NO MANS LAND

Over many years I operated walking tours into remote Aboriginal country. In that process I slept in desert mission communities, spent months travelling with Aboriginals onto their homelands or ferrying them to funerals and jail visits. Like a stranger in a strange land I would wonder how my life had worked its way to this point, my daily vision populated with ancient black faces and red dirt. 

I visited and became family to some remarkable Western Arrernte people around the old mission town of Hermannsburg, witnessing both the daily struggle of the dispossessed and the joy of living simply. I met people like old Mavis Malbunka whose dream of bringing a future to her family, despite the impossible demands placed upon her as one of Central Australia's leaders, was unrelenting. One season, as chemotherapy stole her hair, she visited us on her country with a bandana around her head.

I became a brother to her daughter Marion who spoke as softly of her culture as her mother did forcefully. I became a son to her 'old man' who has recently passed away [ I can't repeat his name out of respect to Mavis and Aboriginal culture] and whose dementia robbed the world of the old stories that, if we are honest, no one really wants to hear anymore. 

For five years, flying eloquently under the controlling gaze of white authorities who "represent the interests of Aboriginal people"  we were successful.

Artists, writers, meditators and singers visited the community. We slept at a camp at Ipolera where warmth trapped in a sandstone bluff by day waged a nightly battle with the icy desert cold. Our camp had previously stored sacred objects [Tjurunga] and was a place of power and mystery to local people.

Then I got greedy. I saw a great big mountain range begging to be walked and a great big opportunity beckoning for my company and the local people. 

We called it The Ilpurla Trail. We designed it, built it, walked it, and in the tradition of everything that is touched by the white authorities and the devastated clan based factions in Central Australia, it now lies overgrown and defeated. Stage Two of the genocide proceeds uninhibited by fancy notions of self determination..

Yep, amongst the child abuse, the alcoholism, the gambling, the lack of jobs, the drug invasion, the diabetes that leaves blackfellas blind and legless without touching a drink, the trail failed. Not because it wasn't great, or because its beauty wasn't mesmerizing, or it's business case so perfect.  Within the DNA of white bureaucrats and Aboriginal culture lie forces that counter any move towards health or independence.

There is a parallel universe between white and black Australia  that is separated by a bridge too far. I got caught in No Man's Land, between desert Aboriginal people who can't count and white lawyers who can only count; between an ancient law lost and a white law that draws its power from the same font that stole children and allowed the shooting of Aboriginals as vermin. Yep, they are the ones protecting Aboriginals, negotiating royalties from mining companies that leave people wasted and hopeless, a perverse alchemy that turns dreaming stories into welfare entitlement. That the trail excited so much support is extraordinary in a culture so decimated and hopeless. 

In the No Mans Land everyone shoots at you. The welfare dependent Aboriginal clans fighting for a piece of something not even completely built and the white lawyers for whom 'right' is what can be proved in court, not what might create a future for children.

Slowly the experience is forming in my head such that I can write it down in an open letter called Why Nothing Works. I write about a line a day because each memory, both good and bad, is like freeing myself from barbed wire. I move carefully lest I be lacerated by my own anger and the knowledge of what is really happening in this country. 

I have been urged to "let it go" and I will, but not before I know what it is that I am letting go of. There is the deep sadness that spinifex grows over the Ilpurla Trail right now. There is the knowledge that as each generation tut tuts about the errors of the past we are blind to the ones in the moment. I am still incandescent with rage with what I perceive as deeply flawed bureaucratic process verging on the insane. I am still in shock that so much ineptitude can be left unchallenged.

Some answers are coming. More will come with the published Why Nothing Works. On a personal level I have realized people's capacity for love is like a camera lens. My focus, crystal clear on far away things, can be blurred to those closest to me. I see children in a desert from a thousand miles away. Most people focus only on what is close to them, to the immediate concerns of loved ones. That is what makes society possible. What happens on the other side of no mans land is a blur and it is in that blur that the madness of Central Australia works its daily poison into this and future generations.

I rang old Mavis the other day. She said:

You are still my son

You are still my daughters brother and

You are still her children's uncle.

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