What the Traveller Saw (14 page)

W
E ARE IN A
long-wheelbase Land Rover Station Waggon with reinforced suspension, heavy-duty shock absorbers, reinforced front axle casing, reinforced steering dampers, heavy-duty cross-country tyres, one of which is now flat, punctured by a thin sliver of ironwood as sharp as a nail and as hard as its name implies, two sixteen-gallon fuel tanks and a lot more petrol in jerricans, a lot of ice-cold water and ice-cold beer and ice-cold food in a huge polystyrene chest packed with ice and all the impedimenta of camp life except for tents, which are a waste of time and energy down here in the middle. Most of the reinforcement work, the driver told me, had been done in Australia because, she said, ‘Land Rovers haven’t got the slightest idea how rough it is in the outback.’

‘The Nips have got them licked with the Toyotas,’ she added gloomily.

The driver is a girl called Diane Byrnes and she is a partner in Annaburroo Tours and Safaris which specializes in journeys in the bush. They also run more prosaic excursions from Alice Springs to Ayers Rock in the season. She is wearing what is the outback uniform in this part of the world – bush shirt, shorts, knee-length stockings and suede ankle boots, and so is her friend Marge who was ostensibly brought along to cook but really to light Diane’s cigarettes – this girl is the greatest compulsive chain smoker I have ever seen – and perhaps to prevent her from being bored, or what the
News of the World
used to refer to as ‘interfered with’, or both. They are immaculate and Diane looks like a rather epicene ADC to
some fire-eating desert general. All the members of Annaburroo Tours and Safaris are girls and they can handle any known form of vehicle and human being. Fleming’s Bond would have liked the girls of Annaburroo Tours and Safaris, though they might not have liked him. I bought myself a similar outfit at Woolworth’s in Alice Springs but the shorts have no belt loops and they keep falling down. I feel insecure and even in the middle of Australia, where the general run of inhabitants, such as there are, can scarcely be said to be dressy, I look a ruin.

We are in the Northern Territory in 23½ south latitude, longitude 132 west in an alluvial plain between the James Range and the Macdonnell Ranges, 150 miles west of the Trans-Continental Telegraph line, the Stuart Highway from Adelaide to Darwin and the railway line, all of which converge at Alice Springs, and we are about 50 miles west of the Hermannsburg Mission which are the last buildings in this direction until you get to the other side of the Gibson Desert. The Mission was founded by German Lutherans in 1877 to save and succour the aboriginals, many of whom up to that time had never seen a white man and had no need of being saved by Christians or otherwise succoured. Now having been given the civilization treatment, they need all the help they can get.

We are near the centre of what the Australians actually call The Centre, about 220 miles, peanuts here, west-south-west of Central Mount Stuart, a height which, except to some mad pedants, is about as near dead centre as you can get in this weird, eroded continent that may once, although nobody actually has gone on record as saying so except me, have been rectangular but now looks as if it has been gnawed by a swarm of its own indigenous rats.

The nearest sea bathing is in the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf, an inlet of the Timor Sea, 600 miles to the north, always providing the Sea Wasps are off duty. Sea Wasps are a sort of jelly fish and if they get in touch with you they make you sit up, I
can tell you – sit up and then lie down for ever. If we had released some sea wasps in the Channel in 1940 there would not have been a word breathed about invasion. You can also swim in the Great Australian Bight a similar distance to the south – but what awaits you in the water there is a matter of conjecture as I have not been, just as it is at Eighty Mile Beach on the Indian Ocean between Broome and Port Hedland, which you can reach by travelling slightly north of west for 700 miles; or if you set off in the opposite direction, a thousand miles to the Pacific.

It is, in fact, a pretty lonely place by English standards and, as an Englishman, I feel it. From here, if only you were allowed to make it, which you’re not, and if you could survive it, you could make the journey overland to the Bight or to Eighty Mile Beach without crossing more than one real road and probably without seeing another living soul. You are not allowed to because this is the threshold of the Great Aboriginal reserve which stretches away north and south, east and west, 100,000 square miles of it. There is only one way through it to Western Australia and you have to stick to it. Beyond it are the deserts – the Great Victoria, the Gibson and the Great Sandy Deserts. There are still semi-nomadic aboriginals in the Musgrave Ranges in the South Australia part of the Reserve; and who knows, perhaps there are still men and women living in the dreamtime out in the deserts. The Central Reserve Committee think there may be about fifty living a nomadic existence in the Central Desert. Altogether there are about two thousand aboriginals and part aboriginals in the Reserve mostly living round the missions. I met a truck driver in a pub in Alice Springs who said he’s seen some a few days before. He had just come up from the south:

I’d been up to Mulgathin Rocks on the south of the Victoria Desert and I was just clear of Tarcoola, that’s a station on the Trans-Continental railway. It was blowing
a real bedourie [sandstorm] and I couldn’t see more than twenty yards in front of me, so I nearly ran ’em down. They were crossing the road. There were two families of them, a fair few, and apart from g strings they were as naked as they were born. The men were carrying spears, the women had the kids across their shoulders. They looked like a lot of fuckin’ stone-agers. This was no walkabout. You could see they were on bush tucker, they were that thin, and I’ll swear they’d never even seen the outside of a mission. You think I’m telling you a Johnnie Warby [tall story] …

Where we are now, at the centre and to the north and south, was the region in which the great Victorian explorers, those, to us, unbelievably intrepid and courageous men, became imbrangled while trying to force their way westwards across the continent through the great sandy deserts to the sea, through the spinifex plains and sandhills, the gibber stone plains, the endless ranges that are like tidal waves, 30, 40, 50 and 100 miles long, through dense stands of desert oak among which the traveller can see nothing at all, suffering from scurvy, their camels dying, poisoned by strange vegetation, all the time forced to tack miles off course as if they were in a sailing ship, by the one consuming need – to find water, so that a modern map of their combined explorations looks as if it has been made by centipedes whose feet have been dipped in ink. Even today the only way through the Centre to Western Australia is by a very rough track through the Petermann and Warburton Ranges and across the top of the Great Victoria Desert to Laverton about 200 miles north of Kalgoorlie, much of it completely waterless.

Snatched from death often by what seems nothing short of a miracle (reading of their escapes even an atheist might be persuaded of the existence of divine intervention), they would return again and again to the quest until they succeeded in
doing what they had set out to do or else, as a Russian roulette player who spins the chamber of the revolver and pulls the trigger once too often, they perished. The names that one reads today on the big scale maps are the names they themselves bestowed on their discoveries. They are never their own. They are invariably the names of other explorers, or of dim, minor royalty, German cartographers, colonial governors, their own patrons, members of learned societies and those of their own companions who perished on the way (quite often the leader perished too and the companions survived, in which case the leader got a posthumous by-line on his own expedition), so that if you knew the circumstances in which these rocks and ranges and peaks and deserts and other natural phenomena received their rather banal names it endows them with a positively sinister quality.

We are just about to jack the wheel up when some wild horses (the Australians call them brumbies) see us and come bounding out from the shade of the ghost gums on the banks of a creek in which, somewhere, according to Diane, there must be a soak of water or they wouldn’t be there, although it looks as dry as a bone.

Brumbies are the descendants of horses which escaped from outback cattle and sheep stations and bred in the bush. These are all chestnuts. For a moment they stand looking at us; then they go tearing off under the noonday sun with their manes streaming in a wind that is as hot as that produced by the hottest hair-dryer ever made, the elders in line ahead, the colts straining to keep abreast of them. They run out between the mulga shrubs, a sort of acacia, and the desert oaks, sparse here, out into the plain which is covered with pale yellow spinifex which is no use as feed to horses or cattle or any other pastoral animal, with the ‘whirlies’, moving whirlpools of sand, syphoning up on either side of them, out towards the Macdonnell Ranges, like cavalry horses that have lost their riders in the rout after an engagement, running loose with the
whirlies exploding all about them like shells.

The Macdonnell Ranges are said to be the shape of an elongated boomerang, if you can imagine one 200 miles long made of sandstone and quartzite and granite and gneiss and schists. They have peaks between 4000 and 5000 feet high and because they rise from a flat nothingness the effect is impressive. Once they were between 10,000 and 15,000 feet high, but even when they were still rising from the earth’s surface about 450 million years ago they had already begun to erode and they have been eroding ever since. (Don’t delay
your
visit! Go to the Macdonnell’s
now
before it is too late!)

At this moment the mountains are purple, as if they were covered with heather, although the guide book threatens even more improbable effects according to the time of day and the season; but this is quite enough for one day. They look very close but it is doubtful if the brumbies will go to them, for in fact they are all of 30 miles away, across the spinifex plain and few men, except perhaps a nomadic aboriginal even at this time of year, early autumn, could reach them in daylight travelling on foot. Here, without water, in five to six hours, you would be dead. Here in this country, even if you stay in the shade and do not move, the longest time that you can survive without water is 44 hours. The brumbies will probably double back into one of the gullies in the James Range where there is enough water for their needs, but at the moment although they are going almost flat out, the distance they must cover before we become invisible to them and they lose their fear of us is so great that it is like watching a slow-motion film of wild horses galloping on a super-wide screen and is something I will never forget for the rest of my life.

We left Alice Springs late yesterday morning – all the best expeditions I have ever been on started late – and as we did so I wondered, as all the citizens I spoke to do, what the Americans are up to on the other side of the Heavitree Ridge that
makes it such a forbidden place that no plane is allowed to fly over it however high in the sky. Perhaps the Mayor knows, not that it matters to any interested parties whether they’re allowed to fly over it or not. That’s what satellites are for. They have always had a down on Alice Springs, the Americans. Their previous attempt to obliterate it was soon after the last war when they wanted to fill the hollow in which it nestles with water and turn it into a reservoir.

It is currently fashionable for writers who have flown out for the day from one or other of the four conveniently situated principal cities (the nearest is Adelaide, 857 miles) to take the mickey out of Alice Springs, especially in the holiday season, but the Australian holiday season in Alice Springs is not necessarily the season when British explorers habitually forgather there, and I think that any one of us who returned to it after some days, weeks or months in the Petermann Ranges, or fresh from admiring that out-of-the-way wonder, the Schwerin Mural Crescent, would regard the place as the lap of luxury. I do, after one day away from it. These mickey-takers can jump in the lake (the nearest convenient one is Lake Amadeus not 300 miles away, which is almost solid salt so they will probably break their necks). So much for Alice Springs. Good bye. I’ve done my best for you.

We have seen a lot of interesting things since we left Alice Springs, Diane, Marge and me in my new bush suit from Woolworth’s, which is looking even less good since I helped change the wheel, thundering down the red dirt road between the long red ridges of the Macdonnell Ranges, among the mulga trees and the ironwood and the pallid ghost gums which look as if they have had their bark ripped off by vandals, seeing the aboriginals sitting under the trees in Western clothes waving to us to come over for a boomerang lesson, or riding out of the bush with a string of camels and seeing their wurleys near the settlement at Jay Creek, the little dens which were, until not long ago, their only protection against the
elements, not covered with bark any more but with corrugated iron.

We drive along the foot of the Waterhouse Range. It is as if an enormous whale had been stranded here when the tide went out and left the continent high and dry. It looks endless but it is only thirty miles long. We enter a country in which blue grass grows and there are cattle almost invisible in the dark pools of shadow under the trees and along the road side there are broken bottles and beat-up, broken motor cars abandoned even by the aboriginals, who are brilliant at making old motor cars go which have given up the ghost to the white man long ago.

This was, and is, the country of the Aranda people and a sign ‘Boggy Hole 18 Miles’ points the way to one of their sacred places, where there is perennial water. They were a people whose decorative art was expressed in curvilinear and circular motifs, at its most complex in the decoration of the sacred
tjurumbas
, pieces of wood or stone coated with red ochre, the abode of the owner’s spirit and covered with concentric circles, u-within-u figures and spirals ending in concentric circles, representing according to Spencer and Gillen, the great experts: ‘the principal feature of the myth portrayed … the spiritual ancestor, places where he camped, went into or came out of the ground, distributed spirit children, waged battle with an enemy or rival’, and so on.