Tracks (17 page)

I left camp the next morning when Richard told me he would be along in an hour, to which I grunted something monosyllabic and continued on my way. I walked for one hour, then two, then two and a half. No Richard. ‘Oh Jesus, I’m going to have to go back, the car must have broken down.’

I had back-tracked five miles when the first and only car we had seen drove up and stopped. I asked them if they would mind driving a little way along and seeing if they could find Richard’s tracks into the scrub, and letting me know if he was all right. They drove all the way to the Rock, and returned without seeing Rick. It was well into the afternoon by then, and I was beginning to really worry.

‘Snakebite?’ I thought. ‘Heart attack?’

I was about to leave these new friends when the Toyota came charging over the hill with Rick inside, listening to Joan Armatrading.

‘Where
were
you?’

Richard looked from face to face and with a dawning comprehension, and a certain sheepishness, said, ‘I was just back at camp reading my book, why?’

I could feel my lips compress into a furious white line. The others swapped glances, coughed delicately, and drove off. Rick apologized. I said nothing. My anger had set cold and hard. It felt like a fist in my chest.

Then the rain came. Great angry thundering clouds swarmed and bustled out of nowhere, and it hailed and poured a deluge. It rained cats and dogs, elephants and whales, and I stumbled through it, cold and wet and holding my anger to me like a baby. I was worried as usual over the camels. And I was exhausted. Exhausted by the work and worry, exhausted by the anger, and exhausted by my thoughts, which went round and round in circles, always returning to the central fact that I was involved in a pointless ludicrous farce.

And of course that was the night that dear little Goliath decided he didn’t like being caught and tied to a tree any more. I chased him for over an hour at a run. I entered a new realm of exhaustion. I was covered with freezing mud, and shaking with fatigue by the time I grabbed him. Then I crawled back to camp, drank a third of a bottle of whisky in ten minutes and through hysterical weeping over which I had no control, raved at Richard before collapsing in an incoherent, shattered heap.

That night injected two new elements into our relationship. The first was tolerance — that is, the necessity to compromise. It set the real basis for an unlikely friendship which, although it was to have its ups and downs, was there to stay. The second was sex.

Ah. Yes. Silly me. Inevitable I suppose, but in retrospect one of the worst mistakes I made in terms of my freedom during the trip. It deepened my commitment to Richard in some ancient and subtle way — I could no longer discount his feelings as easily as I might have otherwise. Rick Smolan, photographer extraordinaire, New York Jewish survivalist, conman and manipulator par excellence without even knowing it; talented, generous, strange young man who felt awkward and hid behind Nikons, this was the creature with whom my trip was becoming hopelessly entangled; who I was to feel robbed me of its original meaning and essence, who had changed from someone I barely noticed to a millstone round my neck and my cross to bear. The first confusing oscillatory element that was to be so characteristic of this trip had struck. It allowed Rick to ‘fall in love’. Not with me, but with the camel lady.

However, we were much kinder to one another after that night. While Rick began really trying, I began to come to terms with the fact that he either had to be completely out of the thing, or completely involved in it. I could not have it both ways. He began slowly changing from that day, letting the desert work on him, coming to a recognition of it, and of himself as a consequence.

We passed Lasseter’s Cave — poor Lasseter, that gold-hungry mug who lost his camels and perished in the sandhills, holding a nose-peg which he must have ripped from his frightened bolting camels, and leaving behind an unsolved mystery concerning his supposed discovery of a gold outcropping so rich he would have been a billionaire, if he had only made it back. The Pitjantjara mob, who up till then had virtually no contact with whitefellas, had tried to keep him alive but, like so many other luckless explorers, he had not been able to keep up the pace and died a miserable death, only tens of miles from safety. Many of the old Pitjantjara people remember him. I tried hard not to think about that nose-peg in his hands.

We were a day or two short of Docker, when the first major disaster of the trip occurred. I was carefully leading my camels through a river that had once been a track, when Dookie, the last in line, slipped and landed flat in the water. I went back to him and asked him to stand up. I tapped him behind the shoulder and asked him again. He looked at me pitifully and groaned to his feet. The rain was blinding me and running down me in cold torrents. He could hardly use his front right leg.

We camped that day in a deep luminous glassy green light. I had no idea what was wrong with the leg. I prodded, rubbed and examined from shoulder to foot. It was tender but there was no swelling that I could see. I made hot compresses but did not know what else I could do. Was it a broken bone, a torn ligament, what? The point was that Dookie could not walk. He sat in the creekbed, miserable, and refused to move. I cut him feed and brought it to him and massaged the shoulder again. I hugged him, fussed over him, and all the while I felt sick and tired and beaten. A thought was invading me which I tried to keep away. That I might have to shoot my boy, that the trip might be ended, that it was all just a stupid pathetic joke. I was glad Richard was there.

At last, the rains cleared. Everything was rinsed clean and sparkling. We rested two days, then limped into Docker, where as usual there were hundreds of excited children to meet us. The community adviser gave us a caravan to live in, and Rick decided to stay until we knew what Dookie’s fate would be. In the end I waited there six weeks, not knowing whether the leg would heal or not. Rick stayed for two. It was not a happy time.

It is amazing to me how human beings can remain calm, controlled and sensible on the surface, when internally they are cracking up, crumbling. I can see now that that time in Docker was the beginning of a kind of mental collapse, though I would not have described it in such a way then. I was still functioning after all. The whites there were kind and did their best to entertain and look after me, but they could not know that I needed all my energy just to remain in that caravan and lick my wounds. They could not know that they were gutting me with their invitations that I was too morally weak to resist, that my endless smiles hid an overwhelming despair. I wanted to hide. I slept for hour after hour and when I woke up it was into nothingness. Grey nothingness. I was ill.

Whatever justifications for photographing the Aborigines I had come up with before, now were totally shot. It was immediately apparent that they hated it. They knew it was a rip-off. I wanted Rick to stop. He argued that he had a job to do. I looked through a small booklet
Geographic
had given him to record expenditures. In it was ‘gifts to the natives’. I couldn’t believe it. I told him to put down five thousand dollars for mirrors and beads, then hand out the money. I also realized that coverage in a conservative magazine like
Geographic
would do the people no good at all, no matter how I wrote the article. They would remain quaint primitives to be gawked at by readers who couldn’t really give a damn what was happening to them. I argued with Rick that he was involved in a form of parasitism, and besides, since everyone saw him as my husband, whatever they felt for him, they felt for me too. They were polite and deferential as always, and they took me hunting and food-gathering, but the wall was always there. He came up with all the old arguments, but was torn, I knew, because he recognized it was true.

It was coming time for him to leave and he felt thwarted — he had not done his job. One night we had heard wailing from down at camp. Without my knowledge, he snuck out of the caravan early the next morning and went down there to take pictures. He was not to know that he was recording a secret ceremony and sacred business, but he was lucky he didn’t get a spear through his leg. I did not know this until after he had gone, but I could feel the people set against us. Not overtly, never overtly, but it was there, a feeling, which I thought was simply because they could see through me. It seemed that one of my main aims, to be with Aboriginal people, was now unattainable.

I had hobbled the camels seven miles out of town, where the feed was best. Dookie I let roam loose. Each day I drove out to check on them, cut feed for Goliath for whom I had built a rope enclosure, and stare at Dookie who did not seem to be improving. I decided to fly back to Alice in the mail plane to consult a vet, or Sallay, or obtain a portable X-ray. I cannot describe the feeling of defeat, landing at the Alice airport. I had sworn never to go back, but now it looked as if I would never be free of the place, even physically. I consulted everyone, tried to get the X-ray unit from health departments, hospitals, even dental clinics. All to no avail. The response was always the same. All you can do is wait and see.

I flew back. Richard left, leaving me the car.

The routine over the next few weeks was abysmally tedious. I would force myself to get up in the morning, after having read a crummy science-fiction book all night to prevent me from thinking, then drive out to the camels. This was sometimes made more pleasant by taking along hordes of children. But the day I had my first encounter with a wild bull, I was on my own.

‘God, Diggity, Dookie looks bigger all of a sudden, it must be all this green feeee … oh no. Oh Jesus. It’s happened.’

There cavorting with my Zelly, and stirring up my boys were … My own camels were so toey, I thought they might take off with them if I waited too long. Luckily there was a young Aboriginal man just down the road. He drove round and round the bulls, so they couldn’t get at me, while I dashed out, feeling terrified out of my wits, and tied Zelly quickly to a tree. So far so good. Then I hurtled back to the settlement at the speed of light. Nothing like a bit of danger to get the blood flowing again. I grabbed my rifle and a couple of men and hurtled back again. I had hardly used the thing, and was still frightened of it, still shut my eyes involuntarily when I pulled the trigger. I rested my arm on the truck, shot, missed, shot, wounded, shot, shot, shot, shot, killed.

We then chased the other bulls in the vehicle, and the men shot them with piffling little .22s. It took many wounds to kill them, and it seemed that each bullet caused me almost as much pain. It was terrible, shocking, to see such proud beasts fall. How people kill for pleasure is outside my realm of understanding. And then the remorse.

Glenys, a nurse working for the Aboriginal health service, arrived a few days later. I immediately liked her. We went out often, hunting with the women, digging for maku (witchetty grub) and honey-ant and going on bunny bashes, in which the women find a warren, dig deep down into the earth with their crowbars and extract, if they’re lucky, handfuls of rabbits, who then have their necks expertly cricked, and are slung on the back of the truck to be taken home and roasted in the coals. I loved these expeditions — twenty women and children would cram into and on to the Toyota, all laughing and talking, and we would drive thirty-odd miles to a special place. The skinny mangy camp dogs would follow at a gallop, yapping and yelping, and arrive hours later half dead with exhaustion, just as we would be ready to leave.

Glenys and I decided to drive to Giles, a weather station one hundred miles west. There was a large Aboriginal camp there and a handful of whites to run the station. When we arrived, some young men came out and invited us into their canteen. We knew the inevitability of the conversation, and neither of us particularly wanted to go through that again. Glenys was part-Aboriginal, and felt their nigger jokes more strongly than I did. I had learnt to turn a deaf ear. We told one of them we would be going down to the camp.

‘See if you can’t knock down a few coons with that roo bar while you’re there, haw haw.’

I threw the truck into reverse and spattered him with gravel as I spun the wheel. Glenys leant out the window and swore at him. His jaw actually dropped.

When we got to camp, we went and had a talk with some women. After a while, there was some whispering and conferring going on amongst them. An old lady then came up and asked us if we would like to learn to dance. Of course the answer was yes. We were led to a clearing away from the view of the camp. The oldest women, beautifully ugly old hags, squatted down at the front while the younger women and girls formed a mass behind them. Glenys and I sat in front. There was much touching and laughing and reassurance. I did not speak enough Pitjantjara to understand all they were saying, but it didn’t matter. The mood was transmitted. Then the chanting began. It was led by the old ladies, different ones leading at different times. Others found sticks and tapped them one upon the other on the red earth in rhythm. I didn’t know whether to join in, did not know the rules of conduct. But as it went on, that droning, dust-woven, meditative music, I felt transported and close to tears. The sound seemed to rise from the ground. It belonged so perfectly, it was a song of unity and recognition, and the old crones were like extensions of the earth. I wanted to understand so much. Why were they doing this for us, these smiling women? I melted into a feeling of belonging. They were letting me into their world. They asked me if I wanted to dance. I felt stupid and clumsy and afraid to get up. Eventually an old woman took me by the hand and to the strange clicking rhythm and the droning melody, she danced and made me copy her. I tried my best. There were hoots of laughter from behind. Tears rolled down faces and sides were clenched in a delight of laughter. I laughed with them, and my old teacher hugged me. She showed me again the difficult bodily tremor that came at the end of each cadence. At last I got it and then we danced in earnest, hopping and shuffling in grooves in the dust, and shaking at the end, and turning and going back and then slowly skipping in a circle. Hours passed. Gradually an unspoken group decision that the dance had ended thinned out the women. Soon everyone was moving away. We stood there, not knowing what was expected of us. We were about to leave too when one of the old women came up to us, puckered her toothless mouth, and said, ‘Six dollar, you got six dollar.’ Her knobbly old hand was outstretched, the others turned and watched. I was dumbfounded, speechless. I had not thought … I gathered my speech and told her we didn’t have any. I emptied my pockets to show her. ‘Two dollar, you got two dollar.’ Glenys fumbled and gave her all the change she had. I promised her I would send her the money, then my friend and I left.