This is one of the reasons why ochre is not only sacred but also dangerous. Red ochre is an integral part of the initiation ceremony of young boys when they become men. In north-east Arnhemland, for example, novices are smeared with ochre in sacred clan patterns on their chests, with white clay masks on their faces. The paint is part of the secret of initiation—and perhaps it is even the secret itself. Many people have speculated on the significance of this red earth—and anthropologists have tended to focus on the symbolism of red as representing men’s blood (meaning death), or women’s menstrual blood (signifying, perhaps, the potential for giving birth). But there is an alternative theory, a curious one: that the iron in red ochre somehow acted as a kind of magnet, to show Ancestors and Aboriginal people the way along sacred paths.15 When I first heard this I dismissed it as New Age confusion, but then later I heard something new about red ochre—something that did not change my mind, but left it a little more open.
I learned that scientists in Italy have found a new technique for dating frescos almost to the year they were painted, simply by examining the red paint. “Red ochre contains iron, and the iron molecules act like compass needles,” explained Professor Giacomo Chiari of the Department of Minerological and Petrological Sciences at the University of Turin. He said that in the few minutes between daubing red ochre onto wet clay, and the time it dries, the molecules realign themselves toward the direction of magnetic north. “And if you don’t move the walls then that is how they stay,” Professor Chiari said. Magnetic north changes every year—it can fluctuate over a range of 18 degrees, so you can learn when the fresco was painted from the direction in which the red ochre is pointing. This can lead to curious artistic discoveries: at the Vatican Library, for example, there were three frescos which were believed to have been painted in 1585, 1621 and 1660. The Turin scientists took tiny samples from the borders to see whether they could test their theory. “We couldn’t understand the results. All the ochre was pointing the same way and it wasn’t in any of the ways we were expecting,” Professor Chiari said. And then they did more tests and realized the truth: the frescos were original, but all the borders had been repainted in 1870. Magnetic north is very erratic, though, Professor Chiari added. “So we can do it both ways: we sometimes use frescos—if we know when they were painted—to tell us where magnetic north was that year.”
He was not aware of the technique being used to date bodies that had been painted in red ochre—as has been a funerary custom in Australia, Africa, America and Europe for thousands of years. Partly because nobody could be sure whether the body had been moved after the ochre had dried and partly because the burials had happened too far in the past. “You can’t go too far back because we don’t know so much about magnetic north thousands of years ago.”
Roqué said there was no way I would learn about red ochre in ceremonies: “it’s forbidden for anyone to talk about it,” and he told me how it was far harder to learn about Aboriginal traditions in the 2000s than it was in the 1930s—not simply because there are few men and women who remember them, but also because there is a deliberate move toward hiding information in order to protect it. His sister was working on a project to put anthropological works about Aboriginal ceremonies into special places in libraries, where readers had to apply for permission to read them. But there were still plenty of other uses of ochre that I could see, he said. If I wanted to know about ochre in culture I should go to the Tiwi Islands. And if I wanted to know about ochre in art I had to go to Kakadu, on the edge of Arnhemland. “It’s the biggest art gallery in the world.”
OCHRE INCEST TABOOS
The Tiwi Islands are just twenty minutes’ flight across the Apsley Strait from Darwin, but when you first arrive at Bathurst air strip it seems as if you are in another country. Not Australia at all. The language is Tiwi, and the children at least scarcely speak any English. The people are represented by sixteen councillors who meet at the Tiwi White House to oversee the running of the islands. Although they like to keep themselves separate from the rest of Australia, some years ago the Council voted to allow a maximum of a dozen tourists a day, so that outsiders could understand their culture.
On the surface the Tiwi people have an idyllic island existence. Plenty of sunshine, bright shirts, pretty painted buildings surrounded by palms, lots of artists working in big bright art centers and everything fringed by immaculate beaches. But on other levels the islanders not only have to contend with some of the alcohol problems that threaten so many Aboriginal communities, they also have some of the most rigorously prescribed ways of social organization I have ever encountered.
The problem stems from the demographics. There are only 1,400 people on the two islands of Melville and Bathurst, and for many years they believed they were the only people in the world. So they developed strict ways of preventing intermarriage. And those ways have remained. There are no mixed schools on the island. Not for education theory reasons, but because sisters and brothers cannot even look at each other, let alone speak. Our guide, Richard Tungatulum—one of the councillors of Tiwi—related an anecdote of a man who arrived at the tiny field hospital one day in tremendous pain. The doctor was out, but instead of helping the patient the nurse went to make herself a cup of tea. “She had to,” said Richard. “She was his sister.”
Everyone is born as one of four moieties. You can be a sun, a stone, a mullet fish or a pandanus palm. If you are a sun then you can marry neither sun nor stone: your husband or wife must be either a mullet or a pandanus. 16 The Tiwi world is made up of four symbolic ochre colors—and each moiety is represented by one of them: sun is red, stone is black, pandanus is white and mullet is yellow. Red and black marry only white and yellow: the “strong” colors always marry the “gentle” ones.
Despite some of the best attempts by some of the worst missionaries, 17 Tiwi beliefs have survived alongside the biblical ones. The Tiwi Dreamtime story involves a blind woman bursting through the earth with her three babies in her arms and crawling over the dark and featureless land, 18 shaping its topography. Her daughter grows up to become the sun and marry the moon. And in the mornings the sun paints her body with red ochre to please her husband, and then when she reaches the western horizon at the end of the day she powders herself with yellow so she is beautiful for her night journey through the underworld.
In the past, there was no trade with the mainland so all the ochres came from the islands. The best white paints tend to be from One Tree Point and the yellows are from Cape Fourcray, and collecting them—in the days before four-wheel-drives—used to require a full-scale expedition. There are some natural reds, but they are rare, and most of the ordinary red paints are made by cooking the yellows. This is one extraordinary characteristic of this iron-oxide paint: heating the yellow ochre makes it turn red through a process called calcining. It is not a good enough red for the most sacred uses (it is not shiny enough), but it is valued for ordinary painting. And in Europe too, calcining is so common that some paints have two names because of it. Sienna is matched by the redder “burnt sienna,” while in the eighteenth century Dutch paint-makers used to buy yellow ochre in France, heat it, and sell it as English Red.19
I was introduced to four women who explained some of the more exotic aspects of Tiwi culture. There are twenty-two different dances, and each person inherits one. There is, for example, a crocodile dance and a mosquito dance; there is even one for a battleship. I asked a woman called Doreen Tipiloura what her dance was. “My great-great-uncle saw a train once, on the mainland,” she said. “So I dance train.”
Each person also has their own face painting, according to what their Dreaming is, and they demonstrated the patterns for us by painting their own faces. Would it be possible to paint my face with ochre? I wondered. So Ruth Kerinauia gamely painted her Little Sheep Big Sheep totem on my cheeks and forehead—candy stripes above the eyes and beneath the chin, then smaller stripy lines along my cheekbones. It was only later—when I saw a photograph—tha
t I realized she had altered the colors into a kind of tonal mirror image of her own painting. Where she painted white on her own face, she painted black on mine: where she had yellow looking luminous on her black skin, I had red looking luminous on mine. It was as if some of the lines and tonal contrasts were particularly important in the design, so she needed to paint them in a way that highlighted them. Caucasian people, incidentally, are not called “white” but “red” in Tiwi language. I was a moretani: a “hot red face,” although they didn’t call me that to my hot red face.
Ochre was also used on what are called “pokemani” poles. A death on Tiwi is mourned for a long time. For the first month after a close family member dies you literally cannot lift a hand and other people have to feed you like a baby. The name of the deceased cannot be mentioned for an agreed amount of time— sometimes years—which only ends when a ceremony is held in which the dead person’s belongings are buried, and the family erects a series of slim painted poles to mark the place. Usually visitors cannot see these poles, but we were led to a quiet place in the forest, where the possessions of one of Richard’s friends lay buried. He had died of a heart attack while playing football, when he was just thirty years old. He had been the first Tiwi tour guide and his family decided he would have liked his grave to be a place where strangers could learn more about the culture he was so proud of.
The poles are like an obituary, if you know how to read them. Richard’s friend was a sun moiety so there was a predominance of red in the designs. And the patterns each showed something about the dead person’s life. “The dots are people and the lines are pathways,” Richard explained. “And what are these strange shapes?” someone asked, pointing to big yellow ovals on one of the poles. “Those? Oh, those are Aussie Rules footballs.”
THE EDGES OF ARNHEMLAND
Roqué had told me that if I wanted to see ochre in ancient art, I had to go to Arnhemland. And two days later I found myself at its fringes. Kakadu is the section of western Arnhemland that has been opened up to visitors, as part of a national park. The rest— everything to the east of the East Alligator River—is open only to residents and permit holders. Yet I was lucky. On my first night there was a one-off theatre performance—a collaboration between the people who lived in the settlement of Oenpelli and the Stalker Stilt Company from Perth. Crying Baby was a highlight of the Festival of Darwin, and was performed under the stars. It was the only theater show that I have been to that has been dependent on river tides, with the extra frisson that if you were caught in the middle you might get eaten alive—not by alligators, though: the river was wrongly named and the huge reptiles that skulk around this fast-running river are actually crocodiles, but no less fierce for that. “Man got eaten last year,” a ranger said cheerfully, when we were waiting to cross into what one of the white theatergoers gleefully called “the forbidden land.”
The play was based on the personal history of a storyteller called Thompson Yulidjirri, whose family members were removed from their homes by missionaries and taken to Goulburn Island, mixed up with the Dreaming story of a Crying Child, whose parents did not look after it, their lack of care resulting in the Rainbow Serpent taking its revenge. The story was chosen to highlight some of the problems of so many settlements throughout Australia, where alcoholism is rife, and children can too often be abandoned. In the audience Old Bill Neidje—one of the respected elders of Oenpelli—was sitting in a wheelchair. When Neidje was a child the missionaries gave him and his family white flour. They didn’t know what it was and they used it as body paint. “You’re wasting food,” the missionaries told them, laughing, before introducing them to the mysteries of damper—a flour-and-water glue that is cooked over a fire into an unleavened bread. But the Aboriginals would have been wise to have stuck to the body paint theory. Their new diet of wheat and sugar was the first step on a journey toward diabetes and dialysis. 20
At the end of the play I went to talk to Thompson and his fellow elders. They were daubed in white ochre, and said they would be happy to talk about their use of the pigment. We could talk now, they said, or I could go to Oenpelli to see them. But now was impossible—the Alligator tides were turning and we would soon be unable to return to Kakadu—and the next day I learned that, invitation or not, it would probably take at least ten days to get a permit. I thought I could just make it, I said, filling in the form. “That’s ten working days,” said the white administrator, reluctantly taking the application from me anyway.
I spent some of the intervening time looking at part of one of the biggest collections of art in the world. There are many thousands of paintings in caves and rock shelters all over the plateau. Some of them tell sacred stories—of rainbow snakes and lightning gods, of hunting grounds, and of ancient sisters who walked across the land making waterholes and hillocks and places so dangerous that only initiated men can go there. Then there are Mimi paintings, said to have been made by the shy stick-like spirits who live in the cracks between the rocks. You can see the work of the Mimi in the highest paintings at the tops of caves, which can only have been executed by very tall creatures, or perhaps by humans with scaffolding. There are also spray paintings, probably done by someone putting wet paint in his or her mouth and spraying it over their hand (or a child’s hand) or foot. And then there are the so-called “rubbish” paintings—with a whole host of subjects, some of which are rude, some historical—including three-hundred-year-old paintings of Macassan traders arriving in their boats—and some the kind of distilled Dreaming stories designed to be told to children.
Although the most sacred paintings were believed not only to depict the Ancestors but to embody them, many of the other cave paintings were never meant to last. They were illustrated lessons and they had a similar significance to, say, blackboards in a religious college. What they signified was precious, but what they were was not. However, today, when much of Aboriginal tradition has disappeared, all the paintings have become valuable in their own right, both as artifacts and as ancient messages for future generations.
According to George Chaloupka, in his book about the paintings of Arnhemland entitled Journey in Time, there are eight main color terms for the paints: black, yellow, deep yellow, the red that is made by burning yellow, a light pink and the shiny hematite red with a purple tint. A color from the twentieth century is “blu” or Reckitt’s Blue, introduced in the missionaries’ laundry baskets in the 1920s. And then there is delek, which is the word both for “white” in particular and for “color” in general—a linguistic affirmation perhaps that although red is sacred in these parts, a good white is also very precious. It is valued partly because it shows up well on both caves and bodies, partly because it is useful for painting both spears and coffins (one evening I found myself in the Aboriginal Town Camp in Jabiru, in the middle of Kakadu, and was taken to the home where a man had just died, and where his relatives were painting around the car with white paint) but partly because the best of it—a clay called huntite—is believed to be the feces of the Rainbow Snake.21
When I first heard this I was rather taken by the metaphor: the idea that the rainbow spectrum should somehow shimmer through the sky and over the earth, and that it should leave a dazzling white behind it. The truth was rather more prosaic. “Have you ever seen reptile droppings?” asked Alex Dudley, a ranger with whom I discussed the myths one evening. I hadn’t, I admitted. So with his penlight we went hunting for gecko droppings, and soon found some on the glass dome of a Telstra phone box. They looked like little white slugs. A python’s droppings are bigger, he said, making a shape in his hand that suggested feces the size of a tennis ball. “Imagine what the Rainbow Serpent could do after a good meal.”
A few mornings later I was disconsolate—I had returned to the permit office and no progress had been made. “Thompson invited me,” I said. “How do we know?” was the answer. I knew no Oenpelli phone numbers except for the arts center telephone, which rang and rang. I asked the woman whether she could try again
, and went for a long walk to think about what I was going to do instead in order to learn more about this elusive paint. During the walk I bumped into a guide who specialized in animal tours. “You’d better go to the buffalo farm,” he said. “Patsy will show you how colors work.” Which is why the next morning I found myself pulling up to what appeared to be a deserted homestead at the end of long tracks guarded by plenty of “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” and “Attention: Electric Fence” signs. It was a strange place: there were huge bits of iron everywhere—red and raw as if a container ship had rusted in the desert. I got out of the car and looked around. It was one of those mornings that shimmer with heat and silence, warning that it is going to be hot. There were flies buzzing around a buffalo horn that had been neatly sawed in several places and left lying on the ground, exposing blood and marrow, and everywhere there was the sweet smell of the abattoir.
Just when it seemed as if there was nobody there at all, Patsy and her husband Dave appeared from a shed. Patsy was born in Arnhemland and had grown up in a traditional community; Dave was a white Australian who had been a ranger for many years and was now managing the farm as a live larder for the local Aboriginals. When they wanted meat they would come and get it from him. Patsy had been married to a man in Maningrida, a coastal settlement in the heart of Arnhemland, but when he died she was pursued by a man she disliked. “My uncle Paddy said marry Dave, so I did.”
Patsy was quiet at first, then she warmed up. Later she told me why she was so sad: her younger brother had died the Sunday before. He had been thirty-one and one of the last true bushmen, I heard from someone in town later. He had also not been a drinker. On that Saturday night he had seen a cat in the darkness, and the next morning he was dead. He had had an argument with a close relative a year back, Patsy said, and shrugged. In our different ways we both paused to picture a world that encompassed sorcery and revenge. She agreed to take me into the bush, to show me how she finds the dyes for baskets. We drove for several kilometers past electric fences that Dave had promised he would switch off—and as Patsy leapt out of the car with her axe and started digging up a small bush lying near one of them, I prayed that he had remembered. “Yellow color,” she explained. “And red too.” I asked what she meant, but she said she would show me later. She also showed me how she found gray from the green fruit of the kapok tree, which contained gray feathery intestines also used to stuff mattresses in the old days.