Condensed Book Manuscript – 15th Feb 08
This is a taste of the stuff I’m working into a book, I say hopefully. There’s some pretty different styles in there, you might find one that suits if you skip through it.
Hunting Wave Hill
1. ‘Where’s that?’
On some of the best cattle country in the world, Wave Hill, the place, is unknown to most Australians It lies on a little-used road, formerly a droving route, in the remote Northern Territory. In country still littered with stone tools and emblazoned with petroglyphs, Wave Hill station was claimed by Nat “Bluey’ Buchanan, a man the local people came to know, like an ephemeris, as ‘Paraway’- (‘far away’). Wave Hill was the name Gordon Buchanan gave to a range called Libanungu – for the gently rolling plays of light and wind he discerned there in the scrub. Those ‘waves’ are still there, visible in a certain light, but ‘Wave Hill’ has taken flight several times. Wave Hill, the station, has rolled as aqueously as required by the times, towed like a floating dray from one mooring to another.
Wave Hill, it seems now, was always going to be a chimeric beast, a many- headed creature adept at reinvention. Its first recorded re-birth occurred in 1924, when to the scorn and bemusement of the Gurindji, the Traditional Owners, the station was moved after a biblical flooding of the Victoria River. The rains, epic in proportion, were bought about by a Gurindji clever man[1] keen to exercise his powers before a doubtful (and drought-afflicted) station manager. Doubtlessly hoping to remove his white adversaries, the clever man was cheated when they merely rebuilt their station some twenty miles east, and erected a sign bearing the same name, although the hill was no longer in sight. Half a century later, Wave Hill station was moved again. Water, the lack of it this time, was ostensibly the cause.
As art mirrors life, in another piece of nomenclative resonance the name of the station has also fled the confines of its original moorings, shifted over the desert ocean like some memetic wave traversing both the breadth of the Australian landscape and the imaginal, semiotic, parallel plane reflecting it. ‘Wave Hill’ is known throughout the land, though the reason why is little-known. But of those who have heard the name, and have some concept, however erroneous, of that to which it refers, how many have sat on the hill itself, or even seen it, out in the immense country-the gorge, mesa and spring; spinifex and blacksoil country at the headwaters of the enormous Victoria River?
Then, from the crest of ‘Wave Hill’ the noun, shifting, ethereal leviathan, a plume of spray shoots forth, for those in the know, a verb, but something more; the ‘Walk-off’.
‘Hello?I’m working on the Wave Hill Walk-off and-’
‘The what?’
Motion again. The wave, red with desert dust, breaches itself, breaking onto the odd beach of recognition here, or a cognizant crescent bay-smile there. There are sprinkled, in Australia, like the cattle over Wave Hill’s thirty thousand square miles, a knowing crowd of inductees, privy to the events at Wave Hill in 1966 and those that followed. There are those who claim the Gurindji as heroes for striking against their powerful masters, and those who decry them as pawns in a larger game. Of all the initiates though, there are few that doubt that the events at Wave Hill comprising ‘the Walk-off’ constitute a pivotal turn in both Australia’s evolution and its identity. It’s a problematic inheritance though, politically riven.
Some emblematic markers are less contentious than others. At Bondi, another icon in the nation’s identity, the latte set are dining out on the knowledge that it is possible to partake of and enact ‘Bondi’ simultaneously. But if the yuppies and surfies are having a whale of a time there, both as participants in and constituents of a more accessible nationalism on the golden shores of Sydney, how are they to approach the battered and dusty offerings of Wave Hill that may wash up on the beach? Unlike cosmopolitan Bondi, which has the cryogenic ability to invent itself anew for each wave of swimmers on its sand and investors on its shore, the Walk-off comes indelibly branded, a victim of premature aging like the Gurindji themselves, in the dusty boots of history. The politics of race is entwined through the tale, inextricable as a thread of rawhide in the plait of a stockwhip or kangaroo belt. And as the Gurindji will tell you, stockwhips can be used to achieve all manner of ends.
The Walk Off still seems quintessentially Australian, though it is now more than four decades since the Gurindji caught the attention of the nation and divided it, and more than three since Gough Whitlam (who was already in his sixties) ‘handed back’ the land. Has the Australia that the Walk-off cleft been replaced by something more complex? Beneath the surface issues- equality and land rights, lurks the old Achilles heel at the heart of the Antipodean proposition and psyche- European settlement and its legal and moral justification. Those with the strongest opinions on those issues would presumably be those of Anglo or Aboriginal extraction- but isn’t that image of Australia itself a little old hat now?
The Walk-off story is pockmarked with the pellet spray of a past that has quickly become remote- semi-indentured labour, stockmen on horses, the pastoral industry prior to mechanisation. Gough seems to be vivified by past glory and sits immortal in his wheelchair, but the other players are mostly buried. Events in Aboriginal life become history quicker than for others. Their ‘old men’ aren’t as old as other ‘old men’- none of the Gurindji Walk-off leaders are alive anymore- to discuss their actions, to give life to memories. Their children now have children of their own. The kids of Wattie Creek ride donkeys round the town, but have never sat on a horse. They can’t imagine a world where their people lived on cattle stations and not the economically gravity-defying communities that the actions of their Grandparents helped to create.
Yet the Walk-off lingers on, inspiring a steady stream of documentaries, reminiscence and reportage. Places associated with the Walk-off will soon have currency as modern, secular sacred sites- if such can be said to exist- listing on Federal and NT heritage registers. In 2006 the party for the Fortieth anniversary drew quite a crowd, considering that the venue was alcohol-free and a three day drive from the closest major city. Meanwhile, a steady stream of social justice devotees (‘down south do-gooders’), white and black, find inspiration still in the narrative and archived footage, and make their way slowly out to the Gurindji country, occupying positions in the Aboriginal service organisations of the region.
Rusting, out-dated, battered by post- modernism and urban pluralities, dropping desert dust- perfect candidate for a PR make-over. What place now for the story of the Gurindji, the ‘Unlucky Australians?’
2. Road to Kalkaringi
When I came to play a leading hand in the production of the 40th Anniversary Festival celebrating the Wave Hill Walk-Off, the consensus seemed to be that I had landed a job no-one would take up voluntarily. Blame then, as it must accordingly be apportioned, for how I got involved at Kalkaringi rests with my parents. In 1958 a book called The Australian Legend was published. My father, Russel Ward, was the author. Although he went on to write or edit another thirty-odd titles, it is ‘the Legend’ that is still dragged into any discussion of Australian identity half a century later, and it was the concerns at the heart of ‘the Legend’ that continued to motivate and inspire him for the rest of his eighty-one years. To tell then, how I came to be working with the nations’ most notorious Indigenous workplace reformers and their descendents, I need to describe how I took receipt of his preoccupations as a child.
As I grew into adulthood, the Walk-Off was a feature of recent Australian history so familiar that I am hard pressed now to identify when I first became aware of it. Not that I imagine that was the case for all the children of the early seventies. In my house we were peculiarly tuned, I think, to the plateau of events, past, present and Australian, in which social values and political developments intersected. This focus and funneling was mostly provided courtesy of my father. As he said in the foreword to his autobiography, he was ‘for the weak, not the strong, the poor, not the rich’. He was for the Irish convict, not his British master. He was for the rank and file worker, not his well-monied boss. Although law abiding, he was for the bush ranger of poor stock, not the trooper whose job was to catch him. He loved to mock pretension and the airs and graces of the rich and well to do. He constantly slandered the polo playing captains of industry, the crooked cops, the squatters and ‘animal husbands’ at the helm of the right side of politics.
More than being his primary concern, the play between these tensions provided the filter through which he observed not just history, but the entire world, from his study to the front door of our home and beyond, from Canberra to Uganda and Petrograd. Through his, and hence my eyes, every interaction between two parties was an opportunity for the virtues of ‘a fair go’ – decency, compassion, egalitarianism- to flourish, or for the dark stain of ‘bastardry’ to assert itself in any of its multifarious and conservatively sponsored forms. ‘Bastardry’, in my Dad’s eyes, was comprised of, but not limited to: the activities of any ‘secret police force’ (or security organisation, in our more modern, Orwellian parlance), the curtailing of civil liberties, any display of greed or avarice, any slight delivered against someone on the basis of race or lack of resources, social or financial, any hint of neo-British imperialism, and any opportunity missed to deliver ‘a fair go’. As you would imagine, the house was constantly erupting with correctly apportioned rallying cries against the enactment of bastardry. Where ‘a fair go’ triumphed or prevailed in any Australian context was of particular cause for celebration.
Although the twentieth century could be said to have made a liar of him, my Father would have been tempted, despite growing evidence to the contrary, to have proclaimed with Joseph Furphy that Australia:
‘… is committed to no usages of petrified injustice, she is clogged by no fealty to shadowy idols, enshrined by ignorance and upheld by misplaced homage alone, she is cursed by no memories of fanaticism and persecution, she is innocent of hereditary national jealousy, and free from the envy of sister states.’
-‘Such is Life’
In the vein of Furphy and the colonial socialist reformers of the late 19th century, he saw Australia itself as the grandest, youngest, most cherished and precarious stage for decency and compassion to assert themselves, and all the twists and turns of its political and social history as tracks made on the long road to the full blossoming of a self- aware and self-authored nationhood. Australia was his preoccupation and despite the failings of history, the indiscretions of its politicians and powerbrokers, Australia, its people, land and history remained his greatest love. He was an eminent and overtly politicised historian, one who pointedly lived his beliefs and expounded them constantly, rather than merely writing them.
Although I didn’t recognize it then, my childhood served as an initiation into my father’s peculiar form of humanitarian socialist nationalism. The best invocation I have found of this was that of A.A. Phillips, describing ‘the triumph of human sympathy over social prejudice’. He was naturally then, one of the many forerunners of the modern reconciliation movement, and saw it as a moral imperative that ‘decent whites’ provide assistance to Aboriginal people when in need.
The bush town that I grew up in, as opposed to the one occupied by its other children, was defined by its ruins, bushranger’s lairs, rare rock paintings, the objects (coins, jewellery, pottery, bottle stops) which could be dug out of its earth and which told stories. Perhaps I am unusually impressionable, but the first independent tastes I displayed were mostly the ones I had inherited. When I really began to read, it was of bushranging. When I began listening to music, it was to records such as ‘A Billy of Tea’; Australian folk music. In this environment, I probably absorbed the fact of the Walk-Off sitting on the fringes of my parents’ dinner parties, my eyes wide open and thoughts cast wide. The Walk-Off, as a story, became as familiar to me as the trite versions I knew of the Eureka Stockade, or Ned’s last stand at Glenrowan. These were the landmarks useful to guide me in the country, real, imaginal and mostly past, that I inherited as a child.
Whether the basic thesis of The Australian Legend- that nomadic white, male workers in the bush had a disproportionate influence on the formation of our national self-concept- is correct in any measurable sense or not, it is hard to dismiss out of hand. This is evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of words it has had devoted to it by students and others, both before and since I arrived on the scene just prior to the ‘It’s time’ election of Gough Whitlam in 1972. Within my dad’s immediate vicinity the strength of his convictions was certainly sufficient to ensure that as an eight year old I felt a fierce thrall of nascent and nostalgia-drenched pride when I considered any instance where the colonial, the native-born, the common people, had triumphed- or even stood up to- their grandiose British overlords or their proxies.
When I left school I set myself the task of getting to know some of the Australia that had transfixed my father all his life. I lived as a questionable bohemian, state- sponsored version of the modern swagman, an overlander, humping bluey[2], reading history and Indigenous culture and mysticism and sleeping under the stars. Interspersed with a host of journeys- both personal and geographic- I considered the centrality of Indigenous dispossession to our history and did a degree in Social Ecology. It allowed me to focus on the reconciliation debate, to explore the topography of my whitefella guilt and consider what, in my own small way, I might do to remedy it. I emerged from university equipped with both a degree and, thanks to post-modernism, large doses of self-awareness and skepticism.
Nevertheless, it was still my ambition to live in a remote Indigenous community and befriend its people; to burrow into some fissure of epistemological inquiry between them and the landscape; and to perform some mix of reflexive community development and personal guilt-alleviation. I moved to Darwin in 2001, where I found my place amongst the constituents of ‘the Aboriginal industry’ that supports that town. In 2003 I was offered the job I was looking for. After following a trajectory for two decades of nascent urges, fantasies and preoccupations, there it was; developing a strategic plan for the community council of the Gurindji. I would be living in Kalkaringi, ‘home of land rights’. Drenched in not-too distant history, remote as buggery. I took it.
3. 26/5/04
Sitting down at the end of the day to take stock- an appropriate metaphor on this country covered in longhorn shit. I can feel the pulse in my head and the sweat crusting on my brow. I’m using tea to rebalance my fluid levels before bed. Crazy place. I had a feeling last night that I needed that huge dinner, ballast for something. By 9am this morning I was privy to my first Kalkaringi ‘community meeting,’ and there were enough boots and fists and weapons flying to make me glad I had something in between my ribs. By way of explanation (we whitefellas love our explanations) I’ll indulge in the illusion of linear causality- a deceptive luxury, but nonetheless, Every picture tells a story… the image of those steel caps sinking into lean ribs is still with me. Apparently to ‘do a fruitbat’ is to climb a powerpole, leap off and grab hold of the wires on the way down. This kid did a good job of it, he could write the manual. The town clerk and the coppers are all away. So it goes. Community meetings seem an effective, rather inclusive way of meting out corporal justice. They’re held in a one hundred metre-wide circle that centres on the fuel pumps, bang outside the only shop in town. The only shop on a six hundred kilometre stretch of road. Some tourists drove right into the middle of this one today. Welcome to sunny Kalkaringi, mate!
4. $50,000 Day
Hardy’s question again- How do you plead?
Predictably, your Honour. As a child of the Left.
If the Gurindji wanted to celebrate their achievements forty years down the track, and they wanted a hand, I’d give’em one. It was something I had no qualms about supporting at all, and that’s what I did. In 2005, eighteen months before the anniversary was due I started searching around for grant money that we could use to kick off the celebrations. I knocked on the front door and then delved through the back passages of the arts and Indigenous support sectors of philanthropy in Australia. I worked as a one man band for a while, shaking the tin in a fairly casual way, checking with a phone call first to see if the CEO of Daguragu Council would pay me to do a grant application, and proceeding on that basis.
One day in Darwin, feeling like another bleeding heart, I went to a grant writing workshop, uncertain if I would be paid for the pleasure. A bunch of despondent, though not yet beaten hopefuls, we were given advice on how to milk money out of different bodies for our respective projects. The event was hosted by an Australian philanthropic group, the Fred Hollows Foundation, a force active in the Top End and overseas, focusing, as Fred Hollows did, on ocular health and related concerns. In 1968, Fred had examined the calm, knowing and sun-damaged eyes of Vincent Lingiari, and visited Kalkaringi. It had changed the course of his life. A relationship was born. Fred Hollows, I was to find out later, was also staunch mates with Frank Hardy. History was swirling, unbeknownst to me, in the air.
After we went around the room and outlined our projects, one of the organizers, a small and dynamic looking guy, sidled up to me and said in a low voice ‘Glad you’re here, we need to talk to you’. Curiosity piqued, I waited until a tea break and sought him out. That was when I was hit with the news that the Hollows Foundation had allocated $50,000 unbidden towards our Festival, and hadn’t quite gotten around to informing us yet.
I returned from the break feeling that I may as well go home and rest on my laurels. With hindsight I can see some backslapping and handshaking by two dead men behind the scenes, Fred Hollows and Frank Hardy. No-one else in the room was any the wiser, and certainly no-one else that day had found any more than good advice on how to rattle a bucket more commandingly. A quiet suspension of belief came over me and I felt as if some rich philanthropist’s cat (with purrr-fect 20-20 vision, no doubt) had got my tongue. Fred himself, it seemed, was busy wheeling and dealing from the afterlife. I was to learn later that in 1968 Hollows had been working in Sydney and was:
‘……interested to hear that (Frank Hardy) was talking on the subject of the black (Gurindji) strike at the Teacher’s Federation in Sussex Street. I went along and I found him a very persuasive speaker. When he asked for donations at the end of the meeting I passed in a cheque for $300. They thought it was a bit iffy, having never got a donation of that size before’
-Fred Hollows, by Peter Corriss
It was either as if Fred had posthumously infected the organisation bearing his name with his own bull-at-a-gate modus operandi, or as if he and Hardy were having a quiet laugh together over a beer someplace in heaven. Probably both. Suddenly I felt my attendance was both a little suspect and superfluous. In a state of bemused shock, I took the Gurindjis’ lotto-winning news out with me, reserved it for other ears in Kalkaringi, and took the afternoon off, grinning like a feral Cheshire cat covered in the cream of Australian philanthropy.
5. Heavier than gravity
You don’t need to spend long in remote indigenous communities to become aware of the acid pessimism that permeates their air. What at first looks like inactivity, a lack of initiative, a lack of funding or a kind of laissez faire apathy are all merely the physical hallmarks of a crushing defeatism carefully nurtured over years by the whitefellas that manage, damage and paralyse the places that sustain and support them. Corrosive pessimism is worn like a dual purpose invisible yoke and protective cloak by many of the longer term white residents. Another way of describing it is as entrenched, bitter racism. Visitors (white) are especially privy to this. The community’s captives, as they feel themselves to be (no-one can leave towns that remote in between shifts) are desperate to alleviate themselves of their terrible burden- which at its essence is that of being unappreciated for working at what they perceive to be a hopeless cause. There woe comes out in a quiet and even flow usually, punctuated by bitter, dead laughter. With no progress or relief for months on end, they will avail themselves of the opportunity to vent as soon as they lay eyes on a transient white face from the outer world.
An attitudinal foundation of racism serves as a protective blanket for these miserable people to justify the shortcomings of their lives by blaming those around them. To characterize- the typical community whitefella is in their early fifties. Male. Having lost their wife and family somewhere a long time ago, they haven’t had anyone to love them for a long, long time. At some point they realized they were in a dead end career, and also realized the only place they might find a better wage were communities in the bush, desperate for staff. These are the plumbers, mechanics, groundsmen and town clerks of the outback. Not every one of them fits this mould, but there are a number of them mouldering in every community. Their alcoholism, satellite TV, savings accounts and dreams of Asian brides are all that sustain them.
With no particular interest in, or respect for, the Indigenous people they are serving, their primary interest is often in what they can accumulate for themselves while doing their ‘sentence’ in the bush – who’s to notice if they fail to advertise their own tenders, or shake some lose change from unexpended accounts?
On ‘blackfellas’, their favorite topic-
‘Money? Don’t make me laugh. They’ll just spend it on cards’.
‘A new car? It’ll be wrapped around a tree in days. They can’t look after anything’.
Or- ‘There’s nothing wrong with these people, let me tell you, I have to go to the airstrip every time they get a medi-vac (medical evacuation), I see it all. They just want to go on a holiday, that’s why they get evacuated’.
All is not grudging, blind forbearance however. Theories are advanced to ameliorate the epistemological misery that their insight delivers them.
‘You can’t drag a people out of the stone age in two hundred years. And these are primitive people, let’s face it. They hadn’t even invented the bloody wheel. And that’s not being supremacist or nothing, it’s just the facts’.
To work with people enmeshed in this headset is its own special type of torture. They function as gatekeepers in the most basic of senses- guarding the resources of their organisations like baleful Gollums- from waste, breakage or even use. Frequently, even getting them to perform the roles specified by their job descriptions can be like getting blood from a stone. These people are the providers of ‘core services’- to them others, whose work entails any notion of improvement, progress, change- such as those working in adult education, the arts, or health promotion- are seen to be lost in time-wasting futility.
Kalkaringi has had its share of such nay-sayers over the years. How for them, could something as frivolous, labor and resource intensive as a 40th anniversary celebration be anything but a disaster? When it came to the Festival, a celebration, generous buckets of doom needed to be splashed liberally over everyone associated with the project. The obstacle race had begun. The first hurdle was to be the staff we would be working with locally.
My ‘essential services’ planning for our guests was an obvious target.
‘Long drops?[3] There’s no way you’ll be able to dig’em deep enough! You’ll need dynamite to get into that rock’.
‘The place will stink like hell, it’ll be a nightmare’.
‘There’s no way you’ll get the locals to work cleaning them, they’ll be getting pissed’.
‘The Health Department will be down on you like a tonne of bricks’.
‘You wait, there’ll be bloody chaos, they’ll camp everywhere, they won’t use your toilets anyway, they’ll crap in the bush’.
‘What, and then you’re going to fill’em in after the Festival? Bloody health hazard mate, they won’t let you do that’
6. Bumnuts
As my sweaty-palmed enquiries had progressed as to how I was to dispose of the effluent of fifteen hundred potential visitors, I had been informed that were I to continue along my path towards the humble earth-closet, I would need to seek the blessing of the regional demigod (Department of Bodily Waste). Then, in what I mistook for one of the random confluences of serendipity that remote community work often delivers, it turned out that the gentleman in question would be in Kalkaringi just when I needed to see him. I arranged a meeting via mobile phone, on what I termed ‘the paddock of my dreams’, the prospective campground.
In a landscape scattered with as many out-of-control pessimists as stunted gum trees, there must naturally be a winner in any hierarchy of nihilistic depravity. I was unlucky enough to meet a gentleman who turned his competition into moderates, stockinged fairies. The most fearsome deployer of doom I have encountered in Kalkaringi, Hades, or elsewhere was a leviathan to the world of pessimism, quaintly called Bumnuts. He came with a calling card that read: Service Coordinator, Water & Sewer, Remote Operations.
Our utes pulled up next to each other under the hot blue winter sky. I, with the lines of a bowed star picket, and he, with the rotund form of some tumbleweed half my height, dismounted. Something in his demeanour prevented me from shaking his hand. Perhaps, if asked he would have said the same. He knew what I wanted, but asked to hear it from me. I told him:
This will be a campground. The water main. Here. We want to access it. For people to shower and wash their hands.
As a reply, emitted the most sinisterly faecal torrent of apocalyptic doom, pestilence, acidic racism and disaster I had ever heard. It far surpassed any previous contenders, in severity, depth of conviction, adjectival craftsmanship and sheer rhetorical impossibility. The man was a genius. His claims were so far removed from the admittedly wide spectrum of outback possibility that I have never found myself able to repeat them. Instead, I attempted groping, numbly, for a rejoinder as I gained a momentary toehold in consensually negotiated reality, gasping for air and desperately reaching for some skerrick of flotsam to cling to. The only content I had absorbed from his stunning attack was his description, in carefully scatological detail, of the catastrophic repercussions of some similar folly that had been attempted ten years earlier during the Walk-Off’s thirtieth birthday party.
On this flimsy footing, I was able to point out that despite the overwhelming and obvious truth of what he was saying, despite the barbarism of the locals and the remarkable ignorance of the organisers of yesteryear, by some undeserved and miraculous oversight Kalkaringi, in admittedly compromised form, had somehow survived nonetheless The buildings were still standing and Kalkaringi still appeared on regional maps, as a fuel stop and not a historic ruin. I felt that if I could get him to concede the truth of this point I might recover some advantage. I needed to convince him that despite the evidence, I was not smuggling the industry equivalent of a dirty nuke. Hopefully then he might find it in himself to negotiate, or at least converse with me. He leered at me with a reptilian gloss to his eyes, rocking thoughtfully on his heels and assessing his quarry.
Things could have either rapidly deteriorated or slowly improved from this point, and luckily it was the latter. I learnt over the next half hour that my hopelessly ignorant and optimistic idealism, born of two years experience in the area, was to be contrasted to his incontestable, self-evident, vice-like grip on local realities that had been won over a quarter century in the region and his role. As if to prove this point, he challenged me:
‘Whatever you think you can imagine in a toilet, double it, and I’ve seen worse’.
‘Body parts?’, I suggested grimly. He nodded his head in the affirmative.
‘You wouldn’t believe it. Just be bloody glad they don’t have dugong blubber over here’.
We stood in the sun with Gurindji bystanders coming and going (whom he mostly knew; plenty of rude jokes) as I followed his soliloquy. I became his sympathetic ear, as we explored and commiserated together, opining and marvelling at the futility and impossibility of providing essential services in remote localities. He explained to me, as he paced back and forth across the paddock to make his point, negotiating imaginary building sites, organizational relationships and ‘SLAP’ maps, how it was possible these days for a contract plumber based in Katherine to charge $3,000 for a job before, or even without, opening their toolbox onsite. This, I agreed with the man they call Bumnuts, was truly amazing, and deplorable. Despite his impressive bluster, Bumnuts was, I could see, overseer of some gloriously paradoxical, not to mention incomprehensible and maddening operational propositions. Over Bumnut’s quarter of a century, the relentless march of ‘user- pays’ orthodoxy, combined with the withdrawal and centralisation of services has really made for some breathtakingly impractical outcomes in places like the Northern Territory.
As we concluded our talk, Bumnuts revealed to me the due process for applying to do the work on the campground that we wanted done. As a parting line, his words ‘I hope we can help you’ almost knocked me over. They stayed in my mind for a long time. They were well earnt.
The last thing Bumnuts and his ilk can afford to do is be seen to be having a good time. Disregarding this though, I was still surprised when I was told that he would be coming to the Festival. His appearance would be in a professional capacity, of course. He would stay at the community’s power station and be on hand to save the day, should we cause any of the catastrophes he was predicting. ‘Noodles’, the Kalkaringi-based power-and water guy had a grumble at this news- ‘if I can’t manage this shit on me own after 13 years, I shouldn’t have the job’.
Days after the Festival, when it seemed all had gone gloriously to plan, I heard that just as the apocalyptic ruminations of Bumnuts had predicted, there had been massive stuff-up to mark the Festival weekend. In the cradle of land rights itself, at Daguragu by Wattie Creek, the day after the Festival all 300 residents were deprived of running water for the afternoon. Too many wild blackfellas? Bumnuts had forgotten to close some valves after doing a check on the town’s bore, and driven back to Katherine.
7. The Walk-off narrative
FROM LITTLE THINGS BIG THINGS GROW- (condensed)
by Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody
Gather round people let me tell you a story
……Gurindji were working for nothing but rations
Where once they had gathered the wealth of the land
Daily the pressure got tighter and tighter
Gurindji decided they must make a stand
They picked up their swags and started off walking
……….Vestey man said I’ll double your wages
Seven quid a week you’ll have in your hand
Vincent said nuh-uh we’re not talking about wages
We’re sitting right here till we get our land
Then Vincent Lingiari boarded an aeroplane
Landed in Sydney, big city of lights
And daily he went round softly speaking his story
To all kinds of men, from all walks of life
That was the story of Vincent Lingiari
But this is the story of something much more
How power and privilege can not move a people
Who know where they stand, and stand in their law
From little things big things grow
From little things big things grow, etc
FROM LITTLE THINGS BIG THINGS GROW P. Kelly/ K. Carmody
© Universal Music Publishing P/L and Song Cycles P/L
Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
‘From little things big things grow’ is the Wave Hill anthem. Written by two of Australia’s foremost songwriters (one Aboriginal, the other white), the song has done more than anything else to deliver the Wave Hill Walk-off to a contemporary audience. It is also a brilliant evocation of what I term ‘the Walk-off narrative’- which reduces the complex series of inter-related processes, players and events that constitute the ‘Wave Hill Walk-off and subsequent events’ into an elementary, school book morality tale, pre-formulated for ease of digestion. In the narrative, there is only one interpretation, no ambiguity. The listener is backed into an attitudinal holding pen, with only one chute offering possible escape into a cattle truck which is waiting, full of what John Howard would call ‘black armband revisionists’.
In the Walk-off narrative, the characters emerge biblically, after a long period of changeless feudalism, onto the stage in 1966. The narrative presents the situation as a moral problem in need of redress. When the moral issue is resolved with a handful of sand in 1975, we have no further need for the players, and the story ends.
As a secular Australian fable, the Walk-off narrative makes a powerful, timely, rich addition to an otherwise bare landscape. As history, which it usually passes for at first glance, the narative makes for a cloying obfuscation of recent realities in Australia’s north. It omits many basic facts. The deeds handed to the Gurindji in the dying days of the Whitlam Government in 1975 merely conferred the status of pastoral lessee to the Gurindji, not freehold title (or ownership as it is usually understood). This was not delivered until 1981, fifteen years after the Gurindji’s strike. The issues raised by virtue of the Gurindji’s actions were not resolved in 1975, but fed directly into the development of the prototypical, modern Indigenous community- a model for remote life which was queried by its architects at the time and has been critiqued, even by its supporters, ever since. Contrary to the impression created by the narrative, changes did make themselves felt in the isolated world of the big cattle stations, especially after World War II. And conversely, just as the events constitutive of the Walk-off are inseparable from those that preceded them, the players did not bow out. The final effects of the events catalysed by the Gurindji are yet to make themselves felt.
The Walk-off narrative is hardly a child’s rhyme though, and like all oft-repeated songs and stories, it is worthy of attention for what it can tell us about ourselves. Wave Hill was not the first place where Indigenous people took industrial action, and neither was it the first place where the demand for the return of land was made. Why then, is it by far better known than any other piece of Indigenous industrial action? Why is it known as ‘the home of landrights ? Why did it strike a chord much greater than the other strikes? The question must be asked why the Wave Hill Walk-off has come to overshadow and in a sense represent all the other events around the country when Indigenous people have taken action to improve their own conditions. Equally, we must ask why, in the years since, where other strikes have faded from the public mind, the Walk-off still shines forth- a jewel not outshone in the crown of the Left’s quest for social justice and reconciliation.
The Walk-off made a ripper of a story. Unlike other strikes, where the adversary might have been a local cow cocky[4], this time the blackfellas were taking on one of the most powerful interests in the world, a British lord no less, and head of a fiscal empire. It seized the imagination of the public, catapaulting into national consciousness. The self-appointed chief correspondent was Frank Hardy, a successful journalist, author, gambler, raconteur, champion of the Left, and card-carrying communist. Wave Hill was a battle made for Hardy. In 1966 he was hoping for a bit of a renaissance in the North, and was, simply, the right man in the right place at the right time. It is impossible to discuss either the narrative (or indeed the history) of the Walk-off without examining the role of its primary herald, Frank Hardy.
I’m going shortly on a journey across and around Australia to try to rediscover Australia, to think about what I’m going to write next, to have a look inside myself.
I want to have another look at Australia, to get some strength out of the earth. Just to wander into some out-of-the-way place and hope it is not standardised by mass media as Sydney tends to be, to hope that this terrible middle class apathy hasn’t fallen over the land. Of course, I’ll be there when I arrive at my destination. I know I can’t escape from myself.
-Frank Hardy, interview on ‘Spectrum’
Frank Hardy was one of Australia’s best-known post war authors. He was also equally known for his political persuasions- as a union sympathiser, a communist and reformer. His identities were intertwined and inseparable. He wrote of politics and he wrote politically, deliberately using his writing and status as a writer to advance political causes. His most well-known work, Power Without Glory, was a Communist Party-sponsored, semi-fictional and highly successful attempt to discredit the Australian Labor Party. It was so acute in its portrayal of the entrepeneur and Labor powerbroker John Wren (who served as the ‘inspiration’ for the book’s protagonist, John West) that the Wren family took Hardy to court for imputing that his wife had had an affair.
Luckily for the Gurindji, he was also an excellent publicist. Hardy’s role in promulgating the Walk-off narrative cannot be under-estimated. Although he was self-consciously preoccupied that he should let the Gurindji speak for themselves, it remains the case that Hardy occupied a key, arguably indispensable position – as media and political advisor to the Gurindji. Languishing, if a reveller can, in self-imposed exile in Darwin, waiting for a revelation, the activist in him rallied, despite his better judgement, when he heard that the Gurindji had walked off Wave Hill station.
‘The Clancy and Dooley and Don Macleod strike of aboriginal stockmen twenty years before had always intrigued me…They had been glorious in defeat. Perhaps this time they will be glorious in victory’.
- The Unlucky Australians
In Hardy’s hands, and with the unions’ support, class struggle easily jumped the barrier of race. While he succeeded in encouraging the Gurindji to speak as much as possible for themselves, and there were several of the Gurindji men who were able to speak eloquently to European audiences about their motivations for the strike, there were none who could work the media, or write. Although he made his own contributions to the struggle as explicit as possible, Hardy’s notoriety doubtlessly helped to catalyse the polarization of a complex situation along political lines from the outset.
As the Gurindji’s de facto minister for communications, Hardy penned regular articles for the mainstream press, as well as a range of leftwing publications. His allegiance and close relationship to the Gurindji was obvious throughout. For a socialist audience, Hardy contextualized the events so that they became part of a wider, almost universal struggle, and a grand experiment in socialist self-determination. While this was Hardy’s political worldview and agenda, it was heavily tempered, if not entirely self-censored in his writing for The Australian and other mainstream newspapers. Every socialist hack, whatever their stature, had to earn their bread and butter in the world of the capitalist press. That Hardy was able to span these contesting realities so adroitly is entirely consistent with his art and intellect.
Hardy told the story, and told it well. In The Unlucky Australians, his book chronicling the enmeshing with the Gurindji’s concerns and his own, he does not pretend to offer an objective view of the events of which he was a part. He situated himself, painfully- bared at times, in the text, thereby challenging all to realise themselves as actors (and authors) in the events that we apprehend; in this case the unfinished tale of Australian postcolonial history. At the end of the book Hardy excoriates himself by linking the birth of ‘White Australianism’ with his much beloved militant labor movement. He ended with a direct refrain which we would do well to ask ourselves yet:
How do you plead?
8. Down to the Wire
As predicted, it came down- right down- to the wire. The Festival was pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, before my eyes. There were twenty four hours to go until the program kicked off. Were the toilets finished? Well, sort of. There were some big holes in the ground with lots of black plastic around them. There was a mountain of toilet paper in a store room, but none near any of the toilets. Yet. Oh, and some of the dunny doors hadn’t been secured. And there wasn’t anything to indicate which was for the men, or for the ladies. And actually, most of those ‘toilets’ had never been cleaned of the sump oil that would soon be anointing the posteriors of our first punters. And as for the toilets, so for the barbecues, the stages, the cinema, the registration booth. Twenty three hours to go.
All noble acts rely on goodwill, and we were certainly in need of our good and willing assistants on the day before the Festival. A handful of them had arrived the night previously, goggle-eyed and covered in sweaty salt crystals, disoriented, tired and hungry after the eight hundred kilometre trip from Darwin. They had found a corner in the back of the caravan park and collapsed into it late the previous night. Despite my own bug-eyed and desperate condition, there wasn’t to be any motion in their camp for several hours yet. Straining, straining…. We were expecting fifteen hundred visitors, through our wildly conjectural, best-practice calculative processes. Whether we had fifteen or fifteen hundred arrivals though, none of them would have any idea where to sleep or eat or defecate on arrival, or not until all our signage was installed. There were no signs in place because no signs yet existed, though a list of the fifty-odd we required had been devised at midnight a couple of days previously.
By now our good-hearted volunteers, were tipping coffee down their throats and starting to look useful, or at least conscious. Others were dribbling in by then, and anyone at a loose end was whisked almost straight off the highway and pressed into service. It was a nerve-wracking process, watching ‘the Festival’, or its infrastructure, appear magically by virtue of one punter under the feet of the next, like the proverbial path made by walking. The most I could do was to keep a couple of inches ahead of ‘the volunteers’- mostly our friends and families, them being an inch in front of the hordes. And patch up the worst of the holes that they beat us to.
One of the main factors dragging us so flagrantly into the eleventh hour was the fact that we simply didn’t have the labour force in Kalkaringi to do our dirty work. The Ngumpin[5] CDEP teams, or at least their grandparents, could have moved mountains, if they’d wanted to. But only half of them worked any given day, of their four ‘work’ days, and then only for four hours. I had let it be known that anyone wishing to work longer than the usual half-time of CDEP would be paid accordingly, but that hadn’t raised more than a grunt in reply. We had been too busy, or overlooked the possibility of going through a blow-by-blow exposition with the community of the vision and all the work it would entail. However you looked at it, we were in the position of depending on visitors for a lot of the work, and they wouldn’t arrive until the Festival was pretty much ready to kick-off.
The fact that we didn’t know if we were going to make it by the skin of our teeth or not was partly a matter of running behind schedule and partly a matter of calculated risk. It was danger and design, art and science. It was the sound of us twanging the banjo wire between limitations and necessities. There was the risk, as many of the local kartiya[6] were happy to remind us, that if we set up anything with enough time before the Festival to preserve our sanity, that it would be vandalized, destroyed or stolen. No amount of community engagement (or none that I’ve seen yet) could over-ride the detached destructiveness of bored teenagers in the middle of the night. How many nights could we risk leaving a nice flammable marquee up? Even the toilet blocks would have looked pretty cool burning, in my estimation, which I made sure I kept to myself. Another factor encouraging us to leave all to the last minute (minimal in comparison to the mostly deadweight of the CDEP labor force) was the issue of safety.
My ‘paddock of dreams’ lay between the social Club, where the town’s alcoholic anaesthetic-beer- is self- administered, and the majority of Kalkaringi’s housing. At night the big empty space turned into a black void, and I had stumbled across it myself with drunken comrades while the lights of the old school bus, ‘the Brown Bomber’, disappeared up the road to Daguragu behind us. There was a decent chance that the longer we had our Festival stuff sitting around that someone would take a tumble into a toilet trench in the darkness, or even gash themselves irreparably on the end of a star picket; humbly and surprisingly lethally disguised in the blackness in the midst of a cheery outback night. Marsupials and ruminants could have also caused us trouble. Pick your species, there are plenty of brumbies and wild donkeys (known locally as ‘Jesus horses’) that clatter noisily around the streets of Kalkaringi after dark. Finding an injured descendant of ‘Bluey’ Buchanan’s pack horse in a toilet pit would be a real drag.
Late that afternoon the miracle began. A steady stream of traffic pulled in off the highway. My ‘paddock of dreams’ began to exhibit the hallmarks of modern nomadism that we wanted to see. Hired four wheel drives full of television crews. Big new dome tents and ratty swags. Brightly painted hippy vans and beaten-in sports cars. There were huge tourist coaches that had been hired by the Unions, and motor bikes with side cars. A squadron of very flash highway patrol cars had appeared and were buzzing everyone in sight. It also, when the army came to liberate us, looked as if a war was on. Norforce, the Indigenous wing of the Northern Territory reserves had bought their own show to town. They had tanks, jeeps and trucks in droves.
The airstrip had been busy all day as well, and by sunset there were more VIPs then you could poke a stick at, ensconced happily in their own citadel out of town courtesy of Norforce. There were commissioners, Members of Parliament, CEO’s, chairpeople, presidents and persons of both great antiquity and former glory. Professors, senators and administrators. Some would have been recognisable just by the strings of letters after their names, and others by their first name alone. It was the pantheon, the who’s who, the ‘A list’ of leftwing and/or black Australia. I was so busy I hardly laid eyes on any of them.
9. Festival Time
The morning of the Festival proper dawned. I awoke full of barely contained energy: my environment the outlet. The feeling in my body, which seemed mirrored by the drunken, ferret-like motions of the four other co-ordinators awake at the Festival Headquarters, was like a bomb ready to go off. We were up at dawn’s first blush and out of the house twenty minutes later. I was ready to snap at anyone who gave me half a chance. Not a good start to the day, I thought. Not considering I had eighteen hours of cross-cultural facilitation ahead of me.
My off-sider knocked himself into working order and we got a taste for the day’s flavour- loading marquees and hundreds of chairs from a compound onto a truck, then delivering them to the Festival sites. After another hour or so the ‘vollies’ stirred and things really started happening. By nine a.m all was in place, though time seemed to be sliding on the preparation of lunch. Indeed the cooking of lunch and the organization thereof was in a slightly improvisational zone all of its own. This was the most critical piece of the jigsaw puzzle that had been left in the ‘some-one will do it’ arena. A few Ngumpin and others had talked about it in a tangential kind of way, but we had no expectations. All we had done was dumped a few truckloads of barbeques, trestle tables, beef, plates, salad, cutlery and firewood in a pile by the river. Now we just needed someone to construct a barbecue kitchen and a serving area and cook lunch for upwards of five hundred people in under two hours. For reasons respectful of tradition and good historicity rather than ease of coordination, the whole affair was held on the river bank where the Gurindji camped after they walked-off in 1966. Doubtlessly a great spot to doss down forty years ago, but some time since then the Victoria River- with a rainbow serpentine lack of prescience, had washed all the sand and soil away. This left us to stage the feeding of the five hundred on something resembling the bottom of a landmined quarry.
Before anything could be done, the barbeques needed firing, to burn off any industrial chemicals or grease that may have been adhering to their scavenged and freshly-welded surfaces. While this project was underway, the masses began assembling a couple of hundred yards away, out of sight up on the river bank. This was where the dignitaries and punters would spend most of the day, listening to speeches, and songs, watching traditional dancers and generally celebrating the Gurindji. I could hear the sounds of the public address system bouncing through the air up above as our initiation began, by virtue of the killer[7], fire and hotplates down below
A couple of two metre long BBQ’s, and a few smaller ones, had been thrown together for the occasion. The comfort of their operators had not featured high in the scheme of design priorities. It didn’t seem to me that it would be possible for a person to cook meat on them without searing a good part of themselves as well. Because of the high relief topography of our kitchen we had aligned the two biggest BBQ’s in parallel. As I watched the superbly dry, dense, hot-burning hardwood of the desert begin to burn, it seemed to me that whomever was going to pick up the tongs would require a great dose of stupidity, bravery, or desperation. Some Ngumpin fellas who came and seated themselves close to the action felt the same, I think. Their positioning could have allowed me to think that they were keen to pitch in and help, but they had an unusual cast to their expression, a glow in the eyes which I guessed was related both to their appreciation of good beef, and the sight of someone else sweating for a feed. They were going to have a long wait though, as from what I could guess our lunch was going to be at least an hour late. So much for the program.
Asides from the barbecue, I was having other troubles. Everyone was feeling the heat. Sitting listening to speeches was apparently thirsty work, and we hadn’t done our sums. There were calls coming from the public, being relayed to me via two way radio, for water. It was bleedingly obvious that our supply of drinking water was going to run dry before lunchtime, before it even got to the hottest part of the day. The closest tap for refilling was half a kilometre away, over the bridge. There were so few containers that it wouldn’t even be possible to take some away to refill them. ‘Why did I say I’d do this job again?’
There was only one solution I could think of, and that was to borrow the watertank-on-a-trailer from the campground. The traffic management ‘plan’, such as it was, had been developed specifically to ensure that things like preventing five hundred cases of heat stroke with a trailer full of water were possible. The only thing I could see to stop me were the twenty-odd cars that had been parked, despite all our efforts at traffic management, on the access track, and even in the toilet area next to the speakers and stage, which was where the water was required.
I found one of the Ngumpin barbecue spectators- who were by then enjoying a show that featured the smell of cooking beef, lobster-coloured legs, singed hair and melted joggers- who would help me pick up the water trailer. We took my Toyota up to the campground, got the trailer hitched up and returned back over the bridge toward the action. Wondering how I could manoeuvre my vehicle, with half a tonne of water behind it, past all the cars, unhitch it and keep driving, I had a brainwave. I could use a backtrack into the toilet area as a shortcut. Someone, probably wanting to knock off for smoko in a hurry, had slashed a secondary track through the dried ‘buffel’ grass that emerged near the main road. I could drive the thing straight in there along that, unhitch the tank near the toilets, and then come out on the same track. So far, so good.
I succeeded in getting the water trailer in, but couldn’t for the life of me see immediately how I was going to get out again. After some blind panic, we began jolting around, uphill and down dale in four wheel drive on a nineteen point turn. ‘Look at him. Another idiot who’s ignored the signs and driven in here’, I could imagine the bemused people around the toilets thinking.
With the crisis of mass dehydration averted, it was bemusing to then see an enormous water truck belonging to the army that had somehow managed to squeeze through the crush of cars in a humanitarian relief mission of its own. I left them to it, and headed back to the main game- the barbecue zone. A Gurindji lady pulled me up.
‘What about these ladies here, gudjeri, they want to make damper’. She jabbed a thumb behind her to the handful of old women sitting quietly under the trees by the river.
‘Good stuff’, I thought. ‘Fantastic. Just what this thing is meant to be all about’.
Lovely. Everyone pitching in. Of course, it might have been nice to know that there would be bonafide bush damper on the menu at some point before it was due to be distributed, but better late than never. I did some quick mental calculations while they sat there, impassively. They knew they had me where it hurt- by my well-primed community development gland. I didn’t want to dash the hopes of an expectant bunch of cute old ladies, there wouldn’t have been any fun in it, so I picked up the two way radio in one hand and got approval to purchase a bucket of flour from the Council. In the other, I picked up the mobile phone and got hold of the breathless staff at the Kalkaringi store. From deep within the electromagnetic storm that engulfed my head I negotiated some accounting skullduggery to purchase the flour on behalf of the community council, and a driver to pick it up. Like the powerful knight in shining armour, and I’m sure with a subtle glow of virtuosity- white guilt temporarily appeased- I turned back to the ladies, who had watched the whole performance.
‘Bunyu[8], that flour be here in a minute.’
A moment later the melted remnants of our barbecue operators decided that a sufficient amount of black and bleeding beast had been scorched to bring down the oi polloi. The program of speeches and entertainment instantly dissolved for lunch and a line of hungry spectators formed, snaking back from the serving tables and away up the hill. Its movement was slower than the dry-season Victoria River next to it, but the important thing was that it was moving. I looked at it again a few minutes later, and in what could only be interpreted as a good sign, there were a handful of people eating. The food was not only cooked but must have been edible also. The feeding of the five hundred was working!
The next moment an issue that had festered, unresolved for months, returned again, via UHF, to bite me. The traditional dancers were on strike. They had come hundreds of kilometres, with the support of the Central Land Council, from all over central Australia, and were refusing to dance. It looked as if our afternoon program was going to be scuppered. The reason for their protest was that no sand had been laid down for the dance area, as was, and is customary. Neither had the ground been scraped clear of cover, which would have done as a back-up measure. They were looking at a dancefloor of packed earth and prickles, and they didn’t like it. Calamity loomed. The question had simply never been resolved. It wasn’t that it was unimportant to the organising team, it had been just one of a hundred-odd items that needed resolution, and to that it had proved particularly resilient, revolving between us with monotonous circularity for months. Was the local sand any better than the dirt patch already there? Was the bloody backhoe going to be working so the sand could be picked up anyway? If we laid down sand, everyone, VIPs and bronchial schoolchildren included, would be covered in dust. Everyone who had been consulted had a different opinion. Now we knew the opinion of some of the lead dancers, and it was one that was going to knock out half of the most important part of the Festival program.
I started breathing in shallow bursts, one eye twitching towards the West Australian border, which it suddenly longed to see. How could we possibly get a truckload of sand up the largely blocked roadway onto the dance area before the end of lunch? That would involve the semi-functional backhoe and a tip truck, both requiring keys and drivers, who could be anywhere. It didn’t seem feasible. A better option was to just scrape the earth and clear out the prickly weeds. The backhoe could have pulled it off, but would it ever fit down the track? Could it be used in that small a space without disrupting the whole show and blowing dirt over the VIP luncheon? Another option would have been to try finding half a dozen rakes and hoes, and then to disengage some volunteers from their steak sandwiches. To do that though, I probably would have had to find the grudging ‘keeper-of-the-keys’ to drive to Daguragu and get the rakes, and even then I might have sustained injuries coming between the men and their hard won meat during a lunch break. We were meant to be celebrating workers’ rights, after all.
Then divine inspiration struck. At the school, Col the groundsman had something like a big mower crossed with a grader-cum-forklift by way of a Shetland pony. It was small, manoeuvrable, and had a bucket on the front with an edge that could scrape our problems right away! Furthermore, Col was always well disposed, and would probably be sober. I jumped in the car and drove up to the school, practically running through the gates. I shouted his name into the locked quadrangle, and he appeared, limping into the light. I explained the situation, ending with a question I knew he couldn’t refuse.
‘Suppose I’ll bloody well have to, won’t I? You’ll be paying for it though, if the old girl blows up!’
What a legend. We made a strange procession back over the bridge. Col zipped about on his little orange machine in front of a few happy punters eating their steaks and nobody batted an eyelid. Looked like we’d planned it all along. The dancers gave it their bare-footed stamp of approval, and everyone, I was told, had a great afternoon.
© Charlie Ward, 2007
[1] This term, from Aboriginal English, is used to denote a male who has received, through ceremony, knowledge endowing him with special powers, such as the ability to make rain
[2] Traveling with a swag, or roll of bedding, traditionally on foot
[3] Colloquialism for pit toilet or earth closet
[4] Colloquialism for pastoralist or grazier
[5] Gurindji self descriptor, literally meaning ‘people’ it is used to refer to the Gurindji and related sub-clans.
[6] Word used for white people by Aboriginals and others across north-western Australia.
[7] Aboriginal English- fresh beef
[8] Gurindji, meaning ‘good’, or ‘good one’.
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