So, I’m here. I’m here. I have arrived.
At 7am, this feels like the first act of a new life. Unlike what came before, this is an act that I have planned, considered, researched. And the planning has brought me here, Wadeye, where sitting alone in a shipping container, my new home, which I am renting from the council for $100 a week. I think it was designed for shipping refrigerated goods, for it has thickly insulated walls; but now the refrigeration unit has been replaced by an air-conditioner, to transform the box into a fridge for humans. A fridge for white humans who want to stay in Wadeye, where the air is always thick and warm.
I didn’t want the fridge. I don’t even like air-conditioning. But you don’t get to choose: if you’re an outsider (white), then you live in a closed air-conditioned box. If you’re a local (Aboriginal), you live in an open house with the heavy warm air oozing through. Maybe we have different metabolisms or something. Or maybe people just feel more comfortable with their differences clearly demarcated.
I’m not asking anyone about this yet. I don’t want to ask hard questions yet, but rather, just sit back and observe. I accept that I know nothing. That I have ideas, eyes and ears, but essentially I know nothing.
So I’m here, waiting to receive knowledge. I have one bag of clothes, two bags of groceries I brought from Darwin (I already knew of the horrors of the Wadeye store), a laptop, a camera, and a high-quality digital audio recorder. Oh and three boxes of incense: I burn that to help me feel more meditative.
I’ve got a print-out showing how to conjugate the 38 verb models documented for the Murrinh Patha language, and a wordlist of about 300 vocabulary items, of varying utility. There are some good ones in there, like ku were, “dog” and kanarnturturt, “crocodile”; but many things I would like to say are missing, and many of the listings don’t seem very useful, like ku ngapkapti, “kidney fat man” and -winhiputh-, “to punish by fire”.
nganhiwinhiputhnu, “I will punish you by fire”, says the example. And now that I’ve given it so much attention, I find myself uselessly remembering this unuseful word.
I don’t have my car though. That’s still in Darwin, which takes me back to the backstory. About a month ago, I finally got all my permissions to do language research at Wadeye. The local elders gave permission, the university gave approval, and my mechanic said my car was as sound as it would ever be. So I drove up here from Sydney, covering the 4500 kms in 10 days, including a few stops along the way in national parks.
The plains of central Queensland seemed to take the longest. Endless flat grasslands, cows, and surly rednecks. I sat taking a crap in a public toilet by the river at Longreach, and read in front of me: “THE ONLY PROBLEM WITH AUSTRALIA IS TOO MANY ABOS AND FAGS” And further down: “BOB BROWN GREENY FAG”.
Not quite, dear author. In fact you are the main problem with Australia. But these sentiments fitted pretty well with most of the short, stunted conversations I had with people in the area. I wondered then if the folk of central Queensland more or less equated environmentalism with homosexuality. After all, Bob Brown is undeniably a fag, and under scrutiny he may even turn out to be an Abo. Well, maybe not. But he’s definitely an Abo-lover.
So when I stopped in these towns in my VOTE GREENS t-shirt (worn, admittedly, to provoke), did people see me with my city hair-do and unbronzed skin and just think, “fag”? Most of them looked at me something like that.
Of course, some people were kind and friendly all the same. The girl at the information centre in Miles asked me where I was headed, and when I told her, she said:
“Don’t stop for them when they’re by the side of the road. Because, you know, they get really …”
She kept not-saying things. In fact I don’t think she ever used the word “Aboriginal”, just “them”. I’ve seen the same effect in the Northern Territory, where a road sign on the way into Katherine has been under-scrawled, “THEY DON’T READ”; and in fact this generic prononoun now seems to be one of the most common ways that bush whitefellas refer to Aborigines. So this is what political correctness mixed with intense antagonism has boiled down to: Them.
“There were a lot of Them around where I was growing up,” the tourism girl goes on, and points on the wall-map in front of us. “And, well … yeah.” She trails off into a series of doubtful winces. But she is trying to be helpful, and sensitive in her own way.
I tell her that until now I have always stopped for Them, and never had a problem. (I have found people who needed lifts, wanted help with their cars, who had run out of petrol. People who perhaps had failed to meet the standards of efficiency and productivity demanded by white residents of the Outback, but nothing that has posed a risk to myself.)
She mitigates then, “Yeah well, I feel really sorry for all the stuff that happened to Them.” She tells me about how an aunt of hers found a store of old documents at a homestead in central Queensland. The documents recorded the killing of around 100 local Aborigines, 70 adults and 30 children.
“So what did she do with the documents?”
“Oh, she put them back in the homestead. It was better to leave them there.”
But I’m getting off track here. Back on the road, now with a pair of Swedish backpackers as passengers, I reached Cloncurry, where the landscape became hilly and the farm-belt gave way to true Outback. I felt much happier. We saw what looked like a pureblood dingo, standing among trees by the side of the road, staring at my car going past.
Outside of Mount Isa, a sign shows a picture of a man dressed in mining gear, and says: “WELCOME TO MT ISA. NOW YOU’RE A REAL AUSSIE.”
As we travelled from Queensland across to the Northern Territory - the long, desolate stretch of the Barkly Highway - we started to see water everywhere, lurking in huge new lakes by the sides of the highway, at places lapping over the top. The roads became riddled with flood-damage.
At Katherine Gorge, we bathed in a perfect natural swimming pool. Clear, sweet water over fine white sand; temperature refreshing but not cold. Even if I had been eaten by a crocodile, it would have been worth it.
With so much water around, I realised that I would not yet be able to get my car out to Wadeye, so I instead made for Darwin, where we arrived, eventually, after two more days driving north. I left my car in a university car-park, and caught the Murin Air local flight that serves as the only Wet Season access to Wadeye.
I arrived early for the Friday afternoon flight, and waited outside the tiny Murin Air building with about a dozen Aborigines. Three whitefellas were trying to organise the flights, their main labour seeming to be adjudicating on levels of drunkenness. People from Wadeye and other bush towns, where alcohol is unavailable, often take advantage of trips to Darwin to get drunk. Some may even travel to Darwin for the sole purpose of getting drunk. On standard Australian inter-city flights, clearly drunken passengers are not permitted to board, but for Murin Air the rules are rather more flexible: it depends how drunk you are. As far as I could tell, if you can stand up, more or less, then you can board. If you can’t stand up without leaning on something, and you’re shouting a lot, then you can’t board. For example, an old guy called Ambrose stumbled in to the waiting area and sat down next to me. He didn’t have any bags or luggage with him. In fact he didn’t have any shoes, and his clothes were covered in mud. He told me that he had been drinking under a bridge outside Darwin. He kept moaning, “When I want to drink, I drink. I love my life, you know. But my life is not in the right way. Nobody gives two fucks about me, and I don’t give two fucks about anybody.” He switched into one or two Aboriginal languages to talk with other people in the waiting room, who supplied him with cigarettes.
Ambrose was allowed to board. But another man, a very big man, came swaying into the building, crashing into things and falling all over the place. He tried telling the staff, “I love my wife. I love my wife and I want to go with her.” But he was not allowed to board.
As for me, I almost regretted being allowed on board, as the tiny aircraft, with its seven or eight passangers, wobbled its way through gusts of rain on the way out to Wadeye. There was some kind of safety announcement but it was completely inaudible; the plain shook and dipped in the squalls, but when we came out the othe side of the clouds, you could suddenly see the expanses of unspoilt forest in the Daly River estuary. Unsuccessfully I tried to spot crocodiles in the rivers, and then Wadeye came into view, and we thudded down onto the landing strip carved out among the trees.
My contact Mark was waiting at the end of the landing strip, with his clapped-out, taped-up Landcruiser. Mark is white, but unusually, he is a permanent resident of Wadeye, and has married into an Aboriginal family. Two of his daughters (I still can’t work out how many children he has) were in the back, holding a baby kangaroo, which they passed forward to me. It lay calmy, curled up in my lap with its delicate face and long eyelashes, and started trying to suckle my t-shirt.
I couldn’t believe I was finally here. My head was buzzing, ecstatic. Not even my first encounter with The Fridge could bring me down. I just dumped my stuff and locked it up (three gates, each with a heavy padlock), then went out to wander the streets. My stomach doesn’t know if its coming or going, but all the same I feel hungry.
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