten information with the photo it shows Charlie Cooper with a party at the cairn on the top of Mount Gillen. Anthroplogist Baldwin Spencer described Mr Cooper as “Oknirrabata of the Gnoilya totem” , which means “great teacher of the dog totem” It should be noted that no further background or explanation was provided with the photo.

This week’s sudden closure of the walking trail up Mount Gillen by NT Parks and Wildlife appears at first sight to be both clumsy and cavalier, although given the fact that it took seven years of deliberation, may have been neither.

Just a day or two earlier, the same government department, in co-ordination with traditional owners, had announced the opening of a new walking/cycling track between Emily Gap and Jessie Gap in the East MacDonnell Ranges. It was promoted by the Central Land Council as a Christmas present for the people of Alice Springs.

Given that chief ranger Chris Day was put up by the Commission to make both announcements to Stewart Brash on ABC regional radio, the possibility that their timing was coincidental seems less likely than a twist in a novel by Charles Dickens. The inescapable conclusion is that the powers that be had decided to present the general public with a fait accompli into which no correspondence could possibly be entered. A sop would be thrown in in the form of a “Christmas present”, but not to be mentioned in quite the same breath.

Given the tendency of many in the media to defer to the perceived feelings of indigenous people over balanced reflection of broader community attitudes, the decision-makers decided they would probably get away with it with a minimum of public criticism. The lack of subtlety in this failed attempt at a trade-off and the disregard for the feelings of many Alice Springs residents is suspicious. It has all the hallmarks of the Gunner government’s top-down style, which is only likely to become only more contemptuous of the townspeople of Alice Springs now that they have rejected its only Labor member of parliament.

Having said that, Mbantwe custodian Doris Stuart is a sincere, intelligent and passionate advocate of her people and her culture and deservedly commands great respect in Alice Springs. Her cause is just and reasonable. She spoke emotionally to Stewart Brash about her family’s long struggle to have the climb closed, a struggle that has apparently been going on for seven years. This, according to Chris Day, is how long ago Parks and Wildlife first approached custodians of the site when seeking to repair the damaged and badly eroded walking track. Mr Day revealed that it had soon become apparent that custodians were “unhappy” about having people on top of Mt Gillen. So how and why did it take seven years to decide they would close it with barely a few hours’ notice?

As long-term Central Australian resident Dave Hewitt pointed out on Brash’s Thursday follow-up,  the move was in stark contrast to the drawn-out and highly public closure of the Uluru climb, which everybody knew was on the cards for many years. Even after the final date was set, climbers were given months before the umbilical cord was cut.  Mr Hewitt rightly described the Gillen climb closure as a “public relations disaster for Parks and Wildlife, for the traditional owners, and for AAPA (Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority).”

Mr Hewitt has also circulated a photograph taken in 1926 by one of the first nurses at Adelaide House, showing six people at the summit, including Charlie Cooper, who Mr Hewitt said was then considered the senior owner of the area and had apparently guided the party to the top of Mount Gillen. “Obviously in 1926 there was no concern about whitefellas climbing Mt Gillen,” Mr Hewitt said. That claim could and probably will be disputed, but it is worth considering that a precedent for climbing the hill without any vocal Aboriginal disapproval appears to have been set nearly 100 years ago.

So far the news of the climbing ban has attracted scores of comments in the popular Alice Springs Community Forum, and they are overwhelmingly opposed to the closure itself, the process that led to it, or both. And while the process is important to evaluate, the closure also needs to be considered an issue in its own right. When examined together with the closure of the Rock climb and Victorian climbing sites, it raises legitimate issues that should not be simply dismissed as the complaints of a disrespectful minority.

Most Australians, not just First Australians, have in common the desire for a genuine relationship with their country, not just as a nation, but as the land that gave birth or succour to them. For many of them, there is no better way to experience the country than by climbing its natural monuments and viewing the surrounding countryside from above.

This has been mischievously misrepresented by many  as the desire to “conquer” mountains and landmarks like Uluru. Talkback caller “Nick” summed up this well-rehearsed view: Most people in town respect Arrernte elders’ wishes and do not climb sacred sites. So disappointed to hear ABC Local Radio beating up this story and giving so much airtime to non-indigenous people’s entitled opinions and desires to climb and conquer Aboriginal land.

Climbing natural features is glibly equated to “conquering” as opposed to simply “experiencing” them, either by walking or by somehow beholding them within an awareness that they are sacred to Aboriginal people in a way they could never be sacred to others. Apart from the fact that climbing something is also a way to experience it, in a very visceral way, this approach does not stand up to scrutiny. A sense of the sacred is common to all people,  even if it buried in the stresses of modern life. It is not only valid when it has been certified and stamped by a government authority like AAPA.

This sense of the sacred is so fundamental and so important to humans that we risk losing our very humanity when it is ignored or suppressed. Nobody questioned the genuine love and awe that Bob Brown and The Wilderness Society had for the Franklin River when they campaigned to stop Tasmania’s Franklin River Dam in the 1980s, but they might well have done so it if the Greens had tried to stop people canoeing down the river as well. People who climb Mt Gillen don’t want to mine it or even put a chairlift up it; the very thought would likely horrify most of them. Their desire to climb it is a tacit acknowledgement that they consider the mountain is at least important (if not actually sacred) to them and they are prepared to sacrifice their time and energy to experience its greatness.

Doris and other custodians clearly have the legal upper hand in their struggle for control of Mt Gillen. That is a fait accompli. But those from different cultures, who have a different sort of love and respect for Mt Gillen than hers can surely be just as sincere in their feelings. They may want to know exactly why and how their desire to climb it constitutes disrespect, as Doris claims it does. Brash actually asked Doris this, but there was no answer, as Doris chose to talk rather of how she felt when she saw the gouged track on the side of the mountain — which she poignantly described as like a scar to her own ribs.

The trouble, however, is the scar is also a fait accompli, and according to Chris Day traditional owners have said they don’t want it repaired. So presumably it will remain and possibly get worse if there is a lot of rain. The climbers will go, however, without ever having been warned or consulted or asked what they think or feel about Mt Gillen. Many of them were born here and have grown up looking at this magnificent hill most days of their lives; some remember being told the late Wenten Rubuntja, also a senior Arrernte person, that they were all “little Yeperenyes”.

Stewart Brash and ABC Alice Springs are to be congratulated for opening the issue of the climb closure to public discussion in a way that should have been done long ago by the government and Parks and Wildlife. While the closure has been a relief for custodians,  it’s hard to see how such a secretive process can help inter-cultural relations in either the short or the long term. And while we have all been saddled with this edict, we as a community need to anticipate and discuss further climbing bans well before they happen.

Dave Richards