When I first arrived in the remote desert country of the Northern Territory of Australia, I was amazed, shocked to some extent, by the lives these sparse remote deserts had nurtured for seemingly endless spans of time. So arid, so desolate in some ways, yet also full of life even if one had to look beyond just the surface level of things. By the time we arrived, even this area which was home to “the last of the Nomads” according to an ABC documentary of the time (“Benny and the Dreamers”) had become ‘settled’ if one may call a cluster of simple concrete block homes, a store, a clinic, some transportable school buildings, and a couple of diesel and petrol bowsers, settled. There was a road in and a road out. Hundreds of kilometers of sand and dirt tracks connected this place and the few other far-flung settlements to ‘town,’ Alice Springs, away to the east. Non-perishable goods you carried in yourself if you had a car. A ‘mail plane’ flew in mail and perishables once or twice a week along with newspapers and any inquisitive ‘dignitaries’ brave or foolish enough to risk the little planes that made the trip. After just one such flight we quickly decided a four-wheel drive twin cab ute was a preferable, if expensive option, for future trips to town…an almost 1,100 km round trip away (for a cup of coffee!).
Benny’s granddaughter, Rochelle, attended the little school that sat in the middle of the dust, weeds, and spinifex, where regular winds would spring up without warning raising ‘dust-devils’ high into the air and sometimes rousing sleeping dogs to a frantic game of ‘catch the rubbish’ that was swept up also at such times. Rochelle was a mischievous child who enjoyed her status as one of those that hid behind her grandfather’s position as one of the main elders in this little community of souls. One memorable day, after my wife and I had returned from a trip with the older girls class to Adelaide, he made a brief appearance at the school intent on righting the wrongs done to his granddaughter during the interstate trip! She, not considering she had been properly pandered to, had concocted some minor disagreements between herself and some of the other girls into something along the lines of constant bullying and harassment where she was the victim who was terribly mistreated, underfed, and generally had a miserable time of it (it couldn’t have been further from the truth). It took the intervention of the most senior woman in the school, Yuyuya (herself a formidable leader within the women’s ‘Business’ in the community and another of those in the documentary just mentioned) to ‘enlighten’ him as to the facts and quiet things down again, and Benny was able to go back to his place, satisfied that he had carried out his responsibilities towards his extended family members. Honour restored. It was within living memory of these elders that these people had lived as they had done for countless millennia ‘walking’ the long seasonal rounds of this remote landscape, and ‘singing’ their country into being. It was rumoured that another family group were still ‘out there’ in the wastelands living as they themselves always had done before the coming of the ‘whitefellas.’ Benny was himself a ‘greybeard’ who could still vividly remember seeing the first of the camel-mounted white men arriving from out of the south-east bringing their gifts and ‘whitefella’ food (and ‘mores’). Memorably, in one of the early scenes of the documentary, he enacted the opening of tins of food, and swigging down the contents – jam – and urging his fellow ‘travellers’ to, “forget that old bush tucker boys” (in favour of this “Jaaam!”). The arrivals were led by Paster Albrecht, a German Lutheran minister and missionary from Hermansburg (Ndaria), a community away to the southeast that he and a handful of others had set-up to bring in ‘the natives’ from their old ways. This new group that Benny and Freddy West represented on film (and in fact), were indeed, tribally speaking, perhaps the last of the [Australian] Nomads, as the documentary film makers claimed in the ABC documentary mentioned earlier. But it may not be just a coincidence that it also the early 50’s and marked the period when the British Government were testing missiles and atomic bombs in the area to the south and east of Kintore at a place called Maralinga, in north western South Australia. The tribes of this vast region of central Australia were then and still are now loosely related to one another through both blood and ‘skin’ ties, and many of the groups spoke more than one language, a necessity to facilitate the irregular coming together for ceremonies where young people were initiated, promised brides exchanged, and country ‘sung’ into being. Even though known as nomads, and nomadic peoples, actually the whole area was criss-crossed by so-called ‘Dreaming Trails’ which had to be looked after and was owned by individual small family groups who laid claim to particular features in the landscape with which they were literally linked (in the way of traditional Aboriginal people), indissolubly. Because of this link to landscape these ‘song-lines’ had to be ‘sung’ in a particular order so that the country could be visualised, come alive as it were, by, or through, the joint input of those ‘Business’ men or Women involved. Ceremony (‘business’) couldn’t start until all were present, and people had to travel sometimes long distances on foot to get to the gathering places. Because people ‘came out of’ particular pieces of landscape or landscape features, such as rock holes (places where water was to be found), rocky outcrops (sources of food such as goanna, wallaby, etc), or even individual trees, it was to these places that their spirits returned after death. In Kintore (Walunguru) there were Men’s and Women’s mountains, one to the south, the other to the east close to the community. In the Tanami desert country were such features were few and far between, trees became people’s ‘Places.’ I recall once on a drive to town, 300kms to the southeast, having a “twin tree” (two trunks from the same root) pointed out to me by my teaching assistant (a fully initiated ‘business man’ also), as the “Place” of the twins who were both students in the school. Only through such shared knowledge can one really start to come to grips with what the loss and despoilation of the land itself really mean to indigenous people, which occurred as a result of both European colonisation and the so-called ‘modernisation’ that followed in its wake.
I had always considered – in some senses at least – that those that led nomadic lives were “free” to come and go, or to travel at will, so to speak, without a care in the world. Actually, the truth is very different as one quickly learns through the kind of contact just described. Indeed, I personally have never felt in some ways, quite so restrained than during my years living in such places, not wanting to cause offence by blundering into areas that were out of bounds to all but the traditional owners (without their explicit permission). Because one didn’t actually have a map that spoke to such things, it was just expected that we would somehow get to know and respond accordingly (this was their ‘Law’ after all). This should be understood in the context of the sense described earlier; one didn’t wish to cause further pain and distress to people where the land within which their whole lives were lived out had already been repeatedly violated. For them, it was as if their very souls (or spirits) had already been stripped from them. There is a very poignant documentary one can still access that gives one a feel as to the extent of this loss, a glimpse of just what this means to those to whom this happened. It can be found on Google. It belongs to BBC News and is called “The Day the Pintupi Nine entered the Modern world” (by Alana Mahony, Kiwirrkurra/23rd Dec. 2004). These were the extended family members of the same group that we lived with in the Western desert country back in the early 90’s (Kintore is a sister community to Kiwirrkurra, the former in Northern Territory, the latter in Western Australia – good luck in finding that on the ground!).
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If Nomads, from wherever they hail, are not “free” in both the normal sense we understand it to mean, and in the deeper sense, why do we, those of us who have long, long ago lost such connections, still long for what we consider such a way of life offers? What of the much vaunted ‘freedom’ that such a life seems to proffer us, ‘modern’ people? In my own country, for example, in more recent times (taking the broadest brush) many older Australians – those with sufficient funds to indulge themselves in ‘mobile homes’ (those mobile shells that allow their occupants to travel in comfort and some degree of safety – may be found at many places along the highways and byways that traverse (mainly) the edges of the continent. They lay claim to some kind of ‘freedom’, for indeed they are ‘free’ to stop where they choose and stay for as long as they desire (provided there is power to plug into, a shop for supplies, and other such facilities). We call them ‘the Grey Nomads.’ Is this “freedom” then? To be able to get up each morning and travel on, or not, as the spirit takes us?
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35yrs ago now, even before our time with the indigenous peoples of remote Outback Australia, my wife and I fitted out an old truck as a ‘gypsy wagon,’ When completed it had a pot-belly stove with a chimney (and a ‘hat’), a sliding hatch above the bed area, so that one could lie under the stars at night, a backdoor that opened in two parts, the top half with glass window which could be left open on warm days. There were stained-glass windows above the sink area, and the whole ensemble was finished off with a stoop over the back (mini) verandah. In this set-up, we, too, travelled with children, a dog, and a guinea pig. Later, our youngest daughter was born in it in a (mobile) ‘home-birth!’ in the Adelaide hills. it had to be left behind when we moved to the NT – and only much later, and after many long journeys and years had passed (including our years teaching in the remotest of NT’s Aboriginal schools) were we to be re-united with it once more, up in the hill-country to the east of Kempsey, in mid-north coast NSW (but that’s another story). There, on the small property bought whilst on holiday from the NT, and to which we headed after we moved from the Territory, it perhaps sits still, maybe waiting for a new generation of ‘travellers’ to be inspired by it and begin the rounds again! For us it is still a memento of a somewhat ‘mobile’ dream of freedom, a time now past (at least for us and that kind of ‘dreaming’)! Yet it too had a predecessor. An old Commer van I converted to a camper-van in which to live and travel back in the early 80’s (I have written elsewhere of those adventures “On the road” travelling with a friend across the Nullarbor Plain to Western Australia for those interested in such journeys).
Were we, was I, ‘free’ then?
And, if not this, then what is it, this need in some to travel, to see new things, even when it is not driven by some social or economic necessity?
For myself, was it a seed planted in my subconsciousness by a mother who should have been a writer or a teacher, but instead had a great gaggle of kids, so – with little or no time for anything else – transplanted her own longing into her children? Her love of the English country life and its imagined freedoms, that she thought could be found perhaps in the countryside, amongst the hedgerows and the shady bye-ways that few took back then, except for the colourful locals and the gypsey caravans that one could come across unexpected? Much of this was stirred in us when she read us the stories of Beatrix Potter, and Kenneth Grahame? Our favourite, ‘Wind in the Willows,’ had a kind of anti-hero in the old (rich) rascal Mr Toad, of Toad Hall, who loved things new and exciting, such as the day he brought a Gypsey Wagon and horse, to live the ‘life of the open road’ with two friends whom he bullied into being reluctant partner’s on his madcap escapade (old ‘Ratty’ and ‘Moley’). Who can say for sure where and when such a seed, or need, is transplanted from one heart to another?
Something within the hearts and minds of those that attempt this outer journeying opens when they experience something of the scent of such things. The kind of opening that must be first tasted before it can be fully understood.
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For Sufis, and others of a mystical persuasion, this experience takes an inner form that is expressed through the language of metaphoric longing for access to a mysterious landscape encapsulated in the wonderful dramas of the spirit as it ‘journeys’ through inner spaces unseen by the casual eye/observers, but ‘there’ non-the-less. The very word ‘Tariqa’ (Sufi mystic school) means ‘the path taken by the Bedouin between oasis in the desert. Such ‘paths’ do not appear as roads might on a map, perhaps even less are there footprints visible to the casual traveller, but they are, never-the-less, ‘mapped’ in the hearts and souls of those ‘Knowers of the Path,’ the Sheiks who lead this train of souls between such ‘places.’ Does this mean that the traveller on the ‘path of return’ cannot be other than what to date we have been calling a ‘Nomad?’ Such questions are to some extent at least, dependent on the one who asks, and the one who responds. I recall Jiddu Krishnamurti, during one of his monologic ‘dialogues’ saying that the answer was always in the question itself…who is it that’s asking, and whom does one expect to answer? So, be careful in how you phrase your questions and listen, listen very carefully to the answer that is given. It may be that this will take a lifetime – if the question is ‘right’ but the waiting will be worthwhile if you do it properly, for there is a longing that resides deep within the human heart. Some call it ‘nostalgia.’ The word itself means “the state of being homesick, a desire to return to, to recreate something now past, lost.” It is linked etymologically to the Greek ‘nostos’ (return home) and ‘algos’ (pain). Such a homecoming as may be offered by much of the ‘travelling’ spoken of here is evinced by (but rarely satisfied through) such a returning. Such ‘pain’ is in some respects unsatisfiable because that which once was, has – with time – moved on. However, for the traveller on the inner plain, such ‘journeys of return’ even where they are fraught with all kinds of pain, suffering and loss, are always, in the final analysis, rewarded because they speak to different roots, ones that are, in a very real sense, imperishable, for they are not established in time, but give rise to the very ‘stuff’ that we think we are searching for, which is itself established in another realm altogether.
One may be told such things, however, but such (re)telling by itself is never enough; like the real taste of a strawberry, only tasting will suffice. The trust in the one who tells us of these things can be of help, of course, like those members of the travelling ‘caravans’ who must have trust in their Sheikh (the one who knows the path) if they are to arrive safely at their destination. This is why such ‘truth telling’ as is possible in this world is so important. Once we lose sight of the very gift we are born with, this inbuilt ability to listen to, to hear, and to respond to such as these ‘knowers’, we are already lost, unable to clearly distinguish truth from lie, then little but Grace can save us. One may spend a lifetime ‘on the road’ and never see (know) a thing. Likewise one may spend one’s entire lifetime in one place and yet know (and hold) the key to eternal life.
In the end one must learn this important lesson: never, never, confuse the journey for mere journeying, lest you too become ‘nomads’ without a home and with no way forward or back.
Tracks in a Pathless Land 