Out here in the Western Desert – seven hundred klicks from the nearest town – the air’s so clear, so untainted by lights and smog, you can lie in your swag at night watching satellites drifting across the skies. The Milky Way curls like a trail of sugar across the darkness, and shooting stars – the spirits of the dead returning home – tumble from dusk ‘til…
Dawn comes clean and cold and fast, a thin strip of light that lifts the veil of the night and peels it back, revealing camps in the scrub and people stretching, yawning and cursing the cold, rekindling fires, stomping up and down, huddling over blackened billies and greasy pans with frozen hands outstretched towards the flames.
The mulga crackles and the water boils and as the sun climbs over the barren blue ridges they gulp pannikins of sweet black tea and crack feeble jokes about the cuisine.
Mangy dogs howl in the distance and fat black crows perch in the bloodwoods, their caws a lonesome echo from some place you’d never wanna be.
An SSB radio transceiver erupts. Wild staccato bursts of chatter hammer the air. It’s been rigged up to a Toyota’s battery, its aerial draped across the dust-encrusted bonnet. Ravenous bites of squelch punctuate riotous gossip sessions in Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Pintubi, Luritja, Warlpiri and – and out here on the border - Ngaatjatjarra.
Word soon spreads that this “Midnight Oil mob” are coming through.
The Western Desert is a region in central Australia that’s utterly devoid of telephone boxes, television studios, commercial radio networks, newspapers and advertisements. It’s a region that doesn’t contribute to the nation’s annual consumption of 115 million McDonalds burgers. A piece of country known, so inappropriately, as The Dead Heart.
Ahead, just over the border into Western Australia, lies Warakurna.
It’s in the middle of nowhere. To the north lies the Great Sandy Desert. To the west, the Gibson Desert and stories of explorers like Giles and Carnegie who tied Aboriginals to their camels and fed them on salted beef until, in desperation, the hostages led them to water. To the south, the Great Victoria Desert and the bitter legacy of the atomic testing program at Maralinga. The nearest slice of civilisation, 700 klicks to the south west, is Laverton, a gold and nickel mining town in which you’d need a digital watch to find a good time. To the back, back along the axle-crackin’ corrugations of the Gunbarrel Highway, lies Uluru (Ayers Rock) and, over seven hundred k’s away, Alice Springs.
Heralded by shredded tyres, overturned cars and the sign that became a catch-phrase for the rest of the tour – Warakurna: STRICT RULES – the settlement sprawls in the dust: a smattering of prefabricated metal shacks; steel power poles; the occasional twisted and gnarled tree, its lower branches stripped for firewood; and great stockades of dead cars that threaten to dwarf even the rugged red hills that climb from the plains like primeval beasts, their barren razorback ridges dominating the litter-strewn landscape and the psyches of all who pass through it.
In a pall of red dust the convoy of Toyotas rolls into the settlement, swinging into formation around the demountable council office. Out hop crews of musicians and roadies and support personnel who take it all in with dust-bitten eyes: the wastelands and the rubbish, the disintegrating cars and mangy limping dogs. The kids with snot dribbling from their noses and eyes caked with flies.
In front of the metal-clad store young kids in the dust, pushing cans attached to lengths of fencing wire across the dirt. Resembling crude toy lawnmowers, they rattle and roll through the litter, bouncing and clanging across the hard-baked earth.
Stage manager Michael Lippold pulls out a football and the kids swarm around, shooting stab passes and drop kicks, lobbing torpedoes and drop punts, showing off skills that have long since passed from vogue in the cities.
The truck, an ex-army four-wheel-drive Bedford that had been converted into a chook pen rumbles in and the road cases rattle out, a train of black boxes clattering across the dirt.
Warakurna hadn’t even been on the itinerary a day ago, had only been suggested last night, and yet here they are – Midnight Oil, a band that usually books its gig three months out – hoeing into lunch beneath a wall of dead cars, staring with disbelieving eyes at the filth and the squalor.
Great walls of burnt out cars – Holdens and Valiants and Falcons, panels vans, station wagons, utes and sedans – are piled on top of each other, forming ridges of scorched, rusting metal. Stripped of serviceable parts, they circle the settlement like wagons, the discarded bones on the edge of town.
Ah, the cars that ate the west, beasts that sit hovering the dust, their engines growling and groaning and choking … rumbling across the earth.
There’s a number plate in the dust. N.T. - OUTBACK AUSTRALIA. There’s a layer of find red sand baked onto the reflective white paint. The paint’s been blistered by fire, peeled off to yield another layer of silver paint splattered by craters erupting with rust, the metal corroding, reflecting brilliant blues and purples and azures like an opal. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust…
For the nomadic people of the desert, cars have been a godsend. The increased mobility has allowed them to organise bigger ‘business’ ceremonies than ever, allowing them to carry out their traditional tribal rituals and obligations.
But there’s a darker side to all this.
Petrol sniffing, introduced into the Top End by American bomber crews during the Second World War, has become a major problem among kids in the desert.
And Hollywood’s had a hideous effects on the car culture..
The car culture has become so bastardised that in neighbouring settlements like Warburton, videos have been banned because of the adverse effect movies like Mad Max were having on the population.
Kids who don’t know where Vietnam is wear Rambo t-shirts and call Rob Hirst “Rocky” because “he’s got strong legs”. Their older brothers sit in cars, idling in the dust, with names painted down the sides: names like The Bandit and Old Smokey.
For thousands of years the Ngaatjatjarra and Ngaanyatjarra people have been living out here, hunting and gathering food from the desert and upholding the lore and the laws of a complex tribal society.
For thousands of years they lived untouched by the outside world. But in the 1930s prospectors swept through from the west in search of Lasseter’s mythical reef of gold and the “sorry times’ erupted with the stench of cordite and the gut-wrenching taste of strychnine. Some people were chained to logs and forced to cook for the newcomers. Others were shot or fed slabs of damper laced with poison.
Fifty years later, the tribal elders sit in a creek bed recounting the stories.
“They just spread a bit of poison on the piece of bread and give it to them just like a dog. My uncle got shot … and my father escaped … and that old fella, Wally Porter, he was up on that hill there, lookin’ down, and ah … he seen my old father crawlin’ across here and he came and … just carried him up that hill…”
Today the Ngaatjatjarra people have come to terms with the ways of the modern world by developing a strategy to protect their sacred sites and their links with the Dreamtime while, at the same time, allowing mining companies to explore their land.
Because the integrity of their sacred sites is so important that even to disclose where those sites are would be an infringement of their religious lore, the Ngaatjatjarra have preserved the secrecy of the sites by showing seismic teams from the Shell company where the sites are not situated, thereby allowing the seismic teams to conduct tests in areas that do not present major cultural problems.
Today, there are 1200 Aboriginal people living in the region, 85% of whom receive social security benefits. In order to gain economic self-sufficiency and therefore a greater influence on their own struggle for self-determination, most of the people contribute between five and fifteen dollars each week to the Ngaanyatjarra Council. Since 1982 the council has been buying businesses at the rate of one a year. They own a trucking company and a buying agency in Perth and two aircraft and a hangar for their Alice-based airline, Ngaanyatjarra Air. They’ve also purchased the Central Australian Ampol Dealership which allows them to control fuel supplies throughout the region. During negotiations for that purchase. The Ngaanyatjarra Council worked with the company’s chemists to have additives put into the petrol to make it unpalatable to the sniffers.
Outside the community store, some of the shareholders in these ambitious ventures stand off in small jabbering groups, watching the road crew trundle their black boxes through the dust, shy people standing back, watching with a mixture of animated bemusement and reserved curiosity. Between their scarred black legs mangy dogs limp and scoot away, scrawny creatures missing great patches of fur. And though they may be the most miserable canine specimens imaginable, they won’t be put out of their misery because they’re camp dogs, camp dogs that keep the place clean by eating discarded scraps, that give fair warning of the approach of strangers to the bush camps and outstations, that can keep a person warm in the bone-chilling depths of winter.
And through the early afternoon, when the winter sun is at its zenith in an iridescent blue sky, a young camel plods around munching on apples and cans of Coke and cigarettes and anything else it’s offered while young kids sit behind Rob’s kit hammering out rhythms on the snare as Rob stands behind them, racing them, pummelling the skins with another pair of sticks and a grin as bright as the day.
Further west, in the wastelands of the Gibson Desert or the Great Victoria, half a dozen of their people are still roaming, untouched by Toyotas and petrol and grog and rock ‘n’ roll, people who are still hunting and gathering and, no doubt, working the silver birds that roar across the open skies into their Dreamtime tales.
© Andrew McMillan, 1987
adapted from Strict Rules, the book of the 1986 Blackfella-Whitefella tour
Niblock Publishing 2008
