Color: A Natural History of the Palette (8 page)

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.

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 stories 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.