Another Country Read online

  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 very Christian thing to say.”

  “A Yolngu thing to say – we are two people but one God made us.”

  “And do you ever see him?”

  “Who? God? I pray to God. I saw Barama in a d
ream once.”

  And he goes on with the story, how he was fast asleep and seemed to rise, and his eyes opened on a tall man before him. “Who are you?” he asked, and the grand, gleaming figure answered: “You know me; you think about me all the time!” “Oh yes,” said Gawirrin, “my father told me all about you.” And a violent joy burst through his heart.

  Days later, the close of our visit drew near. There had been gleeful tales of contact times when Gawirrin’s father had roamed the bays and islands, outwitting warriors and white men alike; we’d discussed the anthropologists and Western intellectuals who passed in and out of Yolngu life. There was something, though, that we still had to see with our own eyes.

  In mid-afternoon, one of Gawirrin’s relatives drove us in an old troop-carrier at breakneck speed a long way through winding corridors of stringybark. At last we reached one of the sacred waterholes. Before us, stretching away, were pandanus stands, lily flowers, high overhanging river gums.

  Enlivened, smiling, Gawirrin jumped out and began striding up and down the bank beside me, explaining just where we were – in terms, at least, of the first creation journeys. “This place here,” he said in a soft voice, almost whispering, “right here is where Lanytjung was calling out when he came back from the dead. Over there, at that bend in the river where the water’s broken, that’s where he lies now, under the surface. In the land there are different laws. Here too: freshwater seaweed law, waterlily law, everything.

  “See?” he breathed. “Beautiful country for those old ceremony men. A special place.” As we stood silent beside him, it felt like Jerusalem as much as Arnhem Land.

  We turned to go. A rain shower began. The drops fell in sharp, slant lines behind Gawirrin; they struck the water and sent their arcs and ripples out. Angles, circles, diamonds; the sheen, the dance, the glow of light – until the pattern was complete and, for a split second, we were standing inside Gawirrin’s bark-painted world.

  The Magical Mr Giles

  “BACK!” I STRETCH OUT OBEDIENTLY on the concrete, and close my eyes. A pause, and then a shock. Pain, as if a thin blade has slid into my flank; pain, and something more – a soft, tender tickling; the pressure of a pair of lips, touching my side, poised above my liver, kissing, sucking; two rows of teeth scraping back and forth on the surface of my skin. How austere it feels; how intimate!

  It stops. I lie still for several moments more, then half-open my eyes. Looming over me, his profile framed by the red disc of the setting sun, is Jacky Giles, the foremost traditional doctor of the Gibson Desert, his lips and white beard bloodstained, a look of ecstatic concentration on his face. He leans across, reaches for a stray piece of cardboard, grimaces, then spits onto it a large blob of bright-red blood, in the midst of which, I notice with some alarm, is floating a distinctly diseased-looking morsel of tissue. “Better now,” Mr Giles says grimly, and turns away.

  After some time I get up and wander unsteadily into the dusk falling over the Clutterbuck Hills, towards the nearby houses of the Patjarr community. I feel light-headed, clear-sighted, vaguely drugged.

  For several hours, I find myself brushing against people, bumping into things, losing my balance, not quite able to talk or think. Around midnight, after inspecting my side, on which a large, red weal is now becoming visible, I fall into my swag and sleep a dreamless sleep.

  The practice of the Western Desert medicine men, or Maparn- jarra, who appear to suck blood, sticks and stones from the bodies of their patients, is well enough known in the wider world. There are traditional healers – variously described as witchdoctors, sorcerers or magic men – right across the Aboriginal domain, from the Kimberley to Arnhem Land. In the deserts, where the tradition remains particularly strong, they are called Ngangkari by the people around Alice Springs and in the Pitjantjatjara lands stretching south of Uluru.

  The institution and the skills and methods of the healer have been probed in detail in various classics of Australian anthropology. The desert doctors, their telepathic powers, their “casting away of badness” are explored in author A.P. Elkin’s seriously weird Aboriginal Men of High Degree, while Pallottine Father Antony Peile’s Body and Soul argues that the tribal healer is the link and mediator between the beings of the Dreamtime and today’s material surrounds.

  The basics of the traditional doctor’s technique are also clearly defined. In the Gibson Desert of Western Australia, where the 2,000 people of the Ngaanyatjarra language group live, illness is thought to stem from human action. To make someone sick, you take a purnu, which is a sharp wood sliver, herringbone-patterned, place it in a circle, spit on it and sing, perhaps after first swallowing some rancid goanna fat to enhance the effect of the spitting. After an interval, the purnu has moved from its circle and is ready for use; you then fire it like a dart at the victim. It is these slivers that the Maparnjarra can get out of the body, as well as being able to suck out congealed, distempered blood.

  The skill that allows a healer to extract such objects, without even seeming to break the surface of the flesh, is hard-won and much respected in today’s desert society. For, of course, someone who can take the purnu out can also put them in. Hence, as is repeatedly stressed, you should always be careful to stay on good terms with a doctor man.

  All of this is vaguely understood by the Western nurses and community advisers who help keep Aboriginal Central Australia ticking along. Few outsiders, however, tend to inquire much about the special world of the Maparnjarra – an intense, terrifying realm, of ordeal and insight, of test and transfiguration, which is spoken of by tribal people in whispers, and which gives the medicine men their fame and authority.

  Mr Giles’s own life story, recounted through various translated interviews, helps illustrate this strange and remarkable tradition, of which he is the chief exponent in the Western Desert region.

  He was born about sixty years ago at Tjamu Tjamu, a kangaroo dreaming site near Kiwirrkurra, just west of the Northern Territory border, in the heart of the Great Sandy Desert. In this country, far from Western contact, he was raised by his family to the nomadic life. His father, also a Maparnjarra, saw the gift in him, and passed on the power – for Maparn, spiritual insight and strength, is a kind of substance that has to be implanted in the body through elaborate rituals.

  “I was walking all over the country in those days,” says Mr Giles, “when my mother and father were still alive. I walked all the way south, to the ranges near Docker River, and climbed right over them. I remember coming to Warburton mission when there were no houses there, and when people still travelled through the desert by camel.”

  Warburton, in fact, was to be an important place for him, for on a visit to one of the outlying ration stations, while still a young man, he met and fell in love with the entrancingly beautiful Norma. “Ah, lovely,” Mr Giles says, remembering those days, though whether he is sighing for the thrill of the recollected emotion or the excitement of the spear-fights in which he vanquished all his rival suitors is not quite clear.

  “I wasn’t worried about marrying a Maparnjarra,” says Norma today. “That’s just who he was.”

  Becoming a healer of high degree is, as Mr Giles puts it, “not fun and games”. The first changes involve vision. You are given the ability to see at night, to receive charged dreams, to roam free in thought. Whole new orders of spirit beings become manifest. Other Maparnjarra from the Gibson speak of stepping into a separate universe and, though they are guarded in what they say, it is clear the experience has much in common with the tales of shaman figures and magicians from other cultures: the forehead and the kidneys are opened, and a power is placed in them; a third eye becomes active, and suddenly spirits and auras and even curses are visible, drifting, disappearing, flying along.

  “I began having dreams, seeing beings,” says one Maparnjarra who chose to relinquish his powers and follow, instead, Christian ways. “Everything opened up, like a mirror, or a movie.”

  At the heart of this experience is the noti
on that the healer dies and is reborn, with a new set of exquisitely powerful sensory organs in his body.

  This is a lonely road, and Mr Giles, despite being a member of a strongly communal group, seems somehow set apart, for he lives at once on multiple levels of reality. “I don’t just see the way you do,” he explains. “I can see the person who dies. I can see inside your body, what you’ve got. When the Maparnjarra starts to look at people, the sick part of them starts to feel like it’s burning. If you have a stone in your heart, or hole in your heart, I can see it. I can see your spirit a long way away. When the body gets sick, the spirit gets sick.”

  In his treatments, Mr Giles employs other unusual attributes. A kind of vibrating meter in the crook of his elbow, which he describes as being like a “clock”, tells him how strong his powers are; he checks it repeatedly while examining a patient. He has a force-field in his palms, and the knuckle of his fourth finger detects the presence of spirits – in much the way the knuckle, in some yogic disciplines, can “catch” the body’s aura.

  Mr Giles is almost as much a spirit as a person. As is well known across the Gibson Desert, his powers have grown through dreadful struggles in the hidden world. Once, when still young, he went into a cave and “evil devils” inside closed the entrance in a bid to trap him. Mr Giles escaped by “going through the wall, the hard rocks”. After this, he retreated into the depths of the desert and, to regain his strength, buried himself beneath a sand dune.

  Dimensions other Aboriginal people fear, but rarely see, are perpetually visible to him: he sees, for instance, the yarrkayi, a whole population of invisible men who often maraud through the night. The greatest feat of the magic man, the ability to project his body through space, Mr Giles often achieves by sending proxies: two small boys who travel on his behalf, flying like eagles, holding on all the while to a long string, something like an infinite telephone wire.