Lost Worlds (34 page)

“G’day to you, mate. How’s it goin’?”

I told him of my narrow escape and he smiled even wider while nodding sympathetically.

“Yeah—y’gotta be careful on the Great Northern. Big zinc oxide and cattle transports—up to maximum length, over a hundred and seventy feet. Usually, though, it’s not car drivers that give me problems—its those bloody ’roos and cattle. All over the bleedin’ place some nights. Make a real mess of me front end.”

He gestured toward a six-foot-high steel-beam fender liberally splattered with dried blood and bits of gore.

“Gotta couple a ’roos during the night. Just outa Halls Creek. Nothin’ y’can do.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Here—let me get you something.”

He clambered back up the three steps into the towering cab and came back with a baseball cap identical to his own, and a pamphlet.

“Here y’are. Wear this and read this.”

I thanked him and he vanished into the cool of the café with a final “You’ll be okay to Halls Creek now. Good road.”

It was getting hot even so early in the morning, so I put the
GASCOYNE TRANSPORT
cap on and read his pamphlet with increasing amusement. It was entitled
Mixing with Monsters
and contained the following valuable advice:

My favorite paragraph read as follows:

Not when there’s three feet of mud at the side of the road, it’s not.

Eddie was right. The rest of the drive to Halls Creek was on smooth blacktop and I rode, without road trains, across more desert plains liberally sprinkled with termite mounds and boab trees. I saw not a single kangaroo, and cattle remained at a safe distance from the road, turning their skinny torsos and bony heads to watch as I skimmed by.

Around nine-thirty
A.M.
I finally arrived. My clothes were mud-stained, my stomach a churning mess of meat pie and deep-fried sausages, and my mind was begging for sleep in a quiet, cool motel room.

Halls Creek offered a straggly street of gas stations, small stores, a bakery, bungalows shaded by verandas and huge hedges, and a sun-scorched park with somnolent groups of Aborigines sitting or lying in the shade of stunted eucalyptus trees. Not much of a place, really, but it felt like a razzle-dazzle metropolis after 250 miles of nothingness.

If I could just sleep for an hour or two….but that was not to be.

“Well, g’day, Dave—my God, we thought you wouldn’t make it—called up Kununurra and they said you left ’round midnight, so we expected you seven, seven-thirty, mate.”

A smiling bespectacled face atop a small wiry frame addressed me through my mud-splattered window.

“Name’s Graeme Macarthur, Dave—cattle dealer, station manager, gold speculator, windmill agent, cattle trough designer, tour operator, and general all-round nice bloke. Me mates call me “The General,” but Graeme’s fine. And…this is Murray, my camp manager.”

Murray was all an outbacker should be. A broad-shouldered bulk of a man with a sun-bleached straggly mass of hippie-length hair tumbling from a large sweat-stained leather hat. Big bushy beard, big beer belly, big earth-engrained hands, and a big boozy grin exposing big, yellow, and very chipped teeth.

“Good t’meet y’Dave. Y’ready to move?”

“I guess so. A wash and a nap would be nice, but—”

“Naw—you’ll have plenty of time for that at camp. We gotta get movin’…this is our last trip out to the Bungle. We’ve gotta close down. Best we get there soon as possible…. I’ll get y’some coffee. You’ll be right, mate.”

Five minutes later we were off, my backpack loaded in the rear of Graeme’s Land Cruiser, hot coffee in my hand, and two lively up-and-at-’em Aussies for company.

Graeme was the raconteur and jokemaster—a real Aussie “spieler.” We rolled out of town (“Give you a tour, Dave, when we get back—okay?”), passing the Aborigines again under the trees in the park. Some were sleeping. Others were decidely drunk despite the early morning hour.

“Same as everywhere,” said Graeme in his high, fast-talk voice. “Bloody shame. Wasted by thirty—dead by fifty. Y’heard many Abo jokes yet?”

I shook my head.

He grinned, knowing he now had a new, open-eyed, open-minded novice as grist for his gusto.

“Well, there were these engineers—oil well men—way out in the desert and they was dancin’ ’round and ’round and the black stuff was spurtin’ out the ground and they was laughin’ and singin’ ’cause they’d found this new oil well. Now, up on a hill, lookin’ over the desert, were two old Aborigines, starkers, just sittin’ there watchin’ ’em.

“One of the Aborigines says, ‘Looks like them white bastards’ve found some more oil down there, mate.’

“And the other Aborigine says, ‘No. Looks like we just found us another sacred site, mate….’”

He waited for my laughter.

“Another sacred site. Y’get it, Dave?…Another sacred site.”

Murray rolled about in the back of the Cruiser, chortling and spluttering, “Graeme—Dave’s only bin ’ere couple days. He don’t know all this stuff about the boongs.”

“Tha’ right, Dave? Y’only been here two days?”

“Four, actually.”

“Aw, well—you’ve gotta bit of catchin’ up to do, mate. We’d better fill y’in ’bout things the way they are ’round here.”

And so for the next half hour or so Graeme gave me his potted-history version of the Aborigine versus the white Australian. It was a long, tawdry monologue, amusing at times, but basically the familiar “surely we’ve done enough for them now” kind of diatribe one hears at home from staunch right-wingers.

“I mean, it’s gettin’ crazy, Dave. They’ve got these sacred sites everywhere. Any bloody rock or stream or mountain you look at—it’ll be a sacred site of some kind.”

“Well—isn’t that the ‘songline’ concept?” (I had decided it was time to say something.) “The Aborigine idea that Australia was ‘sung’ into existence and only keeps that existence by constant ‘singing’ along invisible trails that link all landmarks—all those sacred places—lakes, rivers, ranges—whatever.” (I’d just finished rereading Bruce Chatwin’s beautiful book
The Songlines
and was feeling a little professorial).

Graeme gave me a frowning sidelong glance—a rather diffiuclt thing to do, as we were now crashing and bounding along a five-foot-wide dirt track that disappeared with increasing regularity into creek beds and thickets of spinifex, dwarf palm, and thorn trees. It looked like the African savanna.

“How long y’say y’been here, Dave?”

“Four days—and mostly without sleep.” (God—was I looking forward to a quiet campsite and a bed on soft earth, hummed to sleep by choirs of cooing doves and whistling cicadas….)

“Y’been doing some readin’, then?”

“Oh, some. But it’s interesting to hear your viewpoint.”

“Yeah, well,” growled Graeme, his voice a little lower now, “you’ll be hearin’ plenty more as you travel around. We’re gettin’ really fed up with the whole bloody thing. Y’know what they done now. They’ve gone’n claimed Ayers Rock as a big sacred site and they’re stoppin’ ordinary people takin’ photos and they’re chargin’ journalists and that kind a flippin’ fortune.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’d heard something about that.”

“Yeah, well—it’s getting worse all the time. We jus’ keep throwin’ money at ’em and they just keep grabbin’ for more. And then they waste it all. We buy ’em bloody Land Cruisers—brand-new, twenty-five to thirty-thousand-dollar machines—and what do they do? They run out of petrol and think the bloody thing’s gone ’n’ conked out on ’em, so they ditch it and say it’s no good and ask for another!”

(Memories of all the old tales back in England about the uselessness of building public housing for poor slum families—“What do they do? They’ve never seen a bathtub in their lives before, so they use it to keep coal in…and pigs in the back garden…and…”)

Graeme must have read my thoughts. “I mean, take Halls Creek. My town. Only a little place. I was on the council. We built brand-new houses for ’em—lovely, they were—painted ’em up pretty—new kitchens, bathrooms. Planted trees and bushes ’n’ that. An’ jus’ look at ’em now. Five years later. Bloody great holes in the walls, windows knocked out, wiring and pipes gone. They’re out there in the garden where the grass was, burnin’ up their trees ’n’ bushes in campfires. We had to move them. You’ll see when you get back. Most of ’em’s empty now. They were wrecked! They said they wanted to go back to the bush. So we gave ’em some concrete floors, a well, some toilets—in the hills jus’ out of town—and some sheets of corrugated iron ’n’ stuff, and let ’em build whatever they wanted—and they built what they’ve built for thousands of years, little humpies, like open Quonset huts with sidewalls of spinifex and bushes. They’re happy now…but all them houses are just wasted. I mean, it’s bloody criminal, Dave. I tell you—we’ve had enough.”

I nodded. There didn’t seem to be much point in arguing fine details at this time about the slow pace of societal evolution and imposing Western values on ancient indigenous cultures that weren’t particularly enamored with us—or our material trappings.

“I hear what you say. I’ve seen similar problems in the Indian reservations back home in the United States.”

“Yeah, well, I heard America’s got plenty o’ problems. But I think we’ve just gone too soft. We give ’em everything they ask for and hope they don’t make any more fuss. Y’just can’t keep doin’ that, Dave.”

Murray added his assertions and affirmations in the form of strings of expletives and graphic threats of confrontations and retributions to come.

Then there was silence for a while. We seemed to have got through the diatribe stage and I was glad they’d let off steam so early in the journey. Now perhaps we could move on to other things—like the journey itself.

“Wallaby there, Dave—y’see it?” Murray was pointing to a hillside of bare boulders. I couldn’t see anything except rocks.

“Y’gotta keep your eyes peeled,” he cautioned. “They move like the ’crackers ’round here.”

And so did we. The Land Cruiser seemed an old exponent of buckled, rockbound track travel as we crashed and thrashed our way through more creek beds and over boulder-strewn ridges. The land was cracked and brittle despite the recent downpours. Heat hazes shimmered along the horizons. The sky was a searing silver which stung the eyes. Hot dry air full of dust and grit tore through the open windows.

“Doesn’t look like this track is used much.”

“Naw, y’right, Dave,” said Graeme. “The Bungle’s still a pretty remote place for most folks. Some of ’em start out all right, but after the first puncture or a sideswipe from a boulder they decide they’d rather keep what’s left of their car than chance it any further.”

After a couple of hours driving deeper and deeper into the buckled, broken desert, we paused by a spring-fed pool shaded by white-trunk eucalyptus—aptly named “ghost trees.” After the din and dust of the trail it was wonderful to lie on warm soft sand, dangling my legs in cool water, and listening to the silence of the desert. Even Graeme and Murray seemed moved. All the aggressive belligerences of their earlier outbursts seemed to have faded away into the peace of the place and they lay back in the shade, smoking cigarettes, sipping the cool water from their billycans, and saying nothing.

Our break was only a short one. The driving continued and the track got worse, and I began to realize why the Bungle Bungle may have remained an elusive secret for so long.

Then we topped a high, barren ridge and Graeme paused on the crest. As the red dust dissipated he pointed across the spinifex plain below to a hazy gray-red rock massif.

“There she is,” he said.

At first sight it was not a particularly entrancing scene.

“Where are all the beehives?” I asked. It looked like a poor man’s Ayers Rock.

Graeme laughed. “You’re looking at the west face. The beehives are all on the other side. You’ll see ’em!”

I was still not convinced it had been worth all the effort. Many of Australia’s “sights” are notable for their subtle modesty—enjoyed more in microcosm than in breathtaking macrovistas. There are no great alpine ranges or Grand Canyons in the vast red and ancient plateaus that form most of the nation’s endless outback. This looked like just one more rather anticlimactic attraction.

“You wait on, Dave. You won’t believe this place.” Graeme smiled and slapped my shoulder. “No place like it—anywhere.”

I smiled back, a little weakly, and hoped he was right.

After more interminable bone-battering driving we arrived at “camp,” which consisted of a series of army-gray tents and a cookout area on the edge of a dry creek and shaded by white brittle range gum and river redgum trees. “Shaded” is perhaps the wrong term. Eucalyptus trees are notorious for their lack of shade. Sparse narrow-leaf coverage creates at best a lacy semblance of shadow but no real protection from the heat, particularly at this time, the approach of searing summer and the great “wets” which last from November through March.

Graeme possessed a remarkable love for the scraggly, bark-dripping gum trees of the outback and, after unloading supplies, took me on a tour of the campsite. He rattled off the names, both in colloquial Australian and loquacious Latin: “Now that’s a
Eucalyptus papuanti
, the famous ghost gum that you see in a lot of paintings, and there’s your
Eucalyptus confertiflora
, the cabbage gum. Now here’s a nice little snappy gum, the
Eucalyptus brevifilia
, and your silver-leafed box, the
Eucalyptus pruinosa….
”