Australasia > Australia > Northern Territories > Alice Springs > Articles > Staying with Aboriginals

For some time now the Aboriginal people of Australia have presented a paradox. Abroad, and in the comfortable coastal cities of the South, their very image has been big business. Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines is a continuing international big seller, as is Mutant Mystery Down Under, Marlo Morgan’s absurd account of her time spent with ‘the Real People’, a remote Aboriginal ‘tribe’ who burnt her credit cards and Western clothes, marched her barefoot across the spinifex, and taught her to love non-material things and her inner self. (Morgan’s publishers had to switch the title from non-fiction to fiction when it became clear that the story was mostly wishful thinking.) In the bookshops of suburban Oz you’ll find whole sections full of books with titles such as 'I,The Aboriginal' or 'Mysteries of the Dreamtime'. That’s before you even start on the coffee-table cornucopia of Aboriginal Art.

Up in the empty wastes of Central, North and Western Australia, where most of the ‘blackfellas’ actually live, it’s rather a different story. A combination of welfare and alcohol has reduced many of the Aboriginals that the visitor sees to a hopeless state. In the swankily modernised central mall of Alice Springs wild-eyed, wild-haired men and women scream obscenities at each other, staggering back and forth in a caricature of drunkenness that would put the worst am-dram performer to shame. This in a town that boasts no less than thirty-two Aboriginal Art galleries.

All very confusing for the visiting American or Japanese trying to buy a ‘traditional’ dot-painting before heading out into the desert for a champagne sunset viewing of Ayer’s Rock.

Of course the high-profile drunks are only half - indeed a quarter - of the story. Out in the desert and on the traditional lands the majority of Aboriginals are teetotallers who shake heads sadly at the way poor old Uncle Billhook or Aunty June is going to pieces on the grog in town.

Until now it hasn’t been possible for mere holidaymakers to see this other side of Aboriginal life. Even Chatwin had to hang around the bookshop in Alice for weeks, by all accounts, until he met the man who was able to take him where he wanted. My own initial attempts to get to Aboriginal lands were similarly frustrated. Going through formal channels involved weeks of waiting for permits and finding out who was the right person to talk to in which bureaucracy. Informal channels were equally hard. Trampled over and anthropologized till they’re blue in the face, most Aboriginals have little time for whites who want to know how ‘they really think and feel’.

Then, in Darwin, I discovered the green shoots of indigeno-tourism, and suddenly my problems were solved. I could just hand over the money and take the holiday.

First I tried Terry Patroni’s Panatdji Aboriginal Cultural Tour. The Marranunggu people invite you to come and experience the real Australian bush on their country Gurudju, said the brochure alluringly. The day to day lifestyle changes with the seasons and the Marranunggu live as closely to nature as possible

Terry, nonetheless, was a whitefella. He sported the Jehovah beard and Pavarotti gut combination that is de rigueur for the men of Darwin. He’d grown up out in the bush, he explained, and the Marranunggu were his childhood friends.

There were four other takers in the Landcruiser, all Americans. John and Dorothy were quiet, fifty-something professionals from Pennsylvania. Next to me in the back was Ned, a haybroker from Colorado, late seventies, thinning white hair, prominent pink hearing aid, one of those grizzled old timers who Tells-a-Story. ‘I’ll tell you wad…’ he began, fixing one with an inescapably beady eye. His young companion, Sherry, had very long pink legs, very short white shorts, huge red-rimmed glasses and a goofy smile. At first I’d taken her for an adventurous lone traveller, but as the “we’s” started creeping into her monologue it dawned on me that she must be with Ned. His youngest daughter, I assumed; possibly his grand-daughter. It was only when Ned reached out, and with a gnarled, liver-spotted finger touched her leg that I realized she was his wife.

Two hours out of Darwin, we bumped off the smooth tarmac onto dirt. The bush had rapidly given way to thick eucalypt woods, knee-deep with lush speargrass.

‘You get pythons round here,’ shouted Terry from the front.

‘You got Dolly Python?’ said Ned, chuckling loudly at his own joke. Then he doubled up, groaning; a fly had landed on his hearing aid.

‘Jeez!’ he cried, when he’d finally located and brushed off the intruder. 'I’m going to have to use some of that Rid, that fly was buzzin’ right arn there.'

The road became a narrow grassy track. We passed the battered wooden sign telling us that this was ABORIGINAL LAND, then we were out of the woods and onto a huge empty plain, across which an army of gravestones appeared to be marching.

‘Boy!’ gasped Sherry.

They were weirdly-formed termite mounds, Terry explained. But this was definitely the spooky, Crocodile Dundee-style landscape I’d been hoping for. We all piled out excitedly and took the same photograph.

The camp was in a clearing by a water-lily covered billabong. The Marranunggu (all four of them) were waiting for us by the camp fire. If Sherry had expected the Real People she was to be disappointed. Only Doug was black. Margi and Jason were the colour of milky coffee, Shane was almost as white as I am. They were all, of course, wearing Western clothes and spoke in broad Aussie accents.

While the others settled in I went for a row on the billabong with Terry. It was beautiful out there. The waterlilies in flower. Overhead a thundery sunset sky. The eucalypt trunks, lit orange by the sun, were reflected in the still water.

A sudden breeze puckered the surface. Dark grey clouds raced up from the horizon.

‘D’you think we should go back?’ I asked. I was trying to remember whether being in a boat on a lake in a thunderstorm was the safest or the least safe place to be.

‘Their experience is dispossession,’ Terry was shouting. ‘Until 1967 they weren’t even citizens. They couldn’t even vote and ...’

A gust had carried his sentence away.

‘A powerful cultural experience ...’ I caught. ‘Not the experience of a guy with a didgeridu. We’re trying to present the Aborigines as they are now, not as some mythical idea of how they should be. These people don’t go round hunting with a spear. They go out with a gun. That’s how it is now. A lot of outsiders want to try and freeze this culture in time.’

Back at camp the wind had dropped. A few fat raindrops had moistened the earth but the camp fires blazed brightly. At one, Margi was cooking turtle and wild goose; at the other I found Sherry, eyes shining with excitement.

‘This is great,’ she said. ‘But it’s not what we expected at all. My husband thought there’d be a village nearby.’

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the whole point about Aboriginals was that they’d been nomads.

Ned lumbered over. Now would have been the time for a Welcome Sherry - or even a Welcome Double Brandy - as the old hay-broker regaled us with tales of Colorado Farming Life, but drink was banned out here, for guests as well as Marranunggu. It’s a long and controversial story, but after 40,000 years without it, alcohol has played havoc with the Aboriginals. Like many communities, Margie’s had now outlawed it.

Though Doug and Shane had now joined us round the fire, the conversation remained firmly on whitefella issues: the best tour of Ayer’s Rock, the most spectacular cruise to the Reef, even the prettiest Pacific Island to drop into on the way home. I turned to lanky black Doug, sitting silently beside me, nodding and smiling politely along.

‘Have you ever seen Ayer’s Rock?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘No.’ He’d never been further than Darwin.

At supper Dorothy and I sat with the three lads. How nervous they were, legs jiggering visibly under the table as Dorothy tried to break the ice by asking,

‘So, d’you eat like this every night?’ Jason laughed.

‘No, it’s just the three of us here. We might have a can of beans, something like that.’

The next day we explored the beautiful empty plains of the Aboriginal lands. We identified and tasted the ‘bush tucker’ the Marranunggu, many years ago, would have lived off in the wild. Jason showed us how to catch a turtle, Doug wrestled bravely with a 5ft freshwater crocodile. Margie told us about the local Dreaming site, the rocky hill where her Sea-Eagle Ancestor had retired to sleep forever under the earth. We swam together in a crystal clear rockpool. At lunchtime Ned and Margie bonded on the subject of welfare (“I tell you wad, if people give you anything you want, you don’t respect it”), and, more crucially, trousers: “Levi is the only work-pant ... They are a good strong denim ...”

By the time we went fishing in the late afternoon we were all the best of chums. On the riverbank white Ned and black Doug sat side by side, sharing a rod. Ned had stuck great bunches of leaves into his baseball cap and looked ridiculous.

“I’ll tell you wad,” he said, “these leaves sure keep the flies away from my face.”

Sherry was ecstatic. The trip had been the highlight of her Australian tour, far better than the champagne sunset at Ayer’s Rock or the multicoloured fish of the Barrier Reef.

Later in the week I flew over the stunning turquoise waters of the Clarence Strait to the Tiwi Islands. With the overnight camp out of action because of seasonal storms, this was just a day trip, but, starting early, long enough to get a sense of a place that felt, with its huge circles of Aboriginals sitting laughing and chatting under the trees, more African than Australian.

My tour-companions this time were holidaying urban Aussies, all deeply curious about the lifestyle of the ‘blackfellas’. Once again, though, our guide, Anthony, was white.

The Tiwis are nominally Catholic, but they’ve taken the religion and made it their own. Their pretty, wooden-slatted white church, built by a Dutchman, is collaged inside with bold Tiwi paintings. Behind the altar, symbolically, an old Tiwi man holds the baby Jesus in his arms.

We heard about Father Zell, for many years the priest on the island, who had 150 Tiwi wives, many as young as twelve. This was not an orgy of concupiscence but a practical way for Christianity to foil the old Tiwi custom of giving young girls to old men. Zell’s mission grew as he was joined by young men who preferred wives of their own age rather than the crones they were offered by tradition.

After a look round the Tiwi Museum, we took tea with three stocky female artists. Here was a chance to buy Aboriginal art at source. “Does this design you’re doing here have a Dreamtime story attached to it?” cooed the smart, blue-hatted lady from Sydney. The artist nodded and made the first of several sales. They were all smiles as we dropped them back to their houses.

“Bye, bye, everyone! Have a nice day!” shouted one.

"Mind the crocodile at the waterfall!” cried another.

“They’re happy, aren’t they?” said the lady from Sydney.

“Happy as Larry,” said Anthony, authoritatively.

At Bima Wear there was a team of female fabric painters and seamstresses running up boldly-decorated dresses and shirts. There were more eager purchases. Finally, at Tiwi Designs, we found some working men, artists painting canvasses and colourful ‘pukamani’ burial poles.

“Edward here,” Anthony told us, “is a typical artist. He’s sitting having a brainwave and thinking what to do next.”

Edward mumbled something.

“Oh, you’re having a break. Fair enough. The fellows here,” he concluded breezily, “sit around working just like any normal artist.”

We sped across a five hundred yards of breathtaking aquamarine sea for lunch and a swim on Bathurst Island. The rocky pool, deep in the woods, was exactly what everyone wanted after a hard morning’s sightseeing and gift-purchasing. There was no crocodile, but by a waterfall, a rope hung from a tree and, as we approached, three young Aboriginal boys were swinging and diving from it. “They’ll run off when they see you,” Anthony told us, but they didn’t, and for most of the party this seemed to be the best bit of the day, frolicking in the dappled waterfall with their unfamiliar compatriots.

My third ‘cultural tour’, half a day’s drive south near the rough-and -ready mining town of Katherine, was the longest established and best organized. Manyallaluk (‘the Dreaming Place’ said the brochure) was an old cattle station that had recently been returned to the local Maiali people. Another ‘dry’ community, they were making a bold and unusual attempt to turn their backs on the prevailing welfare culture by developing art and tourism. They had plenty to offer. Besides excellent bark-painting and spear-throwing lessons (I was thrilled, after an hour’s practice, to hit a mock-kangaroo), they had, up in the remote ‘stone country’ nearby, some of the best examples of Aboriginal Rock Art in Australia.

Once again, our chief guide and organizer was a whitefella, a hyper-active and quirkily knowledgeable Welshman called Ron. It was the very end of the season, so there were only a couple of other punters, Anita and Kathleen, two ladies of a certain age hailing from - well, well - the United States.

“They’re absolutely mad,” Ron confided. “Completely crazy.”

But as we left camp and drove up the long dirt track into the hills, he joined them in a sing-song that began with ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ended with a spirited solo performance, by Anita, of ‘Goodbye, Rooby Toosday.’

Johnny, the trainee guide, took it all in good part. He was much shyer and less garrulous than Ron, nor did he know the Latin names for the countless different varieties of eucalypts, but he had one essential advantage - he was Aboriginal. As we puffed up the steep slope to the pile of huge, pebble-smooth rocks where the art was to be found, Ron shut up and Johnny took over.

A few hundred miles away, at Nourlangie Rock in Kakadu National Park, tourists queue in their scores to see the paintings, older than Lascaux but similar in style, of kangaroos, emus, rainbow serpents, and lizards. Here, on the very edge of forbidden Arnhemland, we were entirely alone. There was any amount of art to see, under the weatherproof overhangs of the largest rocks. “Wow!” said Kathleen, as we slid on our backs to get a better view of the overlapping collage of animals, in surprisingly unfaded whites, ochres, browns and blacks on the raw Sienna stone.

“What’s this one, Johnny?” asked Kathleen.

“This one - he like, while fruit.”

“Wild fruit?”

“Yuh. He is.”

“Oh right,” said Anita, swinging her video camera around to get a better angle. “This one looks like a sun, the way we would draw a sun.”

“But Tiggy," Johnny told them. "He got lawk.”

“Sticky?” queried the ladies. Johnny shook his head, gurgling with private laughter. “Tiggy. We call that ‘tiggy’.”

They could barely understand him, but the ladies, flat on their backs in the middle of nowhere, a real live Aboriginal crouching beside them explaining the centuries-old art of his people, were in seventh heaven.

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