What the Traveller Saw (15 page)

The Aranda menfolk covered their bodies and faces with alternating stripes of white bird down stuck on with human blood, and red and black pigment, and they wore enormously tall, slender head-dresses made of bird down, twigs and human hair, to represent frogs, emus, possums and wild plum trees, the intention of the ritual to make them plentiful. And they used to make drawings on the ground, which they prepared by first dampening it and then covering it with yellow ochre, great scrolls employing the same motifs of circles and so on, outlined in black and red and filled with white dots.
Some of these drawings were more than eighteen feet long. A single one took up to seven hours to execute and a different one was repeated for eight successive days.

Looking at Spencer and Gillen’s remarkable photographs of the Central Tribes taken soon after the First World War, one is impressed by their powerful physique. Seeing their descendants, men and women, at the Hermannsburg Mission one is startled by their obesity. The features are the same – chocolate-coloured skin, very prominent brow ridges, deep-set eyes, broad nostrils, and some of the women and girls have light-coloured or bronze-coloured hair and they have thin shanks, but all of them except the young look as they have been living exclusively on a diet of cut loaf and deep-fried chips. They have been destroyed by middle-class morality and carbohydrates and there is nothing that anyone can do about it, except kindly refrain from photography. The symbol of the failure of the so-called policy of assimilation is Albert Namatjira, the remarkable aboriginal artist who became world famous and was discriminated against to the last. He was refused permission to build a house in Alice Springs and, at the end of a life in which every conceivable humiliation was heaped upon him, built himself a stone house near Hermannsburg with his own hands. Even this, shamefully, has been allowed to fall into ruin.

We enter the gorges of the Finke River and grind through deep dry sand in four-wheel drive. ‘Oldest river in the world,’ Diane says. That is as maybe, but this part of it scarcely qualifies as a river at all, having currently only one small pool of water twenty yards long in it. The aboriginals call the Finke the Larapinta, the Snake, and with reason. Typical of the rivers of Australia which so bewildered the explorers, it goes nowhere, finally expiring, after perhaps a thousand miles of absolutely pointless meandering, in a vast, unchartered area of flood flats at the bottom end of the Simpson Desert in South Australia.

We stop to eat in a small puddle of shadow under a solitary desert willow and are instantly infested by flies. They are so abundant that, looking through the view-finder of an eyelevel reflex hoping to record the occasion, I can see nothing at all. We spray one another with a preparation called Scram which they detest, and get down to lunch from the miracle ice chest before the effects wear off; cold meats, crisp salad, ice-cold beer, followed by hot, smoky, orange-coloured tea brewed in a billy can in about two minutes over a fire of wood which may have never felt rain upon it and made with leaves from a packet of Billy Tea, the brand used by the old-timers.

Overhead the sky is peppered with little white clouds and a pair of huge, wedge-tailed eagles are going round and round in it on the look-out for rabbits. Until recently the Government paid a bounty for every wedge-tailed eagle which was shot, because they allegedly attack sheep (they do kill dying animals), but so many thousand were destroyed that now they will have to be protected, otherwise they will become extinct. Later we see one of their nests, a large, crazy-looking construction of sticks high in a tree.

We turn into a wide, deep canyon which enters the river from the west and is a tributary of it. The Finke itself continues its madly involved course through the James and Krichauff Ranges for a hundred miles by way of Boggy Hole. From the floor of it, now in the afternoon partly in blessed shadow, enormous palm trees soar upwards into the blinding sun. They are
Livistona Mariae
and this is the only place on the entire continent where they grow. Relics of the prehistoric, some of them are 1800 years old, they were discovered by Ernest Giles in the Glen of Palms near Boggy Hole when he was attempting to cross a thousand miles of unexplored territory to the West Australian coast with a party of four including an aboriginal boy called Dick in 1872, travelling on horseback. And there is a strange seed-bearing plant called a cycad (
Macrozamia
) which has its origins in the Mesozoic period,
2,000,000 years ago. There is an eerie feeling about this place below the blood-red cliffs under a sky of indigo blue and the bright blue Port Lincoln parrots squawking among the gums do nothing to dispel it. It is much too old to be arcadian. If the Finke isn’t the oldest river in the world then it certainly feels remarkably like it. Here, I half expect to see the saw-tooth grin on the face of the pterodactyl and hear the clashing of its wings, only the detritus deposited by generations of Australians anxious to make their country as hideous as possible reminds me that I am indeed in the present and that the tins and the non-returnable bottles will remain for ever, because down here in the centre there is no one to take them and nowhere to take them. Fortunately, this is a national reserve of 113,000 acres of which up to now only a minute part is ever visited by the public. It is a pity that Palm Valley is one of the places that is.

The sun departs from the valley in a blaze of glory at 7 p.m., and the terrible day is done; so do the flies and so does the cat bird whose cry (it can scarcely be said to be a call) makes one’s blood run cold and makes one glad that one is not here alone in the wilderness.

Diane cooks enormous steaks on a piece of flat iron which she carries about with her for this purpose, having thrown it on to the ashes of a very hot fire, and we drink a strange concoction of Australian sherry and very cold tonic water which is less loathsome and more refreshing than it sounds. Quite soon we retire to our alloy beds, which are of a sort that can be turned into camp chairs if you only know how, knocked out by the too long day; but not to sleep. The dingoes, wild dogs, have taken over from the cat birds and they can be heard for miles around. Finally, they move in close enough to eat the remains of our dinner and they do this to the accompaniment of blood-curdling howls which go on echoing and re-echoing against the walls of the gorge. Even when they tire of howling I cannot sleep. First my patent bed turns into the patent chair
with me inside it, like the filling of an over-generous club sandwich; then the night is too beautiful. Overhead the Milky Way stretches up and down the length of the gorge and right across the Southern Hemisphere, slightly obscured by a few pale clouds that are as thin as chiffon. The silence, with the flies and the cat birds and the Port Lincoln parrots and dingoes and Diane and Marge and me closed down for the night, is so great that it hisses in one’s ears. By the time I drop off the Milky Way or the world has swung round so that the galactic circle lies across the gorge instead of up and down it.

Dawn is at six and at six-twenty the flies begin. With the ironwood already embedded in the tyre we set off for our puncture and our meeting with the brumbies.

All through the afternoon we drive through what the itinerary describes as ‘the gas fields’ in the Mereenie Anticline. Natural gas and oil have been discovered here but not in exciting quantities and there is little to show it, no rigs tower against the sky. The road is rust-red gravel, the sandhills are the same colour and so are the anthills which look like rotten old teeth sprouting from the ground. It is an utterly lonely place with the long straight tracks of the prospectors running through it and soon we are lost, not because we are disorientated – the compass and the sun between them are enough to reassure us where north and south lie – but because Diane has never been this way before and the place is a maze of tracks with gibberish signposts on them which no map except an oil company’s map would show. If you follow one of them for five, ten, fifteen miles, you come to a dead end where there is nothing but a pile of rusty drums and a sealed off well behind a mesh fence. We do this several times and become worried, but at last, towards evening, we come out on a bluff above a plain with mixed scrub and mulga and even some grass growing in it and here, on what are the extreme western limits of country that has ever supported cattle, we look across 40 miles of it to the ramparts of the George Gill Range, named by Giles after
his brother-in-law when he discovered it in October 1872, low down on the horizon – so low that once we have descended from this little height the mountains immediately disappear.

As we drive towards them with the sun going down on our right and the beautiful dingoes watching us curiously from all around, they come rising up out of the earth redder and redder as the sun sinks lower and lower until we are close to them and they are blood-red under an apple green sky and lapped by hard, wind-furrowed sand, in which few tussocks of grass grow. In this terrain a Land Rover is as incongruous as a melting watch in an early landscape by Dali.

The Red Canyon runs into the heart of the George Gill Range from the west. No one lays claim to having discovered it, so far as I can find out, which is strange because it is one of the wonders of the world. Its cliffs are sheer and smooth where it narrows, as if they had been cut with a sharp knife, but at the entrance to it, where visitors congregate to see the sun setting on them, they are pock-marked and eroded. We camped at the foot of them among tins and assorted plastic crap that neither moth nor rust can ever corrupt. Then, very early the next day, with the moon in the last quarter and the morning star just below, as if it was hanging from it on a cord and before the flies came on duty, we climbed up into it through a chaos of rocks as big as houses, from which cycads and palms and gums sprout at improbable angles, to the head of the first part. Here, a waterfall pours over a sandstone lip into a pool from a reach of deep water, invisible high above. Flyless, deliciously cool because of the strong wind that blows down it, having swum in the pool and washed off the red dust with which one is habitually covered from head to foot in this part of the world, to me, this place is a paradise on earth. Unfortunately, it is not yet part of any reserve or national parks system, so it can easily become as squalid as the camping site at the foot of it is already.

After some days in the stony, Red Centre of the continent,
where from early morning until late afternoon in the warm weather nothing is worth looking at or even visible, except liquescent or upside down in mirage, Diane becomes obsessed, because she has been entrusted with the job of ensuring that I witness them, of getting me to the dawns and sunsets on time. It is in this spirit of urgency that she whirls me down a vast, featureless avenue fifty miles long into the nothingness in which Ayer’s Rock resides, travelling by way of Reedy Rockhole, Kathleen Spring, Bagot Spring, Farrer Spring, close country, all of it on the north side of the Gill Range, full of gaunt-looking bloodwood trees and screeching, twittering Calan birds with white tops and pink under parts, and Wallara Ranch, where we fill up with beer and petrol and envy the cattle in the shade.

If I have given the impression that there is a dearth of fauna in this part of the world I don’t mean to. Besides red kangaroos and rock wallabies there are euros (hill kangaroos) and fat-tailed marsupial mice and marsupial moles and rats and bandicoots and brush-tailed possums and jerbas and western native cats and several sorts of
Sminthopsis
which is another marsupial and seven different sorts of rodent mice and nine sorts of bat including a mastiff bat, which I don’t like the sound of, and wild cats and wild camels and foxes and 84 different birds including the enormous emu and four different sorts of lizard, legless lizards, skinks and goannas or monitors and 16 different sorts of snake of which three are pythons and the rest fanged, including the desert death adder, the western brown snake and the black-headed snake, the very mention of which is sufficient to make me take off for home. With all this wealth of life one can scarcely be said to be alone in the Centre. One can only hope that they don’t all appear at once.

We have more beer at Curtin Springs – in this weather you do about twenty miles to the can, in high summer according to Diane, if you have enough of it you do about five, and rush on past Mount Corner, a large, flat-topped mountain on the
port hand which is fantastic enough to make the majority of visitors think it is ‘the rock’ and rush off towards it in their motor cars where they promptly lose themselves in the inhospitable bush.

By driving past the ticket office at the real rock without stopping – shouts of ‘oi!’ – and roaring out westwards along the southern side of it, Diane succeeds in getting me to the sunset at the precise moment when it is passing away and the colour is a rather depressing
sangue de boeuf.
I photograph away gloomily, sure that I have failed in my mission (although why should I care – there are enough pictures of Ayer’s Rock in circulation for those who need them to paper the Albert Hall) but months later I am surprised to find that the effects which I have recorded on Ektachrome are as improbable as those recorded by ‘real’ photographers, nothing like those I saw with my own eyes. The same thing happens at sunrise.

The first European to set eyes on the rock was Giles in the course of the same expedition in which he discovered the Glen of Palms; but he didn’t name it. At the time he was more than fifty miles away from it on the north side of Lake Amadeus and he could find no way to cross the lake. It was William Gosse, a young man in the Surveyor General’s Department, who finally reached and named the Rock in 1873, the year after Giles first sighted it, travelling with a party of eight which included three Afghan camel drivers and the indispensable aborigine boy – this one was called Moses. Gosse thought Mount Ayers marvellous, ‘the most wonderful natural feature I have ever seen … a sight worth riding over 85 miles of spinifex sandhills to see’, a camel ride which makes one’s arrival by Land Rover rather shaming.