Another Country

ANOTHER COUNTRY

PRAISE FOR Another Country

This book represents a substantial journalistic inquiry. It deserves to be read because it goes so far beyond the average Australian’s comprehension of their own country.

—MARTIN FLANAGAN, The Age

Subtle, elegant and disciplined.

—NICHOLAS JOSE, Australian Book Review

Rothwell is a stylist of talent … His style seems peculiarly suited to the Territory, a place of grand hopes and failures, full of the sweet bite of nostalgia. His portraits of Aboriginal artists and elders have this same elegiac, haunting tone. He is acutely sensitive to the sadness in Aboriginal art …

—STEPHEN GRAY, The Sydney Morning Herald

Rothwell writes vividly about characters of the Outback and … picks his way deftly through the maze of small-town politics to the big picture of 360-degree horizons.

—TIM LLOYD, The Advertiser (Adelaide)

The astonishing thing about Another Country is not how often Rothwell is defeated by the difficulty of reconciling two radically different ways of seeing, it is how tantalisingly close he comes to pulling it off … To these accounts, Rothwell brings all his considerable descriptive and analytic skills to bear.

—GEORDIE WILLIAMSON, The Australian

Another Country

NICOLAS ROTHWELL

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

Level 5, 289 Flinders Lane

Melbourne Victoria 3000 Australia

email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com

http://www.blackincbooks.com

© Nicolas Rothwell 2007

First published February 2007

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mech anical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Rothwell, Nicolas.

Another country.

ISBN 9781863951272 (pbk.).

1. Rothwell, Nicholas - Travel - Australia, Northern. 2. Rothwell,

Nicholas - Travel - Australia, Central. 3. Art, Aboriginal Australian.

4. Aboriginal Australians - Social life and customs. 5. Australia,

Central - Description and travel. 6. Australia, Northern - Description

and travel. I. Title.

919.4204

Book design: Thomas Deverall

Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Imagined Country

I. PATHFINDERS

The Keeper of the Lore

The Magical Mr Giles

The Black Screen

The Call of the Yidaki

II. THE LURE OF THE NORTH

Capital of the Second Chance

The FCA

Goldsworthy

The House on the Hill

Australia Twice Traversed

The Angels of Annandale

III. IN THE SHADOWS

Meeka

Borderline Justice

Dying Days

Lost for Words

Nowhere To Go

The Perfect Trap

IV. PORTRAITS

Hector Jandany

Rusty Peters

Daisy Andrews

Jukuna Mona Chuguna

Walangkura Napanangka

George Ward Tjungurrayi

Aubrey Tigan

Billy Benn Perrurle

Angelina George

Joan Stokes

V. DREAM PLACES

Warburton

Wingellina

Jirrawun: Beyond the Boab

Jirrawun: Beyond the Frontier

Peppimenarti

Ernabella

Bidyadanga

VI. CRITICAL QUESTIONS

Crossing the Divide

Scams in the Desert

EPILOGUE

Journey to Yankaltjunku

Note on Photography

Acknowledgments

In memory of Arkie Whiteley

PROLOGUE

Imagined Country

ONLY AFTER I HAD LIVED IN northern Australia for several years did I begin to recognise some of the well-buried forces of attraction that had brought me there; and once my mind started to run along these pathways, almost every day I spent in Darwin would reinforce in me the idea that all through our lives we are merely tracing out pathways of deep, subterranean influence, and our thoughts and emotions are little more than the expressions of confused, conflicting, ill-written equations from the past.

When I first decided to move to Darwin, a city I had always found irresistibly appealing, as much for its beauty as for its remoteness from the general run of life, this felt like a decision made in the sun of logic. The deserts and the northern tropics were best reached from Darwin: the city would serve me as a natural base; its charm, in my eyes, lay in its nearness to other things.

Gradually, though, as the seasons cycled round, and the different landscapes of the city became clearer to me, I would find myself struck by certain sights, or scents, or sounds. They would reach into me with a sudden shock, as if I was remembering them from long ago, and there would be a distinct state of mind associated with each of these brief epiphanies.

I remember one afternoon in the build-up season, when the humidity seems to press down on one’s skin from the clouded sky: I was standing on the rock platform at the tip of East Point Reserve. I had walked out there in a vain search for breeze, for motion, for some breath in the stifled air. It was the still point of the tide; the waters of the harbour in front of me were lead- coloured, and calm as glass – and then, as I watched, there was a sharp ripple. Close in front of me, almost close enough to touch, a dolphin broke the surface, its flanks gleaming, like an exclamation mark, a promise inside the heat and silence.

I recall that moment as if it were unfolding before me now; just as I can feel again, with absolute precision, the sense of poise and serenity that came to me one evening, at dusk, when I was driving from the city towards Nightcliff, between the tall stands of grass and the pandanus trees along Dick Ward Drive. The sun was plunging down towards the horizon, casting a forest of shadows across the oncoming procession of cars, while on the far side of the airport, behind the radar dome, shimmering, blood-red through burn-off smoke, the great disc of the full moon began to rise.

And I can also picture myself, exactly as I was, in the darkness of a hot night one mid-December, waking in fear, and joy, when at last the storm-clouds above the city broke, just as they break each year: the thunder peals, the air shudders like the skin of a wounded animal, the sound reverberates and rolls away.

Very soon after I began my northern life I realised that there were certain areas of Darwin that spoke to me with a special immediacy. I spent many weeks exploring the old wharves and boat-sheds, and the mangrove shorelines where derelict foundations from wartime storage dumps or defence posts were rotting away. Much of the town centre was fringed, then, by semi-industrial wastelands: one could still wander through wildernesses full of concrete blocks, straggling vines strewn over fences of half-rusted wire, and twisted sheets of ancient corrugated iron.

Most of all, though, I found myself drawn to the gun emplacements at East Point, which possess a kind of melancholy grandeur. They stand, almost like abstract sculptures, facing out to sea, devoid of their original weaponry, which was, in fact, not installed in time to help defend Darwin when the city was bombed by the Japanese in 1942. Tall trees and enclaves of tropical rainforest surround one of the turrets, shrouding it in a vegetal light, where almost any chain of events seems possible – and it was here, one afternoon, that my thoughts turned to memories of my childhood, when my father, who died long ago, used to tell me the most fragmentary of stories about his days as a young man in Darwin.

He was sent north as a war correspondent in the dying days of World War II, and he flew in many of the long-range bombing raids mounted from the airstrips that line the Stuart Highway. On those missions, some of which lasted for as long as twenty-four hours, he would absorb and note down every impression that came to him, every snatch of conversation the bomber crews exchanged. I have read through his meticulous accounts of these experiences, which were published in the Melbourne Age newspaper: to contemporary readers, they must have seemed little jewels of tranquility and balance, and it would be far beyond me to write of war and danger in such cool and neutral fashion today.

Only now do I come to see how much his days in the Top End affected him, and how deep were the traces they left in his thought. His striking interest in saltwater crocodiles and the most deadly varieties of box jellyfish, his enthusiastic study of new trends in tropical architecture, even the keen way he would interrogate me about the old Darwin aerodrome when I arrived in Sydney on long-haul flights from Europe as a child – all these things stand out for me in fresh light now, as does his near-obsessive fascination with the northern paintings of Ian Fairweather and the photography of Russell Drysdale.

Often, when I walk in that stretch of rainforest near the gun turrets, which he himself enlisted as the backdrop for a pair of fledgling short stories, I feel some echo of his presence lingers there, even if this thought is, on the surface of things, absurd. I think, too, of a scene which I have always found unbearably poignant, in Le Premier Homme, the uncompleted novel by Albert Camus, which was found among the author’s effects after his fatal car crash. The narrator pays a visit to his father’s grave, and realises that he himself is old enough to have been the dead man’s father: a dizzying time and role reversal. And in much the same way, in that green cave of diffused light beside the gun-mount, my own protective feelings towards the dead reach new heights, I imagine the lost can come back to us for a moment, and touch us gently on the shoulder: I feel, as nowhere else, the thickness and the depth of time.

*

The sketches and portraits collected here were written over the past five years, a time of great transformations in my life, when the deserts of the Centre were like schoolrooms to me, and the horizon seemed the most persuasive home. I am still tempted to hold that belief; and to feel, also, that one cannot write with conviction about a country and a continent if one has not travelled and explored its furthest reaches.

But movement, the sheer sense of movement, has a tendency to become its own justification: one must pause, from time to time, and glance back at where one has been. Some of the things I saw and learned in those repeated journeys through the inland and the North are contained in these pieces, many of which were originally published, in slightly different form, in the weekend pages of the Australian newspaper.

There is a dream that afflicts the writer and correspondent staring out across uncharted terrain: the dream of total coverage, a kind of Borgesian dream that one’s words will spread out and relate all the stories, all the nuances of the landscape and every momentary thought and yearning that has ever been felt by those within it.

But there is another way of capturing the country: or being captured by it. It is the way of chance: a life path that is fragmentary, spasmodic, full of erasures and forgettings, of mirages and missed encounters: and that way can often seem, in remote Australia, the most fitting way to advance, as if the landscape were constantly inviting one on, offering its redemptive silence and the austere grace of its indifference. Indeed, one of the images of Northern and Central Australia that most often comes to me is precisely that of a mosaic, a dance of broken, gleaming fragments: the landscape that varies in its unending, subtle rhythms; the human presences within the country that glint and catch the eye like metallic rooftops shining in the late sun.

I have slowly come to believe that a linear way of thinking and imagining yields scant return in remote Australia, and that more rhythmic, reduplicated mental patterns fit better with the deserts and the tropics, with the savannah and the plains of spinifex. If this idea is true, then the best way of experiencing that world through words might be by the written equivalent of a low-level light aircraft journey, when one is constantly swooping down and coming in to land at unusual airstrips, and the eye stares out at new vistas, and gains a fresh sense of how the chaos of conflicting parts all join together, until they seem to form a rich, coherent fabric – a mesh of interwoven country, spread out beneath the splendour of the sky.

I. PATHFINDERS

The Keeper of the Lore

DEEP IN THE STRINGYBARK FORESTS of north-east Arnhem Land lives an old man who knows many worlds. Gawirrin Gumana, presiding genius of the tiny, remote Gangan community, reviews his visitors with clear, assessing, half-amused eyes. He is as familiar with European ways as with the deep traditions of his own Yolngu people. There are few men like him in the increasingly divided and troubled north Australia of today: he is at once a celebrated bark-painter, a Uniting Church minister, an inheritor of ancestral knowledge and a mediator between conflicting realms. His life is both example and enigma of balance; it serves as model for his own extended families and suggestive lesson for the wider world.

But before investigating his journey, which he views as a continuing search for knowledge, before tracing what he learned from his warrior father and his bush childhood, we need to travel beyond the bounds of time, to when all was formlessness in Arnhem Land.

It was then, at Gangan waterhole, a broad sheet of lily-covered river channel, that Barama, the creator-being for much of the Yolngu universe, emerged from below the water’s surface. His body was covered with intricate markings beneath the river weeds and lilies that festooned his flanks. These patterns were the designs that would become sacred ever after for the Yolngu clans.

As Gawirrin tells, and paints, the story, Barama then summoned to him a pair of equally imposing beings, Galparimun and Lanytjung, whom he dispatched across the landscape to meet and make laws for the waiting clans. North went one towards the Arafura Sea, south the other as far as Numbulwar, dispensing languages, territories, rituals, dances. These groups, though, make up only half the Yolngu world: they are the Yirritja people and a mirror of their beliefs is maintained by the various Dhuwa clans.

The interactions of these two elements of Yolngu humanity, who must marry one another and support each other, set in motion the elaborate kinship computer of north-east Arnhem Land – a computer that ticks on today, relentlessly prescribing bonds and responsibilities.

And what of those first law-bringing ambassadors? Lanytjung was slain by tribesmen who feared his height and imposing tread. That same night, re-animated, he returned to Gangan, calling out from across the water: I was dead but now I’m alive again. Whereupon he plunged into the river and took the form of a hollow, submerged log, the outline of which is still visible beneath the ripples at a bend in the channel. His brother-being, meanwhile, in distant Numbulwar, changed himself into a paperbark tree.

Such was the world of constant arithmetical divisions, of balanced forces, that Gawirrin was born into: a stringybark and freshwater-glutted jungle alive with presences and transformations. In its moist atmosphere, crayfish and long-necked turtles were charged totemic beings; the reflecting mists, the sunshine and dry-season smoke shimmer all seemed to speak of ancient powers.

That’s the Gangan story, says Gawirrin, looking out as though he can see the signs of those precursors in the forests round him. That’s why people lived here long ago … that’s why we follow our ancestors by living here now. When I was a boy, we used to travel round, even as far as Groote Eylandt, we’d cross the sea by canoe. The law, though, was always right here – dance, story, painting, they all stem from here, from this river. Gangan, a tranquil, well-kept oasis, stands, then, at the very fount of the Yolngu domain.

It was not always so peaceful. When Gawirrin’s father, the fearsome Birrikitji, was a young man in the early 1920s, he heard reports of clashes at the sacred waterhole between a white over-landing party and members of his Dhalwangu clan. Birrikitji canoed and walked his way in from the coastline and at Gangan found dead bodies, bruised, bullet-marked, the skin rotting away. Crocodiles had taken several corpses. Birrikitji buried the remains and later held a funeral ceremony for the bones at Blue Mud Bay. That story’s not in any of the books, says Gawirrin quietly, but it was part of his legacy when he first began to walk the country, wondering how best to balance Western and Yolngu worlds.

His life’s course could have run much like his father’s, steeped in an increasingly endangered set of traditions, had not fate intervened. In his early teens, Gawirrin was diagnosed with leprosy and immediately dispatched to Darwin, first to the Channel Island leprosarium, then to East Arm Reserve. There he was plunged into a foreign world of surveillance, inspection and treatment. There he stayed, married, learned English, became a Christian, was exposed to the beliefs and logic of a different order. Balance this in your Yolngu way, life seemed to be saying in mocking tones: find if you can the antinomies in this.

From his ordeal, Gawirrin gained something hard to catch in words: he began to see himself, and his culture, from the inside and outside at once. I have three angles now on life, he says with great caution, and I try to make them agree with each other: the Yolngu, the Western and then there is God’s, above all, looking down.

The result has been not just a hybrid belief system but a distinctive life traced out on the membrane between clashing worlds. A decade into his stay in Darwin, the homesickness, the pain of separation, had built up in him: he was painting on bark images of his country. He prayed and pleaded with his doctors. At last they agreed to let him return home, and a few days later he reached Yirrkala mission, at the north-east tip of Arnhem Land. There he discovered that his father was living down the coast.

Abruptly he was restored to his social place as clan leader’s eldest son. In a tumbling rush, the public chapter of his life began. At first he lived with his young family at Yirrkala, where moves were afoot to excise land from the Aboriginal reserve. In response, a group of senior men from different clans produced the two monumental Yirrkala church panels, collaborative works illustrating their people’s beliefs and making a virtual land claim. Without hesitation, Gawirrin clambered into a sea canoe and paddled the 200 kilometres to Numbulwar where his parents were waiting at the wharf, weeping, as was Gawirrin. Welcome back, my son, said Birrikitji. We missed you; we thought we’d lost you forever. The youngest of those Yolngu artists, Gawirrin is the last alive, but the church panels are still in tiny Yirrkala, gleaming with their intricate designs – and for anyone who knows the Gangan creation story, they recall insistently the image of Barama, rising from the waters, his flanks incised with patterns from the Yolngu universe.

Those patterns, though, were under ever greater threat. Geologists were abroad in Arnhem Land, where vast reserves of bauxite had been found; plans were drawn up for a mine. The Yolngu launched a fight for their country, preparing a bark petition (which hangs now, too late, in Federal Parliament). They staged a land rights case at the Supreme Court in Darwin, which failed, although it did pave the way for the age of native title. Gawirrin was one of the interpreters, bridging cultures for the senior Yolngu spokesmen. In 1970, after every avenue of appeal was exhausted, ground was broken for the Gove mining venture.

Gawirrin increasingly came to feel a longing: a wish to leave the Yirrkala coastline and return to his country – and all across north-east Arnhem Land, the mood was similar. A homelands movement saw a score of remote Yolngu settlements established as traditional leaders began to turn back to their origins and pick up the threads of their former lives.

It was then, together with a pair of helpful missionaries, that Gawirrin drove out to find a path into the waterhole at Gangan. I was already a learning artist and a learning Christian. I was becoming a leader of my people because my father had told me he was getting weak. We came right through, making the track in a short-wheel-base Land Rover, and camped up here.

For five years, he and his followers worked with shovels and axes to clear the forest by hand, make the first airstrip and create their new home. Conditions were basic then, as they still are: no generator power, no health clinic, wild buffaloes wandering the lawns at night.

By this stage, Gawirrin’s life path was combining his remote homeland and the outside world. He was a preacher in the Uniting Church and head of an Aboriginal Cultural Foundation. He was travelling with artists and dance troupes to the US and Europe; he went on church missions to Bali and Timor. In the early 1990s, his traditional authority was consolidated, so much so that when the political king of Arnhem Land, Northern Land Council chairman Galarrwuy Yunupingu, needed an expert witness in a court case, it was Gawirrin, the ceremonial leader and speaker of thirteen dialects, to whom he turned.

Here the subtlety of Gawirrin’s path becomes evident: the son and grandson of warriors, stricken by illness and removed from his home, he had been obliged to transform himself into something else. I was still a warrior but not with spears, no, with my speech and tongue – he sticks it out to demonstrate. I’d been painting for a long time, I’d been studying our law and thinking, too, about the English law and the Christian way of living. I was thinking: which direction to go next?

By contrast with the worldly titans of north-east Arnhem Land who won fame young as activists, Gawirrin was almost obscure. But it was in men such as him, the philosophers of culture contact, that different worlds could communicate and touch. I didn’t raise myself high; I was humble in myself. Only last year, that was the first time I ever got noticed.

The cognoscenti, of course, had admired his bark paintings for years and his austere works had quietly found their way into every important national collection, where they would often be displayed alone, radiating a kind of self-possession to the passer-by. In August 2002, a tall, bleak memorial pole of stringybark painted by Gawirrin was chosen as winner of the high-profile Telstra National Aboriginal Art Award. After eccentric choices in previous years, it was a well-calculated selection. The judges described Gawirrin’s work as a defiant cultural and political statement – to wide amusement throughout Arnhem Land, where everything that lives and breathes is automatically imbued with culture and politics.

This prize, though, highlighted for mainstream Australia the central aspect of Gawirrin’s status among his people. Through his life and understanding, the old man at the creation site of Gangan is widely assumed to know special things about our world and the way its elements hold together.

And the nature of that wisdom? Gawirrin allows himself an almost mischievous smile, a punctuating, very Yolngu grunt, even the ghost, for a second, of a laugh as he leans back on the ground: I was always asking myself, how am I going to learn for my people about the Western world? But not only that: how can the people outside learn something about the Yolngu as well? Some Austra lians believe we’ve got no world, no culture – but I think, slowly, people now begin to see we do have culture, law and life. I’ve learned a little about the Western world: we are much like you, we have a system of law. So how can we live together, learn to be with each other more closely, in this one Australia – help each other, understand each other?

A pause as this very Yolngu set of propositions hangs before us. Gawirrin teases out the implications for a while: a future north-east Arnhem Land where his people learn deeply all the Western ways of management, and technology, and housing construction; and where Westerners, as if in requital, acquaint themselves with Yolngu law. An Australia where black and white know their differences yet come together. A whole world, in fact, where comprehension and equipoise replace conflict.

At which point comes a quick, sharp gesture – the sign, in Arnhem Land, that vague preliminaries are done and something’s about to happen. I can go deeper, he says. And deeper. Not because I’m qualified – I didn’t go to school – but I have my own books, in my head and in my life. In the land, he gestures round, "there’s a singer, already singing – but we can’t see her. In the land, and in the sea water and fresh water, there’s a yidaki [Yolngu for didgeridoo] singing, dancing – friendly. The river gives us water, the sea gives us fish and food and strength. Trees are already singing, telling the story of their law; the leaves are dancing or singing, the grass is talking to us with its flowers, nature is telling us a story, talking to us. Because of the trees, and shade, and water, we – black and white – are people with a good life. The trees’ greenery and the green grass, they’re all telling us we have a green heart."

Green?

Yes; we should have a green heart, full of water, full of soil, he says, rather impatiently. I’m talking about the Bible way – and the Yolngu way. But it’s not always green – trees die, leaves fall away. People are going to die in this world. The land’s telling us all these stories, but some people just see the tree and they don’t see its link to all of us.

Its link to all of us? I echo, somewhat startled, for I have been assuming that we are operating in the realms of extended metaphor. You mean everyone? Is the whole world, white and Aboriginal, caught up in the tortuous forests of Arnhem Land?

That’s the law. What the rocks are saying, and the trees, and sand. We should be thinking together, teaching each other. That’s why I’m making my paintings, using human hair and ochre from the rocks, yellow, black and red and white, to give you that message. Why are we still speaking past each other, why can’t we see ourselves as one?

"A