Breakfast was the white heart of a sand palm—succulent and bittersweet—and for “jam” we ate bush apples and red ants with green bottoms that were so full of vitamin C they tasted like stings. As I looked out for buffalo (which apparently could be dangerous) Patsy chopped down half a tree to make a forked stick, and then started hooking out the leaves of a pandanus tree—a palm with long spiky leaves bursting out from it like wild thick hair. This was the raw material for making baskets, she said, and when we returned to the farm we sat on a mat made of corrugated iron and she showed me how to strip the leaves, separating the soft underside from the hard top. She completed fifty to my one, but we sat companionably for an hour or so. Her puppy was getting tangled up in all the leaves. Patsy smacked him and then hugged him and then smacked him again. Suddenly a dinosaur crossed the path near us. “That’s just Stumpy,” she said, laughing at my look of alarm. Stumpy was a goanna—a meter-long lizard with a fierce face that gives a good clue to his general disposition, and no tail, having lost it in a fight.
Patsy took the roots of the yellow bush—which she called anjundum—and scraped off the skin. She divided them between two saucepans and started to boil them with the stripped pandanus. All my many wasted pandanus-stripping attempts were then gathered up and burned into ashes on our corrugated mat. “This is the red one,” she said, adding the ashes to one of the pots. “And this is the yellow one,” she added, pointing to the other. I realized that anjundum had a similar characteristic to pieces of ochre, in that the yellow ones could be transformed into red through cooking— although for the dyes it was a matter of adding some kind of alkali, like wood ash, and not just heat. She showed me a book: Penny Tweedie’s Spirit of Arnhemland—which contained photographs of a boy called Jazmin being decorated for a ceremony, his face sprayed from a man’s mouth with white ochre, rather like the technique of hand painting I had seen in the caves, and his thin chest painted with a singlet of yellow, white and red ochre stripes.
Another picture showed a ceremonial dilly bag on the back of an elder. It was cylindrical, hard like a basket, and covered in white, red and yellow diamonds. I suddenly realized how strongly the natural dye colors mirror the ochres—red, white, yellow and black. “Dangerous,” Patsy commented casually, flicking through the pages. “Women can’t see this,” she said, pointing at other pictures. I asked her whether it was dangerous for us to see the pictures. “No, we can see the photos, just can’t see in real life,” she explained, suggesting that by the very act of being set up for a photograph, the subjects had suspended their sacredness for the camera. Her sense of danger was reinforced by stories of women being killed for looking at ceremonies. “It happened before white-fellas came,” she said. “But even now too,” she added pensively. “Maybe.”
Three days later my permit was turned down again: I realized I might not get my interviews. I had been circling carefully around both ochre and Arnhemland. I had talked to people who used it for hunting, and seen how it was still used for funerals. I had seen the colors that women use to imitate sacred patterns. But now it was time to meet some painters. “There’s a good mob down Barunga way: they do painting,” said a man I met at the Jabiru Social Club. So I called them. The Beswick and Barunga areas are in a protected area to the south-east of Kakadu. Could I come? How could I request a permit? I asked the arts coordinator, David Lane. “You’ve got a permit,” he said generously. “Come down when you like.” And yes, he confirmed, they did use natural ochres. “We’ll take you to find them if you want.”
I hired the only available four-wheel-drive in the area—a huge Nissan Patrol that made me feel I was Queen of the Road. When I arrived at Beswick, which was at the end of a red dust road so well made I felt a bit of a fraud in my grand car, I found a pleasant rural community of about five hundred people. There were picket fences and a well-tended playground and community center, with big houses set off the road and surrounded by grass and old mattresses. Beswick had been built in the 1940s when there was an emergency relocation of Aboriginal people from the coastal areas after the Japanese started bombing. Some had returned to Arnhemland but many had stayed, although some still dreamed of going home—and one of those dreamers was Tom Kelly.
Tom—a man in his sixties with a timeless etched face—was sitting on the porch of the main offices of Beswick. He had been a hand on a cattle station for many years but he had retired to Beswick to make and play didgeridoos—or “bamboos” as they call them in the creole that the people (who come from seven language groups) tend to use. “Tom’s one of the best,” David Lane told me. “He’s travelled the world with his didge.” Tom nodded matter-of-factly. “Been around,” he murmured. His group, the White Cockatoos, had been to many international music festivals, although now his dream was only to go back to live in Maningrida—the Arnhemland community where he was born—before his wife became too ill. Of all the places he had visited he’d liked America the best, especially meeting “them Indians,” who, he said, “also paint with ochre like us.”
He and David first showed me the didgeridoos. The stick-like instruments were covered in stories and pictures of lilies and file snakes and turtles in different ochre colors. One was decorated with a series of concentric red circles filled with white dashes, all on a black background. It represented water, Tom said, and the dashes were the effect of leaves falling on a waterhole. “It’s not country,” he said. “We don’t paint country on bamboos. Just pictures.”
He and two relatives—Abraham Kelly and Tango Lane Birrell— were to take me to find ochre from a nearby source called Jumped Up Creek, and suddenly my Nissan no longer seemed like an embarrassing overestimation of the terrain. Ten minutes out of town we turned off the main road onto what they said was a track, but I had my doubts. We churned up spiky spinifex for about a kilometer when Tom suddenly told us to stop. So we stopped in what seemed the middle of nowhere, got out, and suddenly I realized we were standing in a giant paintbox. The dried-up creek bed didn’t just have one color, it had dozens, all combinations of the basic four colors—dark red hematite, lemon yellow, white pipeclay and black manganese that looked like chewing gum spat out by dinosaurs and left to ossify. The colored stones and pebbles were strewn in every direction. You could pick up almost any of them and you had paint in your hands.
Abraham found a big flat white stone from beyond the creek. That was to be our palette and canvas, and Tango—who had a water bottle with him—showed me how to pour water on to it then take a stone and rub it vigorously over the water to make it into pigment. The stones had the right combination of clay and color to make painting easy; they were even smoother than my little Italian stone. Is this what they use for the didgeridoos? I wondered. “Yeah,” said Abraham. “We used to,” said Tango. “Now we use acrylics. Ochre needs a vehicle, it’s too far to walk. We had a vehicle before but the engine got buggered.”
Beswick is the last domain in the area to the south of Arnhemland that is considered culturally “intact.” Its inhabitants still organize initiation ceremonies, with boys going into the bush for four or five months to prepare. “We’ve only got five or six old men left now to teach the young ones,” Tango said. In all the settlements there were problems, he said. “Ganja, petrol-sniffing, all that.” But one of the biggest problems for cultural life was that the old men were dying. “Me, I’m forty-eight years old. If I don’t get anyone to teach me then I’ll fade away, the whole thing will just fade away.” The multicolored stones of Jumped Up Creek were used for both art and ceremonies, Tom said. “But we don’t tell you about ceremony,” he added firmly. “It’s secret.”
“Secret” is such a vulnerable thing in Aboriginal communities today. The stories have been passed on only with difficulty. Yet they have probably never been so important—not only in the religious sense, but also in the sense of identity. What meaning do stories and paintings about land and country actually have for a sedentary person who rarely sees the places they refer to? Today, when there are so few sto
ries for men like Tom Kelly to pass on, it is important to pay attention to what is left, and to respect the very thin blanket of secrecy that can be spread over them. Things were not in fact so secret sixty years ago, when there were more stories and they were told fairly freely to anthropologists.
ALICE SPRINGS
Theodor Strehlow was the son of a missionary; he grew up with Aranda playmates, spoke the language fluently, and kept diaries and accounts of the ceremonies and traditions that he witnessed. His papers and pictures are held in the Museum of Central Australia, just outside the center of Alice Springs and an overnight bus journey from Beswick. To access them I turned away from the dark display cases of stuffed possoms and exotic rock samples, and went through a nondescript door into a triangular room with space for four chairs, a telephone and what looked like a two-way mirror. I felt as if I were in a spy film, or entering the secret headquarters of a cult.
I sat down in a chair and looked at the telephone for a while, wondering whether I had a good enough reason to dial 11–111 and ask to consult the files in order to learn more about ochre. Then— and as I write this a few months later I’m surprised I did this—I stood up and left the room without even picking up the phone. These were secret documents, so secret that in 1992 they had been confiscated from Strehlow’s widow’s home and put into the safe-keeping of the museum, for whenever the Aboriginal elders or scholars wanted to consult them. It wasn’t right for me even to try to see them, I decided. Whatever I was to find out about red ochre would either be things people told me in full knowledge of why I was asking, or things I found in public libraries, open to anyone. Even if that meant I knew less, it meant I knew it fairly. And, to my surprise, that afternoon I found in the reference section of Alice Springs’s public library some of the information I had been looking for. It was an account—written up in Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia—of a sacred ritual that might help me understand why red ochre was so sacred.
In the hot summer of 1933, Strehlow was invited by four elders of the Loritja tribe to see a rain ceremony at a place called Horseshoe Bend, not far from Alice. He described how the men—having approached the cave banging shields and boomerangs to warn the Ancestors of their arrival—pulled three sacred rain sticks or tjurunga from the bottom of the cave. Two were slim poles, about the size and shape of didgeridoos, representing rain brothers who had travelled through the Central Desert country at the beginning of time. The third was smaller, and symbolized the brothers’ two grandchildren: greedy infants screaming for blood.
The thirst of even the most hemoglobin-challenged of ritual objects was satisfied that afternoon. In order to honor the rain ancestors, the four blood donors cheerfully set to work tying their arms and opening the veins on the forearms, Strehlow wrote. They all had problems getting a good flow and spent the first five minutes cutting, splintering glass chips, and pulling at the opening of the cuts. But when the jets came they came quickly, spraying the tjurunga and then drizzling on top, bottom and sides of the cave entrance. It was, the missionary’s son noted, the greatest quantity of blood he had ever seen sprinkled about for a ceremony.
The account is written in a very matter-of-fact way, but Strehlow added in a footnote that he had to brace himself for this “orgy of bleeding” by downing several good brandies, and even then he had to watch it through the lens of his Graflex camera, standing a short distance away, so he did not feel too sick. It was a hot day and a small gully, and he found the smell of blood quite overpowering. He was told that these three tjurunga were unique among the Loritja in that they were never painted with red ochre, but instead had to be refreshed with human blood at frequent intervals. Later he speculated that the usual practice of smearing tjurunga with red ochre might be a substitute for covering them with blood, although this was, he emphasized, purely a guess.
When the ceremony ended, the bloodstained sand was trampled until all signs had been wiped away; each man had to scrape the marks from his arms, and wash himself before returning to camp. It was important that the women shouldn’t smell the blood, Strehlow noted. I was reminded of a story I had heard a couple of weeks before, whispered over a beer by a man in the Northern Territory. He knew a man, he said, who had been to an initiation ceremony in the mid-1990s, and had carelessly left the ceremonial red ochre glistening on his arm so that the women could see it. He had carried something dangerous into the world where it could not be contained, and the penalty for that was death. “They did it with spears,” the man whispered, glancing melodramatically over his shoulder.
In the same library was a book about the Dreaming places of Alice Springs—which directed me to the road running along the Todd River (so dry that there is an annual regatta where the racers run, carrying the boats) and leading to the casino. The map recorded it as Barrett Drive; the Aboriginals preferred to call it Broken Promises Drive. When it was first proposed, the Aboriginal guardians gave permission for it to be built—as long as it wriggled round a spot that was known as the Caterpillar Dreaming because it included a long mound believed to mark the space where the caterpillar Ancestor rested beneath the earth. But the road builders were greedy; the wriggle would cost dollars. They blocked the road off and a few months later opened it unrepentantly—with several meters cut off the tail of the caterpillar. The wound was still there. From the road I could see a long mound about three meters high and five meters wide curling away into the distance, covered with eucalyptus and grass and signposts warning people to stay away. The mound ended abruptly at the road, where it had been chopped, and I saw something glinting in the debris. In fact I saw a lot of things glinting. It turned out that the “caterpillar” was made of a rock that flaked off with shiny silica dandruff. This rock on the road to the casino was not just ordinary stone, it was stone that changed color as you moved. Once again I saw how the “sacred” was something that was full of gleaming colors.
Everywhere in Alice Springs you can find Aboriginal designs. They are on logos and place mats, T-shirts and didgeridoos, and, of course, they are on canvases—in the dozens of art shops that line the streets of the town center. There were a few of the Northern Territory ochre paintings I had seen at the beginning of my journey, and there were others that seemed to represent some kind of stylistic transition—by artists who came from the Kimberleys to the north-west of Alice, who still used ochre but in ways that involved large areas of paint, rather than either dotting or stripes. One of the most powerful of these was a man called Rover Thomas, who lived between 1926 and 1998 in Warmum, Turkey Creek, just to the west of the Darwin–Alice road, and about halfway along it. His paintings look like pieces of kangaroo skin stretched taut with pins of white pigment. The work seems less a painting of the country than a kind of wrapping up of the country—rather as Christo did with the Reichstag in Berlin. He uses a deep chestnut brown and his skies are the color of bitter chocolate. He always uses natural pigments, often mixed with bush gum and applied to marine ply.
But most of the paintings in Alice were, quite naturally, from the Central Desert. They were bright acrylic canvases in patterns of dots and curls and splashes and concentric circles. If they had been from Europe or America they would have been given labels like “abstract expressionist” or “neopointillist,” and the influence of such artists as Miró and Picasso would have been discussed in unending detail. But they were from Australia with their own distinctive artistic inheritance, so although those comparisons have been made, they have mostly been allowed just to stand for themselves. Many of the paintings had a title like “Two Snakes Dreaming” or “Dingo Dreaming,” and some included explanations of the iconography—that, for example, a concentric circle meant a waterhole, or that an oval shape was a shield, or that little curled lines represented men sitting at fires. These were some of the stories that had so intrigued Bruce Chatwin, in his journeys for the book that became Songlines, describing the way Aborigines traditionally conceptualize Australia as a series of sung stories, criss-crossing the land.
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The paintings, when you look at them for more than a few minutes, seem to be an exercise in optical effects—like one of those Magic Eye games, with an obvious picture in the front and another picture “behind” it which you can see if you focus away from the paper. Like the shiny red ochres that I had not seen but had heard of in Arnhemland and South Australia, the paintings from the Central Desert seemed almost like another way of flipping reality. In their case by dotting it into non-existence.
I began to recognize some of the different artists—particularly the more famous ones. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, whose work was made up of bold squares, either set inside each other or spiralling geometrically into a central point. Then there was Rover Thomas, of course. And the Petyarre sisters—Ada Bird, Gloria and several others, much of whose work is made of small, swiftly painted dashes in contrasting colors such as green and purple, giving the effect of a weeping willow shivering in the wind. Listening quietly to conversations in different galleries, I learned that “Glorias” were getting more expensive, while “two Ronnies” cost about the same as a car nowadays. “Though good Ronnies are so hard to get nowadays,” was the sad comment from the dealer I was eavesdropping on. “He’s having domestic problems.”