Love In a Sunburnt Country (32 page)

In the 1930s many Wiluna Aboriginal people were leading their traditional nomadic lives. All the rules still held and rule-breakers earned severe punishment. Girls married older men. Boys waited until they were old men themselves. Marriages were arranged well ahead of time. Yatungka was betrothed to an older man. But she loved Warri and he loved her. Defying every tradition—and knowing they were risking death—they ran away together into the desert.

Pursuit was quick, but Warri and Yatungka found shelter with another tribe, and were protected from retribution for a time. But there's no expiry date on tribal punishment—and Warri and Yatungka remained fearful. The 1930s was also the height of the gold rush around Wiluna. Life in town was arguably easier than the boom-and-bust life of the desert, and soon Aboriginal people moved to where there was always water, and medicine to save children's lives. Warri and Yatungka, with their three children and their dogs, stayed in the desert.

Their daughter died. Still they stayed in the desert, keeping clear of tribal reprisal. Their sons left in their teen years to take up working in the towns and on stations. By the 1960s the couple had become legendary figures. Were they still out there somewhere in the Gibson Desert, or had they perished?

Mudjon was one of the original group of warriors who had tracked the pair after their elopement. He had grown up with Warri and so for him these two people were very far from legendary. He kept an eye on the sky. He felt his own loss of strength with the years. He imagined Warri and Yatungka without young people to help them, and he imagined that most vividly in the dry times.

In 1977, three years into a severe drought, he felt the time had come to go looking. Search party in tow, he headed into the desert, guided by the map unrolling in his head. They saw almost no water, and his hopes were evaporating further with every dry clay pan passed. Then, in the air, unfurling like a flag, he saw a wisp of smoke rising in the sand hills. Warri and Yatungka: emaciated, ill, weary, ready for rescue. There was no tribal punishment for these two, now celebrated as the last of the nomads.

Their family still live in Wiluna to this day, and it remains a between-two-worlds place. Aboriginal people gather here to discuss and apply the law. And every year, in suits and white cars, come the bureaucrats and the politicians for their meetings. So different are the two cultures that the perceptions of one sometimes can't even admit the perceptions of the other. But there are also the halfway places which try to bridge the two worlds: the art gallery, the ranger program. It was within these that Tania had come to work.

‘The job was the Community Development Manager with the Shire of Wiluna. My role was to look after a few different departments they had: the ranger, the swimming pool, the sports and recreation centre, the art gallery and tourism.'

After years of cultural immersion in Tim's half of Australia and brimming with the skills she had gained from that time, Tania was back in the kind of Australia she'd known first. She loved the chance to work in strategic planning, networking and sharing, and to help her managers look with two sets of eyes: first, to see what it was that people wanted; next, to reconcile that as best they could with the shire's scope and strategy. She loved, too, the people and the place. The look of a town is immaterial to Tania—and Wiluna is a strange mix of battered and just-built—it is the people and the land that she inevitably falls in love with.

That it is people who are the critical asset of any place is something Tim echoes.

‘I'm trained as a scientist, but I always understood—I knew from growing up in a little country town—that it is always the people that are most important. Agriculture is successful if the people know how to do it well.' Tim was missing living with Tania full-time. He was loathing watching the best opportunity in Australian agriculture being ignored by policymakers. A year after she had moved to Wiluna, he resigned from the Agriculture Department and moved to be with her. This decision took Tim into Tania's world. Wiluna was the beginning of Tim's journey into the spirituality of land and his appreciation of the indivisibility of land from the human soul.

‘The spirituality of the Aboriginal culture is really strong and powerful, and strange things happen. Tania knew that already, but for me as a scientist it was a shock. Wiluna and then Marble Bar is where I started to understand the spiritual aspect of the land through Indigenous cultures.'

‘Tim had just made the move and I thought I'd take him out to the places I'd explored. So we headed out to this particular area where there is a ravine. Now, I could feel one half of it was no good—I just didn't go anywhere near it—but I knew I could be on the other side of it.'

Tim was keen to explore and simply strode away, down into the guts of the ravine.

‘He was gone for an hour and I was starting to think, “Where the hell is he?” Eventually he returned, shaking like a leaf. And I said, “What's wrong with you?”'

‘I'd walked into the ravine and I started to feel ill. I took a step, I felt sick. I felt sicker with every step. It was like someone had a microwave pointed at my brain, as if my brain was going to explode, that's how strong it was. Eventually I twigged what was going on. I was in the wrong spot, I needed to get out of there.'

In this environment Tim was an explorer without a map or a compass. He had nothing in him to provide a footing or even bearings so that he could begin to understand what had happened. He was a scientist, but this was a radical, reality-altering and expanding experience.

‘You hear some pretty weird stories, but I guess I've come to accept them, not try to deny them, because once you've had that experience you can't deny it. There are other forces in the landscape that we don't understand but the mob seem to understand. I don't believe now you can ignore the spirituality of the land.'

What underlay his experience in the ravine Tim is yet to discover, but it was enough for him to become eager to learn more of what Aboriginal people saw, felt and understood. Like all scientists, he is an information junkie. He began to be concerned that his clients—who were now pastoralists rather than farmers—were missing out on a relationship of potentially great benefit.

‘We've got the story of clashes and massacres and there is no doubt that happened. But the other story is not told, of really close, cooperative relationships that lasted for generations, and in some cases still do. There's the odd pastoralist out there who is the complete redneck, but they really aren't too many and that's encouraging.'

Tim believes the evidence that this relationship was the common experience can be found in all kinds of ways.

‘In the De Grey River catchment we had this massive flood with Cyclone Rusty, biggest in living memory—at its widest it was ninety kilometres wide,' he says. In fact, for most of the time the De Grey River is a large dry bed. When it is flowing it is no more than 130 metres across.

‘All the old, original homesteads are built within two hundred metres of the main river channel and when you see a flood like that you think the builders would have had to be mad. From the air you could see all the original homesteads, on a strip of sand, in a ninety-kilometre-wide inland sea. The reason none of those original homesteads went under water is that they were built to be above even the biggest floods—but those first settlers wouldn't have known what a big flood could look like. The local Aboriginal people would have told them that,' says Tim. ‘The early pioneers tapped into the traditional owners' knowledge, respected that knowledge and would have obeyed that knowledge, otherwise they'd probably have got a spear through them.'

Loving the same land can create a connection as profound as loving the same child. Caring, even caring in very different ways, is a forger of mutual appreciation and bonds built on a shared commitment to the wellbeing of the land. The stories of ‘other forces in the landscape' that Tim mentions are found all over Australia, not just in the outback, but in cities, too. The mysterious stewardship of the traditional owners is another kind of land care. It is based on a body of knowledge, a language and a science most of us don't yet understand.

‘I was talking to Chris Ward at Lake Violet outside of Wiluna—they've been there for five generations, they were the original settlers. I said, “How do you get on with the mob?” And he says, “Oh really, really well, my great-great-grandfather was best mates with these guys in town today, and we have this friendship passed down through the generations.” And I asked the mob and they said, “Oh, our family were best mates with his great-great-grandfather.” There's been a strong positive relationship out there for five generations on that property. No dramas at all. Chris knows a lot of the Aboriginal history for his property: he respects them and they respect him. Where it exists it works really well.'

Sadly, that mutual respect isn't found everywhere, not because of a lack of goodwill, but simply as a function of the revolving ownership of many pastoral properties. Tim identifies 1967 as a critical year: with the increase in Aboriginal stockmen's wages, the number of stockmen employed greatly decreased, and many families moved to find work in the towns. After this time, if a property changed hands, often pastoralists and traditional owners never met. Tim believes this is a loss felt deeply on both sides, yet rarely do either pastoralists or traditional owners act to re-create the relationships.

‘There is a need for a “dating service” out there,' says Tim. ‘Pastoralists often say to me they would like to know more about the Aboriginal history and culture of the sites on their place. They don't want to muck it up—but they don't know where those sites are, they don't know how to manage them. I say, “Why don't you talk to the traditional owners?” and they don't know who the traditional owners are. Then there's the mob in town, they don't know the pastoralists and they're too scared to go and introduce themselves.'

Their shared lives in Wiluna (and then Marble Bar, where they moved next) taught Tania and Tim that their relationship could act as a bridge between traditional owners and pastoralists.

‘It was Wiluna that really taught me that this was where we fit. This is where our common links are, this is where we are strong because we have those relationships on both sides of things and are able to bring it together. That's bound what we do—we think and feel the same in our own different fields, but they connect really nicely,' says Tania.

‘When Tania was working with those communities I had the opportunity to sit with very traditional cultural people and listen to them and learn from them. Without her I wouldn't have developed those relationships—I'd have just been working with the pastoralists.'

In helping Tim connect meaningfully to Aboriginal people Tania was further refining her mastery of one of the most precious and rare skill sets in Australia: cultural brokering. We tend to understand cultural brokers as intermediaries, messengers and translators between two or three different cultures. That's not quite it, though. When a message is passed from a person of one culture to a person of another, at that very moment of transmission, the broker absorbs and holds the message and very gently, in their body and their face, in their gestures, in their words, they reframe it for both people.

The broker says and conveys what was meant to be said and conveyed by one person to the other, and they help the other person hear it and convey their response in return. It all happens in a flash. It is teaching as much as translating, building trust as much as it is building knowledge, being in the moment with the people rather than doing any particular thing. Nowhere is this harder—and more important—than in brokering across the gap between any traditional culture (where it is all about cooperation, sharing, surviving and spirituality) and any modern Western culture (where it is all about specialising, owning, producing and self-expression). We have nowhere near enough of these people, simply because they are most often created when an unusual sort of person is given an unusual kind of life.

Such expertise in negotiating boundaries can only be developed when a born negotiator has had to make their way back and forth across a society's liminal spaces for a very long time. Of course, this has been Tania's story. From living under the oppression of domestic violence and low expectations to suddenly having to find her way in Australia's mainstream and finally to her apprenticeship on the frontiers of academia under Ann Larson, she's been crisscrossing Australia's cultural borders for a very long time. And she is a born negotiator. The wonder is not that she's become a cultural broker but that her marriage to Tim has taken her into a place where we have so few cultural brokers working: the interface between modern agricultural science and the oldest living culture on the planet.

If Wiluna had showed Tania that this in-between space was where she and Tim fitted, Marble Bar went one step further. It adopted them.

‘The day we rocked up, someone said, “Do you need a hand unloading?” and we didn't have any tucker and Foxy the publican said, “Oh, we'd better feed you.” As soon as you walk in you feel a sense of community,' says Tim.

Marble Bar is an entire community living on the borders of old Indigenous culture and the new mainstream. There are only two hundred people in Marble Bar: more of them are Indigenous than not, and everyone gets on.

‘You've got people who come up with an idea, the people who say, “Yes let's do that!” and then the organisers who make it happen,' says Tania.

These are the ingredients, she says, for a lively and rich community life, no matter a town's size. Tim and Tania had a year and a half in tidy, pretty Marble Bar, then a year and a half in Port Hedland, when they spent most weekends travelling back to Marble Bar, and then they returned to Marble Bar for another two years.