Waves

Winner, Roland Robinson Literary Award.

Deserts hold many stories, but what makes a story true?

This is a true account of what what seemed true to me, and an accurate account of what I was told by others. I do not pretend to speak for my Warlpiri friends. I speak as their fortunate guest. (I now share my time between the lands of the Yaegl people and the lands of the Worimi and Awabakal).

A brief note for readers unfamiliar with my country:

The original owners of the lands now known as “Australia” - the Aboriginal First Nation peoples - have lived here for a time beyond imagination. Archeologists will tell you their latest data indicates a period of 60,000 years - and probably more. My Warlpiri friends simply said - “We always been here, Japangardi” and they have the stories and the songs and the ceremonies to prove it.

Myself, I take their word.

So this is my story, of part of my story with them, when I went to live on their land.

It was a while ago, and I didn’t know much. I don’t claim to know a whole lot now, but I had good Teachers, and I did listen, and I am still working on it. As a nation, we need to do that.

Photo above - women carving wooden “Parraja” baby carriers with traditional adze.

Photo below - where we were…..

And now the story. Come out bush with me. Central Australia. Northern Tanami Desert. It’s a hot hot day here in the middle of nowhere, which is also the centre of everywhere….

Waves

The desert sun is cutting circles in the sky. It is surrounded by circles of light - neat concentric halo rings like ripples in a lake. Like the mullet jumping in Cockle Creek - round wavelets spreading from a leap you never saw, a splash you barely heard; just the water moving out and out and out in search of stillness.

The air is still already, with no sound of a splash, and the sun at the centre so bright you can only steal quick glances, furtively, as if afraid to see what might have just submerged itself in sky.

Jangala looks as if he knows, leaning back against his swag and looking up with eyes accustomed to the light.

"Ngapa coming" is all he says, after a long silence.

"Rain, mayi?"

"Might be," he replies, looking down and returning to work and silence. Then, a full five minutes later, "Might be not," and the silence is back.

Or not quite silence. There’s the slight, uncertain sound of the light breeze fumbling in the dry leaves of the bough shade. There’s the barking of camp dogs, somewhere off in the distance and faintly, just, the intermittent cry of a child. Then there’s the sound that Jangala makes - the steady scrape of steel on wood as he carves a stone hard scrap of mulga wood. His tool is a simple adze. A curved wood handle with a small blade inset in the end, held fast with spinifex resin reinforced by roo tail sinew. He holds it in both hands, leaning forward over the hunting boomerang taking shape in his lap. The red dust smears his dark hands as he works, and catches the light in his hair.

When you arrived here, three years ago, that tendency to silence unnerved you. It wasn’t what you expected as you flew in on the once a week mail plane, though at this distance it’s hard to know what you did expect as you sat in the co-pilot’s seat, watching the limitless plain of spinifex unroll itself below. The land was a quilt of subtle shifts in colour - a patchwork of many shades of green - all light, all dry, all shading into brown, with here and there the darker blotch of black from hunting fires, running haphazardly, like a dark stain spilt upon the land.

Then, at the limit of sight a glint of sun upon tin, coming closer and closer as the plane descended in a shallow glide, resolving itself at last into a cluster of hesitant houses, dusty windmills and rusty water tanks, huddled around an airstrip like frightened dogs about a camp fire, and all around them space.

The small plane landed with a running thump on the gravel strip. The pilot opened his window as he turned and taxied back, the prop blast hurling dust like a sandstorm. Then the engines were cut, the roar ended, the hatch opened and the desert air descended on your life. Now, years later, it’s the smell you remember most. The dry dust smell. The desert air smell. The smell you’ll remember all your life, like a shared secret.

Yet the first secret lay inside yourself, unshared, as you hid like a hermit crab inside the shell of your allocated house for two whole days - cleaning, reading, sleeping - doing anything to avoid admitting that secret to yourself. You were scared of this place. Scared of the light. Scared of the dusty dog strewn street. Scared of a place where the people are black and the language on their tongue a mystery.

So the kardiya came first. The white people. Little delegations of one or two or three knocking politely at your door. The policeman and his wife. The store keeper. Two teachers. The wonderfully titled "Manager of Essential Services." Then, most amazing of all, Mr and Mrs Missionary. You had thought that species extinct but there they were, like unearthed survivors of another age. Genial enough, but antique, misplaced in history, like meeting a pair of diprotodon.

And for two days the secret fed upon itself until, starved of other food, you were forced outside and down to the community store. The great green galvanised iron elephant squatting in the dust, humming to itself with the throb of the cool room compressor - all day, all night, all day ..... and outside the old men and women, surrounded by threadbare dogs and dignity, and inside a shrill of children. They know you already. You are the new kardiya. The new Council man.

‘ello they say. ‘ello ‘ello what your name?

David.

no! they shriek. no! no! that not your name. we call you kumanjayi.

I’m David.

no no. you listen ‘im! your name kumanjayi. what your skin?

I don’t have one yet.

oh, you gotta have skin, you can be Japangardi - like me.

‘ello Japangardi! ‘ello ‘ello ‘ello!

and all the time hands touching, hands pulling, eyes looking.

You spend your days learning the council work. Housing programs, road maintenance, quarterly returns to the Office of Local Government. Learning the people too, not realising that all along they are learning you. Japanangka the Council President - careful, quiet and worried. Watchful. Jangala who runs the road crew. Nakamarra, the young woman who struggles without complaint over tangled numbers and letters written in a language foreign to her. She laughs easily and avoids your eyes, but sits feeding her baby unselfconsciously from a full breast pushed out of the top of her loose dress, forgetting at first to tuck it away afterwards, the large black nipple oozing white milk across her deep brown skin.

Amongst the kardiya, the other white people, you soon find there is conflict. They fall into two camps, each expecting your support. The missionary has been here longest, the policeman tells you. "You should listen to him. He knows what they’re like."

At first you don’t understand who "they" are. He tells you this one evening, over dinner in the police compound - three houses and a police station hunched behind a high, barbed wire fence and hidden away beyond the airstrip. He tells you as well to be careful with Jungarrayi, the Police Aide. "He says you’re helping him with ‘is English - working on ‘is day book. That right? yeah... that’s good, but just watch what he writes, you know? Those young blokes give us the run around a bit. Sometimes we have to teach ‘em a lesson, get a bit physical. Wouldn’t want it in the day book, you know?" … and by now you think you do.

The mechanic’s with the police. So is the old store keeper. "You can’t trust ‘em. The girls I got working here are‘orright, but you still can’t trust ‘em. Saw you out collecting fire wood with ‘em yesterday. Shouldn’t do that. They’ll get to expect it. Like them stupid fuckin’ chalkies. Only makes trouble."

The teacher linguist laughs when you tell her. "Yeah well, he reckons we caused him trouble. We had the trainee Yapa teachers doing research. Thought a good project would be to compare prices at community stores around the centre. Trouble was, they don’t even mark the prices here. He got pretty upset when we asked."

In those first few months you are welcome in both camps. You even try not to get involved, not knowing it’s inevitable, eventually, but it gives you time to discover that under all the differences, and despite them, there is one thing which unites the two sides - one single issue on which they all agree. A strange thing, a peripheral thing - beyond the politics of race. They all agree that one night, there in the desert, it rained fish.

You look out the window instinctively, at the tattered plastic bags caught on the police compound wire and the sharp dry spinifex sea beyond.

"Yeah, true mate. You better believe it. Woke up in the morning with the rain gone and there they were - all over the fucken place - little silver fucken fish. I stuck a couple in a jar of water but they were dead already."

The Principal confirms the tale. "Oh yes," she says, looking up at the empty sky. "They were everywhere. The kids collected them and had fish fights, then the camp dogs ate the scraps."

All the kardiya agree that it happened, and they all show a childlike amazement which briefly transcends their differences, though the policeman gives you a blank stare when you ask if it rained loaves as well.

Only the Yapa seem unsurprised. Jangala doesn’t even seem inclined to answer at first. He leans back against the wheel of the grader, as if looking for a more comfortable position. "Yuwayi. ‘ee was fish alright," he finally admits. Then he tells you the road crew has knocked off for sorry business.

"But we haven’t finished the contract yet Jangala."

"Yuwayi. Sorry business Japangardi."

"But the road’s not done!"

"Sorry business like that," says Jangala, walking off himself.

Sorry business, and some days it seems a sorry business, this trying to understand another country while missing your own. Missing the mist on the lake in the morning. Missing the gut deep pull of a fish hooked at dawn, your Father beside you laughing at your surprise. This is a place where the language has no word for mist, where lakes are dry salt sheets and fish fall dead from the sky.

"Might be you go to Alyekarenge some time Japangardi. ‘im rain frogs there," says the Council President, Japanangka, smiling faintly.

"Junga?"

"True," he says, "frogs," then he leaves on sorry business too, and there you are alone, in an office empty of people and full of pointless papers; just a single scruffy dog curled up beneath the desk.

After a while the women come, wailing as they walk. The crying grows and grows as they approach, sweeping the dry brown dust with fresh green leaves from a tree. You are at the window, hidden by the interior gloom, watching them come down the street. Their cry is wordless, beyond words, not seeming to match the voices you have come to know. Blood from sorry cuts stains them. One woman still holds a rock, blood smeared, hitting herself on the skull as if in time to the ebb and flow of their cry. She has lost her son.

"They don’t mean it you know." Says Mrs mechanic that afternoon outside the store. "It’s just an act. They really don’t feel things the same way as us. I mean they can’t can they, not like us..." and it’s a statement, not a question she ends with, as she loads the shopping into her clean white four-wheel drive and cruises the 100 metres home.

Meanwhile your own questions grow rather than diminish. Some nights, when the air is still, you hear the singing from the scrub beyond top camp. It comes and goes, swells and fades with the light breeze, like breathing. You notice in the morning the ochre patterns of white and red fading into the dark skin of Nakamarra’s arm and running upward to disappear beneath her sleeves.

She says nothing, and you know you can’t ask, but at Christmas when most of the kardiya have gone away on holiday Jangala takes you to business camp - "so you can understand ‘im. Yapa way," and you go, and you stay there, all day and all night.

And it’s up over forty Celsius - the sun like a sledgehammer. Even the Yapa sit quietly when they can, in the warm shadow of the bough shades. They sing, they talk or sit silently. They paint delicate lines on dusty skin from chewed sticks dipped in old corned beef tins. Ochre mixed with goanna fat mixed with sun. Dust devils whip into life and as suddenly die. An old dog lies down in the dust by your feet, digging a shallow scrape in the sand, and he’s still there at dusk when the sun sets, the earth seems to sigh, the fires are lit, the stars paint the sky....

By morning the dog, you discover, is dead, and you still don’t understand why. Only, somewhere deep inside yourself, you realise that the understanding is less important than the acceptance.

You think of that when you are back in the soft country, the cooler country, the place of water. You have been there a month and the desert seems as far away as it is, and the Yapa even further, and you think of all the definite statements you have lost, all the things unlearnt, all the words you no longer remember. It has all been one long giving away.

A breeze whips down the creek on that grey Autumn day and chills, like the draught of Winter sucked beneath the door of April, warning of cold days to come. It blows against the inrush tide, raising sleek ripples on the water. Rubbed by wind the wrong way the hackles rise on the catsback creek. You can seek the truth here, and maybe find it too - hidden in the dark mud sediments from the lead smelter, or the silver cloudface sheen smeared wide across the water, like new roof paint on old iron.

A single shining fish jumps, high and electric in that brief leap into light, but you don’t see it. You have already turned. You are already returning to the desert, leaving a place no longer home, leaving one love for another.

And now the desert sun is carving circles in your life, as surely as Jangala carves the wood. Neat concentric halo rings like ripples in the lake. Like the anchor of your Father’s boat dropped overboard and disappeared in green. Like the mullet jumping in Cockle Creek - round wavelets spreading from a leap you never saw, a splash you barely heard. Just the water moving out and out and out in search of stillness.

So, you lie back on the sand, looking up through half closed eyes at a sun surrounded by circles of light. You know what it is. You know it’s the light catching on ice crystals - a high thin haze of ice in the upper reaches of the air. But maybe, just, it could be something else? Maybe it’s fish after all - the light of the sun reflecting from the iridescent scales of countless tiny fish, just waiting their chance to fall.

Jarnami - desert scenes. Landscape and bough shade.

If you would like two other (much briefer) views of my life in this place, please do read:

Junga Yimi ; Lajamanu Morning and Japanangka’s Dog