My
friends, Neil and David Bell, and I were out on the path of the Kungka kutjara,
a Central Australian travelling songline – one of those epic Central Australian chants
that are meant to have come into being in the Tjukurpa (eternity), or Altjira as the Aranda call it. We were
hoping, perhaps too blithely, to make a radio program about it for ABC Classic
FM.
We
had got some recordings down at Mutitjulu, had just dropped N and B
off at the Loritja camp at Hermannsburg and were heading back towards Alice
Springs. We sang some of the chant as we rattled over the corrugations of the
dirt road, a bit of the song that stuck in our memories – ‘Yulatji luma,
Kunpatji luma...’ – not so much as to ‘bring the country up’ as Bruce Chatwin
observed aboriginal travellers doing, as to make the time go faster.
As
we turned a corner near Ellery Creek we came across a burning car. A Western
Desert man was standing beside the car trying to beat out the flames which had
already spread, quickly in this heat, to the grass by the side of the road.
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| Ellery Gorge, photograph: courtesy Andrew Schultz |
Neil
pulled up and spoke to him. ‘Nyaa palyanin?’ and they had a
conversation. As we pulled away, David, Neil’s son, said, ‘Did he say someone’s
dead down there?’
We
descended to the creek and saw two women stripped to their waists, wailing and
hurling dirt in the air. In the dry creek bed we saw a man cradling another in
his arms.
A
carload of people had been driving from Alice Springs to Kaltukatjara (Docker
River). They’d been drinking. At Ellery Creek they jumped into a waterhole and
this fellow hadn’t come up.
‘How
long has he been like this?’ we asked.
‘Half
an hour’.
Back
at Hermannsburg the police looked as if they’d hurriedly thrown their khaki
uniform shirts over shorts and thongs. It was New Year’s holiday. We took the man’s
body inside the station. Then there were a series of interviews. Neil translated, but there
were still misunderstandings. ‘Name?’ the police asked one interviewee.
‘Stephen Bradshaw,’ he said (I use a fake name). ‘Well, if you’re Stephen
Bradshaw, who’s he?’ they indicated the body bag and opened it. They had
identified the deceased by the cicatrice scars on his shoulder. But
distinguishing Central Australian aboriginal people by scarification on their
shoulders will not get you far.
The
police had to go back out to Ellery Creek and gave David and me a choice: sit outside in the 50 degree (122F)
heat, or in here with the body. We chose the air-conditioning.
We
sat in silence. But I was coming to understand what T.G.H. Strehlow had meant
when he said that nowhere else in the world are death and eternity bound together so tightly as in Central Australia. The eternal myths, such as Kungka kutjara, are present in
the daily lives of living people; death is out-in-the-open and an all-too-frequent
occurrence.
At
the end of the day, after five or six hours of witness statements, I was
standing outside watching the sun set, waiting to finally get back on the road
to Alice Springs. The driver of the Docker River people’s car came over, the
car that I later learnt had been burnt in grief. I said, ‘Not a good way to
spend New Year’s Day.’ He said, ‘Bad day for me.’ I wondered why him in
particular, but was told later that as the driver of the car he could pay for this
in a big way. In the past he might have been speared. How was it his fault? When
the drowned man’s mother had been dropped off at the Loritja camp, the women had come over
and struck her. I don’t know how they’d have known what happened. Something specific in the way she was wailing? But why strike her? These were graphic illustrations of the Central
Australian concept of ‘duty of care’ and ‘tribal responsibility’. Awesome obligations
of reciprocity necessary I suppose in an environment which will kill an
isolated human if they’re not paying attention.
And
all we had wanted to do really was make a radio program about an Australian
form of music. To help Australians gain a bit more insight into the cultural
riches of our land. ABC Classic FM never got that radio program on the Kungka
kutjara, but we certainly got more than we had bargained for.
If you liked this blog, others of mine on Central Australia are:
Carving up the pie, 17 December 2012
Life-changing statements, 16 December 2012
Ah, Nathanael, 29 November 2012
Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow's The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012
Opera in a land of Song, 29 July 2012
Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012
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| GW in 1993 |
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