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  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: [email protected]

  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 veg
etal 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.