Here's another crack at opening up our imaginations about different ways to live, this time drawing on the experiences and knowledge of one of Australia's First Nations. This is not my story, it's my reflection on someone else's story.
We often think of the invasion and colonisation of Australia as having taken place in the 19th century. In reality it was a gradual process and it continues to this day. We see its continuation in our own time in Rio Tinto's destruction this year of the Juukan Caves, a site occupied by the Puutu Kunti Kuurama and Pinikura peoples for at least 45,000 years. We also see it in the recent exclusion of Wangan and Jagalingou people from the site of the Carmichael Mine in Central Queensland.
Both these nations have had to live with Europeans on their country for generations, but there are still people alive today who are among the first generation of their peoples to have contact with Europeans. One of the most famous is the celebrated Yolngu actor David Gulpilil, who spent his childhood in remote Arnhem Land and was one of the first of his extended family to see Europeans at the age of about 8.
Less famous are the Walmajarri people who hail from the Great Sandy Desert in the north-west of Western Australia, just to the south of Fitzroy Crossing. They had the good fortune to live in a part of Australia that is not only remote from the main population centres but of little economic interest to Europeans. There is not enough rain there to support crops or cattle, and no minerals have been found under their lands. As a result, the Walmajarri were largely left alone. While some of them left their homelands at various times in the 20th century to work on the cattle stations to their north, many had limited contact with Europeans until the 1950s and 1960s when the last members of the community finally left the desert.
 |
| Lumpulumpu 3 by Manmarr Daisy Andrews |
Members of the community have written about their lives in Out of the Desert: Stories of the Walmajarri Exodus published in 2002. This is a genuinely beautiful volume, with short stories published in both Walmajarri and English along with artworks depicting various places and scenes from Walmajarri country. The book was edited and the stories translated into English by two missionary linguists from the Summer Institute of Linguistics and a co-worker who was the partner of noted Walmajarri artist Jimmy Pike. Two of the last community members to leave the desert, the sisters Ngarta Jinny Bent and Jukuna Mona Chugana, also wrote a book telling the stories of their two journeys out of the desert, called Two Sisters: Ngarta and Jukuna, in partnership with Eirlys Richards and Pat Lowe.
The stories are, in a way, deceptively simple. A lot of them are written as learning aids for children, or writing exercises for the adults as Walmajarri was being developed from a spoken into a written language. They are stories of everyday life - events from their lives in the desert, their early encounters with Europeans and their introduced animals and plants, and their journeys north to work on or live around the stations.
Despite their simplicity, the stories open up a window into a whole new world. Here's a few things I learned from them.
 |
| Jiligaa Jilji by Jimmy Pike |
It's not easy, and it takes skill. Someone like me would be dead within a week. I don't have any of the knowledge required for survival in that environment. Walmajarri children were taught this knowledge from birth. What to someone like me seems like a barren wasteland is actually a rich source of food and even water.
Some of the water is visible on the surface, but much of it is underground. The Walmajarri knew every water source on their country, including the ones you had to dig for, and planned their journeys to be at one or the other each night. Things could still go wrong - the soak could be dry and you could have to travel on to the next one. It would get hairy, and some of the stories involve rather stressed searches for water. But they survived. If one water source failed, they knew where to go next, and what plants to suck on in the meantime to keep dehydration at bay.
Nonetheless there were dangers and a couple of the stories are cautionary tales of children who wandered away from camp and were overcome by heat stress, or left in the shade of some bushes with with their grandmothers while the parents head off to find food and water. There is genuine tension in these stories - what will happen if the parents fail to return? Thankfully they generally did. They knew what they were doing.
You can eat cat.
 |
| Jumu by Rosie Tarku King |
But there's more. By the time of these stories many people may not have seen Europeans but their impacts were being felt. One of the biggest was the invasion of feral cats which became endemic in Walmajarri country, displacing many of the native species. By necessity, cat ended up on the menu. As did camel, on the odd occasions when these desert wanderers found their way unattended into the country.
Not that they ate indiscriminately. Far from it. There are a couple of amusing stories about peoples' first encounters with watermelon. One involves a couple travelling between waterholes and discovering that successive water sources were dry. Along the way they found a watermelon plant and the husband, who had seen them before, urged his wife to drink some of the juice. Despite her extreme thirst it took more than a day for her to overcome her fear of being poisoned and try this foreign fruit.
Then of course there were cattle. These rarely ranged into Walmajarri country itself, since it was too dry for them, but as the Walmajarri travelled north they often met the cattle before their owners. One story tells of a father and son spending two terrified days trying to stay out of the path of a mob of these horned monsters before waking up one morning surrounded by them and realising they are harmless. Then, of course, they would spear them, and that was a whole different story.
 |
| Rockhole Desert Country by Jimmy Pike |
It should hardly come as a surprise that a culture living in a desert would end up with a different family structure to the Western nuclear family, or indeed the Western extended family.
Some of the differences are easy to understand since they also occur in our own history. For instance it was normal for a man to have more than one wife. The children took this in their stride, talking about their mother and their second mother. But then it gets rapidly more confusing, because the distinction between a mother or father and that mother or father's sisters and brothers is rather blurry. They are all regarded as 'mothers' and 'fathers', and their 'parents' as the child's grandparents. For westerners meeting people from these cultures this gets confusing very quickly.
In such a small community it is important to be extra-careful to avoid marrying the wrong person, particularly when people lived in small groups and might go years between seeing some of their relatives. It seems that this was the responsibility of the grandmothers. Here is how Jukuna describes it in Two Sisters.
The marriages were arranged like this: the grandmother of a small girl (on her father's side) chooses a man who will be the little girl's 'son-in-law'. The grandmother says to the man she chooses, 'this little girl is your mother-in-law. Now you have to keep bringing her meat until she grows up.' Then she gives the girl a husband. When she has a baby - a boy or a girl - she promises that child to the son-in-law already chosen for her by her grandmother. If her first child is a boy, she will give him to her son-in-law first, and afterwards, when she has a girl, she will give her to him to be his wife. The boy will stay with his 'husband', who looks after him for some of the time until he grows up. When the boy is ready to go through law the 'husband' has to tie the hairstring belt around him.
A hairstring is a chord made from human or animal hair which is worn by initiated men. Jukuna doesn't say how the grandmother makes her choice, but the system clearly has advantages in an environment where food is scarce. The young girl and her children have have an extra provider when they are little and need it most. The boy has an extra mentor who is not his father (similar in some ways to a godfather). Everybody belongs in more than one family, which is important when the environment is harsh and there are lots of ways one can die.
 |
| Purnurni by Ngurnta Amy Nuggett |
There's more than one way to damage a culture.
In most of Australia, the destruction of Aboriginal society (to use C.D. Rowley's phrase) was violent. It involved battles, massacres and forced removals, while those who lived in relative peace close to European settlements suffered from exposure to European diseases and poisoning by European alcohol. Their societies were decimated, in some cases annihilated.
The Walmajarri were extremely fortunate that their remote, arid country protected them from most of this. No European colonists came along to force them off their country because the Europeans saw it as useless. This meant the damage was less, and occurred more gradually. But there was still damage.
For one thing, as noted feral European animals played havoc with the local wildlife and this upset the food supply. They made the best of it by eating cat, but it wasn't the same.
Other things could perhaps be speculated on. Did Western diseases slowly travel south and do damage before Walmajarri ever saw the people who brought them? And Jukuna talks about the drying of the water sources. Was this a result of windmill-driven pumps further north lowering the water table, or just a coincidental drought?
The other factor is that the economic opportunities in the stations around the Fitzroy River drew people north. By that I don't mean money. The Walmajarri didn't use currency and it doesn't seem that they were paid for their services in any case, aside from food and second hand clothing that they struggled to work out how to wear. But food WAS economic opportunity in a desert culture, and the chance at a reliable supply was hard to pass up, especially with the other pressures facing their society. And while some worked on the stations, others hung about on the fringes being passed food by family members and spearing the odd cow.
The result of all these pressures was that Walmajarri country was slowly depopulated, and those who stayed behind found it harder and lonelier to stay. Those who remained were vulnerable. The key event in Ngarta's story is the coming of two brothers from a neighbouring country. These brutal outlaws would track small groups of remaining Walmajarri, invade their camps, kill the men and older women and take the younger women as 'wives'. A fully populated Walmajarri would soon have put a stop to it, but with most of the fit young men working on the stations they were defenceless. Ngarta, then a young woman, was one of the last group remaining, and she finally survived the carnage by tricking the brothers into following the tracks of some cattle, enabling her to safely reunite with her older sister and other family members.
 |
| Louisa Downs by Janyka Ivy Nixon |
Not all law is the same.
Once the Walmajarri entered station life, there was no going back. This was not because they didn't want to. It seems likely that, given the choice, they would have alternated periods on the stations with periods back on Walmajarri country. After all, certain important ceremonies such as initiations were tied to particular places in that country. But European law was different. Once they joined station life the Walmajarri came under the authority of the 'Protector' who had the power to determine where they lived. Those who tried to leave the stations were seen as runaways, hunted down and brought back. Eventually those who proved surplus to station life were not sent back to their own country, but to various mission stations.
Not only that, but the Walmajarri were surprised to discover that the Europeans considered hunting cattle to be a crime, and thereby hangs a tale. When Ngarta lured the two brothers up to Christmas Creek Station they were arrested and sent to prison. They weren't imprisoned for their many murders, but for cattle theft. It's not clear whether the police didn't care about the deaths of multiple Walmajarri, or whether the Walmajarri considered it none of their business. Either way, after a while the two brothers returned and settled down to station life with their Walmajarri wives.
Some time later, a group of Walmajarri lawmen arrived at their camp painted and feathered, ready to carry out Walmajarri justice on the murderers. Their number would have been up but for one thing. Since they were married to Walmajarri women, however that marriage originated, their brother-in-law considered that as family he was obliged to intercede on their behalf. The murderers were spared and lived to a disreputable old age. As I say, not all families are the same.
Some memories never die.
To survive in an arid environment you have to have a reliable, accurate mental map of the country. You need to know the location of every hill, every waterhole. When getting lost is a death sentence, navigation is a non-negotiable skill.
Two decades or more passed from when the last Walmajarri left the desert to when some of them returned for the first time. Yet when some of them were introduced to Western art techniques they didn't paint cattle, or the tree outside their door, they painted the various waterholes and sand-hills of their home. Even though they couldn't visit their country, they carried it in their heads and hearts and when they learnt to paint, it was what came out.
I have used some of these images for this post. All these images belong to their creators and are displayed or in the catalogues of various Western Australian galleries and arts centres - check them out!
 |
| My Father's Country by Purlta Maryanne Downs |
Comments