|
Expedition to Docker River For Wayne and Dave Rain clouds hovered over the Rock and swathed the Olgas as we turned west down the dirt road to Docker River, an Aboriginal community in the Petermann Ranges. I had seen Uluru before against the more usual cloudless blue sky and, as a tourist, albeit in a small, unhurried bus, had found my visit to the great desert park a rather dry and barren experience. Something was missing, as I think it is for many overseas visitors, who come to Uluru naively hoping that Aboriginal wise men will give them the key to some higher spirituality. Instead, they find themselves shepherded by well-meaning people who are afraid they will see the degradation into which some modern Aboriginal people have fallen. It was the same in the old Soviet Union. Tourists saw Red Square and the Kremlin through the bubble of their Intourist buses lest, heaven forbid, they made contact with Russians who told them what life in the suburbs and provinces was really like. I spent 15 years, peeling the onion, trying to penetrate to the “truth” about the “real” Russia. Would it take me as long to understand something of the condition of Aboriginal people today? Fortunately, I had good guides, Wayne Anthoney and Dave Oakes, managers with the Nyangatjatjara Aboriginal Corporation, two white fellas who are caring but not politically correct. They were taking me to see the “camel project”, a fledgling venture intended to enable the unemployed young men of Docker River to earn a living by catching feral camels and selling their meat to Muslim countries such as Malaysia. The vast majority of people in Aboriginal communities across Australia are unemployed. Some of them may find it easier than diary-driven, endlessly busy white people to “just be” but others are bored. With no way back to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of past centuries and apparently no way forward into predominantly white mainstream society, some turn to substance abuse, such as petrol sniffing. Aboriginal elders feel embarrassed about this but it is no more shameful than the tragedy of white people addicted to hard drugs in the cities. At Docker River, the camel project offers hope of health and wealth for the 300-strong community. As we vibrated in our land cruiser down the rutted, rusty-red road, past “Bananarama”, where Dave usually stops to eat a banana under his favourite desert oak tree, we saw a couple of camels, wandering in the dunes. Dave said they were two of an estimated population of 70,000 camels, the descendants of the beasts of burden that the Afghans released into the wild after the building of the railways. The idea was that the lads from Docker would round some of them up, keep them in a stockade until they became used to the presence of humans and then, when they were calm enough, transport them live to the markets where camel meat is appreciated. Another possibility was that tourists, willing to go the extra mile for deeper understanding, could be attracted to take camel rides in the foothills of the Petermann Ranges. The Indigenous men of the area would be good at handling camels, Dave said, because their fathers and grandfathers had worked as drovers and stockmen for white cattle station owners. After what was for tribal Aborigines the catastrophe of white settlement, the period when black men were cowboys was a time of relative fulfilment. But it came to an end when the law demanded equal pay for all workers and the cattle station owners discharged their Aboriginal employees to empty lives on often artificially-created communities. Communities like Docker, where there is one general store, a primary school, an old people’s home and a small Lutheran church set down in the middle of nowhere, albeit a mountainous nowhere of stunning beauty. To reach Docker River or Kaltukatjara to give it its proper Aboriginal name, we had to cross six, usually-dry rivers – Karu Nyitayira, Tjitjingati, Muwa, Puta Puta, Tjunti and Kaltukatjara itself. We kept an eye out for more camels but in retrospect, we should have attached greater significance to the flight of three ducks just in front of our vehicle. These ducks were trying to tell us something. It
was already raining quite heavily when we reached the half-built camel
stockade that stands on the edge of Docker, waiting for more funding,
and we did not At the Docker River campus of Nyangatjatjara College, a secondary school based at Uluru, we picked up Sam Sailor, a teacher originally from the Torres Strait Islands, Clive Shaw, a local man working as a teaching assistant, and three boys, Frederick, Peter and Sandy. They were going to lead us up the mountains to Walka Cave, where they said there was rock art. Now in a convoy of two land cruisers, we set off up a steep, bumpy track where silver puddles were beginning to collect on the red earth. “Shall we risk it?” asked Sam. “Oh yes, let’s go for it,” I said, not seeing any particular danger. We
reached the cave in pouring rain. It stank of bat shit but the ochre “Better head back,” said Sam. The rain was coming down in sheets. As we turned the vehicles, we saw that the track up which we had come had changed into a bubbling stream. In front of us, across our path, a river, dry 30 minutes earlier, had become a raging torrent. If we tried to cross it, we could be swept away. We turned the cars again, hoping to find another road home and it was at this point that “Desert Oakes” bogged our vehicle in some soaking sand. “Oh shit, now we’re up a creek without a poodle,” he said with his characteristic Scouse humour. In the other land cruiser, Sam, Clive and the boys still had mobility although they were in the middle of the stream that continued to rise. Only after much pulling on ropes that kept snapping did they manage to drag us out of the sand and we drove back up the track to some high ground, where we parked. Mentally, I prepared myself. I am a lady who likes to go with the flow and suddenly, here we were trapped by the flow. Our lives were not in any immediate danger – we had enough water, God knew -- but there was a possibility that we could be stuck for a week or more. At the very least, it looked as if we were in for a night confined in the cars. Between the three of us, Dave, Wayne and I had one hard-boiled egg, two tomatoes and a peach. Our inner resources were rich. Dave had his endless Liverpool laughter while I had my repertoire of 2,976 Russian jokes. I told one about a poor man whose friends were surprised to see him eating caviar sandwiches. “That’s not caviar, it’s sardines’ eyes” went the blackly humorous punch-line. In anticipation of the other 2,975 jokes, Wayne went into self-defence mode and promptly fell asleep. “He can sleep on a clothes line, without a peg,” commented Oakes. Presumably, Sam, Clive and the lads in the other car were having just as much fun. And then, as quickly as it came, the rain stopped. Sam announced that he had walked down to the river and found that the flood had eased to the extent that he could wade across. We got the vehicles over. Further
down the road, we had to stop before another torrent but now I knew By tea time, we were safely back at Docker River. As we prepared to leave the community for the return journey to Uluru, Clive grinned at me through his gap-teeth -- it is customary for Aboriginal youths to have one front tooth knocked out at initiation -- and asked: “How did you like the flood?” I had to admit that I had never seen anything like it in my life and was deeply impressed by the competence of the Aboriginal people who guided us through this wet adventure. Back at Uluru, it was raining on the Rock. Waterfalls ran down the liver-coloured surface of the monolith, a rare sight I was most privileged to see. I went to thank Charlie Walkabout, chairman of the Nyangatjatjara Aboriginal Corporation, who lives in Mutitjulu community in the shadow of the Rock, for permission to walk on his people’s traditional lands. I felt satisfied that at last I had had an authentic experience and released from the need to try and grasp any more with my Western mind. If I, a so-called “expert” on Russia, still knew nothing of that country after 15 years, how could I hope, in my remaining life-time, to understand the eternal world of the Aboriginals? Let it remain a mystery. On the way home to Alice Springs, Dave Oakes played a tape of himself singing one of his songs. Its haunting refrain will always remind me of my friends in Australia: “I
look ahead to seeing you, you’re just a week away And
like so many times before I’ll
want that time to stay for more And
yet before we know it, we’ll be saying our goodbye Time
will have come and gone To
be seen through memory’s eyes, on and on Time
has no time, time’s passing through No-one
can hold it, it’s always anew That
was a time, a memory of you Under
the starlight, beneath Uluru”
|
linger
as long as we might have done over the well-crafted fencing of strong
desert oak. In Docker itself, we ate hot pies from the general store,
surrounded by bony camp dogs which definitely were hungry even if press
reports of starvation among local children were inaccurate and offended
the community. The settlement looked littered and shabby but no worse
than countless depressed villages I have seen in rural Russia.
paintings
were luminous. The boys ate oranges.
that
it would only be a matter of an hour or so before that river also
subsided. Such is the nature of flash floods. In the meanwhile, I went
walking in a meadow of wild flowers – white, yellow, pink, orange and
purple – while the boys splashed in the water and ran in the bush,
absolutely at home in this wild environment.