Field Report 10:
Australia - Red Center - March 11, 1999

By Jeff Bell
 

Greetings from Melbourne! This is a wonderful place, feels like San Francisco to me actually, proof that there are places here in Australia where you can go which feel a world away from a billabong (small area where water has collected).

Just returned from the Red Center of Australia. The Northern Territory, Outback, so to speak, I escaped by train, but in truth, I would rather have stayed longer rather than leave there so quickly. Guess I can do without the big city sometimes, this is a place where the phone book for instance for the entire territory, a very large place is exceedingly small. The territory (not a self-governing state) also operates on a time difference of 1 1/2 hours from the East Coast. That would be 1 and ONE-HALF hours. You might say that being in sync with the world global financial markets is not a high priority out there. In fact, what you do or did out there didn't seem to matter one iota, which is perhaps what I enjoyed.

One moment of humor: I flew out from Sydney to Ayers Rock via Alice Springs. You've got to fly because the drive from Sydney would have been something like 44 hours by bus. On the flight from Alice Springs to Ayers Rock, going over some of the most arid country on the planet, the very efficient stewardesses of Quantas airlines actually included, along with the seatbelt fastening demo (hello?!) and a Vanna White turn to point out the No Smoking indicator lights, a full demo of the inflatable vests. Yes. Now am I nuts or is the unlikely event of a water landing more like the absolutely impossible event of a water landing? The captain comes on and say I'm sorry, on this 250 mile flight, we are making a 1,000 mile detour to put this baby down where it's safe, in the nearest body of water, the Tasman sea.

Many moments out there I spent pondering a feat I had read about, Gerry Tatrai's North/South bicycle record ride (hi Gerry), soaking in the sense of what he did. This country is very flat. And unchanging, for so many miles it is nearly inconceivable. It was almost a bit too much for me to imagine the feeling of what it would be like for this to be my land as opposed to North America. The road North/South is not a highway, it is a two laned road, with no guard rails, no lights, nada. To some it would seem like an experience filled with—emptiness?— but you'd only know the truth of it if you actually did it. Which he did.

One night out in the well designed, pre-planned village where you stay to visit Ayers Rock, I walked a kilometer or so from the outdoor amphitheater, where I saw "Ants" to the village on a trail through the bush. (An aside—the moment that I enjoyed the most was when they discover "insectopia", a garbage heap, and they play in it like an amusement park. At that moment, you feel, hey, the American culture has it's good points, especially if it makes other people feel like this. When I was walking out, I overheard a German couple talking with some people and they were clearly touched by something entirely different—the quality and intricacy of the animation, which is amazing. So much for knowing what other people see in the American culture.) The moon was out, and it was great to feel what the Aboriginal people must have felt for tens of thousands of years, all the mysteriousness of the night in the Australian bush.

The Ghan train ride out, which took about 30 hours, was more of a stretch to do a lot of reading and an exercise in getting a feel of how vast and harsh the interior of Australia. It's like the center of the earth out there: hot, red, and a place few people would think of as a hospitable place. The terrain is not unlike what you might see on a drive down I-5, except it's red, very red.

Ever since leaving the East Coast of Australia, where I had the coastline to keep my bearings, I noticed that my sense of direction was completely messed up. System done, out of service. Finally I realized that down here what messes you up on a basic level is that when you look at the sun, it is always slightly to the North, as opposed to how it has been: to the South. Not only that, but when the sun rises, it arcs left, rather than right. Your instinct is that the sun is in the South and that the sun is moving in the wrong direction, right to left, rather than left to right. Even here in Melbourne, I'm hopelessly turned around, having basically given up having a sense of which way is North.

The Southern Cross, which by the way is the set of five stars displayed on the Australian flag currently, is in fact not the brightest set of stars in the Southern portion of the sky. But it does sit right on the Milky Way, turned perfectly on it's side, towards the bottom of the sky. Probably a good navigation tool in the early days. And while it would only appear to be identified as a cross to Christian minds because it has a star on the four cross ends, one star doesn't fit the picture, it's in between the bottom and the right side. Makes you think about planets out there with intelligent life at about our stage of development where their sky happens to have a perfect alignment of stars that actually seems to paint something distinct. Now that would give you religion. We've got a saucepan, which isn't bad. Weird to think about a day when everything that was know to be temporary was on the ground, and everything permenant was up there above you, in the sky where you could never get to. No wonder heaven was up there, and that was where you would go after you died (if you were good).

Interestingly, every year they have contests for new Australian flag designs, but evidently have trouble making the final break with England. Basically the flag says one thing—that Australia is the premier British territory in the Southern Hemisphere. It's a matter of time until it goes the way of the Tasmanian tiger: extinct.

Australia is the size of the U.S. and began it's European invasion not too long after the U.S., but due to the harshness of the land, Australia today only supports about 17 million people as opposed to our 250 million. It's not clear that it could support a whole lot more too. The lack of volcanic activity on this rather stable continent means that the soil and the oceans are lacking nutrients (phosphates and nitrates). Australia imports seafood to feed it's population, for example. Mammals have never done well here, they are too high on the food chain, but there has been an explosion of different species of everything else because of all the specialized niches that have to be adapted to to survive.

The interesting thing about Australia is how clearly it demostrates the fragile balance of man and environment. When man (Aborigines) arrived here some 40,000 years ago, there were only a handful of large mammals and the largest where quickly extinguished. The Aborigines developed a nomadic lifestyle that in spite of the harsh country allowed them to cover the entire continent. With the coming of the Europeans, a second wave of alterations to the continent have taken place and a host of other species were and are being extinguished. Not unlike the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs and the majority of fauna and flora on the Earth, the global spread of humanity has had a similar effect. Let's hope for the sake of future generations that we protect as many species as we can, if for no other reason to avoid the shame it will bring our descendants who look back in amazement at our short-sightedness.

There's a sad story of New Zealand that illustrates this. New Zealand was discovered late, about 800 years ago, by the Maoris. When they arrived New Zealand was a paradise of birds of all sizes. We think of wild animals as being naturally afraid of humans. But really because in the beginning, the friendly species, especially the large ones who did not recognize us as a predators, get extinguished, selected out of the remaining gene pool.

The Maoris arrived to a seemingly limitless supply of moa birds, 12 species in fact, gigantic birds, resembling ostriches, only much taller. Evidently they tasted great (legs were favored) and were simple to catch, there is no evidence in the fossil records of any Maori hunting instruments of any kind. For a couple of hundred years, the moas were eaten, some sites showing hundreds of thousands of partially eaten birds. The population of the Maori grew to perhaps 100,000, then about 400 years ago and the moa went extinct.

What followed is interesting. The Maori, effectively unable to support their large populations, evolved into one of the most warlike, cannibalistic societies that we know of. The first Europeans who arrived aptly named their landing site, Murderer's Bay, when the Maori people rowed out to meet and murder the first landing party.

North Americans are lucky to live on such rich lands. Lands where animals have enough to eat that they can involve to grow antlers, lose them and grow another. In Australia, such an animal would never evolve, natural nutrients are too rare, such a wasteful being would never evolve.

(Factoid: The last ice ago, about 20,000 years ago [1 of 17 in the last 2 million years], onset in only 100-200 years, stuck around a few thousand years, and then broke in only 3-5 years! Now that's global warming! Already a bit colder than today, when the ice age hit the planet cooled by an average of about 13 degrees F and Northern Europe was either under many feet of ice or a frozen wasteland. Tree line around the world lowered to about 6,500 ft., about the elevation of Lake Tahoe.)

The Alice

Alice Springs is roughly in the center of Australia and is the largest town in that part of the continent. The signs on one end of town says "Darwin" with an arrow pointing to that town which happens to be about 1000 miles or more away. There is a very fun band which played one night there, with a dingeridoo player, a guy on congos, bass and guitar. The next night they played down the street at another place and everyone just moved down to that place. They'd get these funky B-52 like grooves going with some rap-like vocals and that dingeridoo. In typical Aussie style, one night they had a contest where people were called up to make their attempt at playing the dingeridoo, and there were people from Europe and Canada (no Americans!) represented and the Aussie fellow in charge did a typical job of turning it into lots of good fun.

This "small" town, with it's dozen or so major streets and Aboriginal people scattered about within, is a the front lines in fact where a cold, but real war between two peoples over land still plays out. You can talk all you want in the big cities about the Euro vs. Aboriginal issues, but to understand the truth and complexity of how it plays out, you have to go to a place like the Alice.

Lots of Aborigine people hung out around the place I was staying, and on Sunday it was interesting to see a Bible-thumping white fellow alone in the park with his guitar and PA system, preaching with great pursuasiveness, and to the skeptical eye, with a bit too much demanding tone. Many Aborigine people were sitting around listening however with a certain calm, but detachment which would be hard to describe. In all the alcohol problems and demise of their stature, it's no wonder that talk of a path to salvation would be have some power.

But the signs of detachment between the two groups are easy to see. One night, having settled into a room over a tavern that had bands playing on Monday night, I couldn't sleep with the noise. At 2am, I walked downstairs and outside just in time to see the end of some sort of disagreement between some alcohol-troubled Aborginal men who hang out in the park across the street. At that moment, three large, relatively young white bouncers from the tavern seemed to lose their cool, got feed up and, with intimidating power in their stride, went across the street to break up the fight. I couldn't make out any of the talk, but the body language said it all. The Aboriginal men, as they backed away, turned their attention to the tavern and waved and motioned at the tavern, with all it's noise and institutional alcohol consumption. This was at the eye of their rage now. But the bouncers had the upper hand, you wouldn't want to mess with these large fellows. Here it was, a view into how the frontier grinded at the edges. Animosities perpetuating, and an ugly line drawn by the powerful. In a perfect world, no white person would drink in a town filled with Aboriginal people, but gotta get real, that isn't even close to our nature.

From the start, Aborignal people have never liked sharing their land with the outsiders, which is reinforced by the fact that their societies have developed over tens of thousands of years very specific things that can and should not be done, and the introduction of European can and should nots were so different and contrary to their own in many cases, that co-habitation is a problem with no perfect solution.

Amazing as it seems, many Aborginal people today still can live the traditional way, and the list of things that we would find unusual about this is enormous. On the one hand, you might be amazed at how shoes are not part of their tradition. On the horrifying side, if this still happens, you would be shocked to hear a story of an Aborigine who broke the legs of a dingo to keep it around the camp for warmth and then simply ditched it when the tribe moved on. Our you might be amazed to know that often only a small fraction of the day is spent by the men hunting and gathering, and much time consumed telling mythological-like stories => an adaptions to a land that offered little, personal conservation of energy being tantamount, and some allowance for extra time to save up for when food was tougher to find.

Today there are about 200,000 Aborgine people, about the same number as where here hundreds of years ago, only now they own about 13% of the land, as opposed to having access to 100%.

In Alice Springs, you rarely will make eye contact with an Aborignal person, unless you are speaking with them. They speak amoung themselves in their own language, in some cases speak perfect Aussie English, in some cases very minimal or difficult to understand English. (I won't soon forget one middle aged lady who charmed me to no end with her sweetness. She had woken up after sleeping in a park, desparate for some beer.) Ayers Rock, the remarkable slab of rock which the Aboriginal people own (and lease to the government), has great spiritual significance for them, as it should, since it stands out as one of the only remarkable landmarks in the middle of an enormous land.

The Aboriginal people ask that you do not climb the Rock, which created an interesting experience. After seeing the sun rise at Ayers Rock (and for about 5 minutes hearing a chorus of dingos howl [dingos can't bark] but never seeing a one), the buses and vans take everyone to the start of the climb of Ayers Rock. Faced with the knowledge posted on signs everywhere that the Aboriginal people would prefer that you do not climb it, I had decided that I would wait until I got their to make a final decision.

So it was a showdown—your personal desires versus those of Aborignal people who, at tourist haven Ayers Rock, were never visible. Sounded like a chance to act out a part in a real life drama that I considered only applied to others.

When I got to the start of the climb I was frozen in indecision. I watched people of all types head up the rock. Japanese tourist, well, I expected that, they are not known for being free thinkers, but at this moment the conversations I overheard were surreal to me: Could I make it, it sure will be tiring, etc.

I wanted the exercise of the climb. I wanted to see the view. And while I could see that all the climbing had discolored the rock along the route, no Aborigine would ever need to know of my transgression. I thought back to Maxx Maxed of Nimbin, whose life forever ran against the tide. At that moment, I was right between Maxx and your Average Guy. I was neither. And I was going nowhere.

Back at the village I had met people, though not many, who categorically weren't going to climb the Rock because it didn't feel right to them. But they weren't here now, and I was being torn in two directions. 15 minutes went by, evidently no one else was as indecisive as I was, at least that I could see. I knew that whether I climbed or not was not actually important, but having gone through the gauntlet of struggling with your own desires versus the desires of someone else you'd never even met sort of was. (You folks with children doubtlessly have passed through that gauntlet enough to know plenty well enough.)

So I made my decision. Later, I met two people, a young Japanese fellow and a older Canadian fellow who asked whether I'd climbed the rock, which I didn't expect. I could feel my decision mattering, in a small way.

I'd had a bit of a hard time relating in a big way to the spiritual nature of Ayers Rock that the Aboriginal people felt. It would come and go. But each day as you'd get to see the rock from different angles, in different lights, and then a final sundown where it transformed from grey to bright orange to grey and back to bright orange again in the space of about 5 minutes, I was finally convinced.

This was a special place indeed and many Aborigines doubtless had felt transported into a very mystical state of mind visiting the holy, reserved places scattered around the rock. The Aborigines had stories about the various holes and cracks in the rock being made by giant serpents and spears. Did they believe these stories in a literal way? Some of them surely did, and I'm sure were awed. Sounds hokey, but the easiest analogy I can think of is imagining that you were in some sort of fraternity with all sorts of mystical initiation rites, which you actually believe in! The Christian mythological tales no longer hold that sort of spell over me!

Back at the camp, they served up a cook-it-yourself menu combo option of kangaroo, emu and crocodile. I had to try it, but actually didn't finish any of the three. The 'roo was the best, most like steak, the emu was in sausage form and the croc was in shish-ka-bob form. Now that didn't feel right!

I had a talk after dinner with a local old fellow who knew a lot about the evolution of Australia. About how it used to sit close to the South Pole in a warmer time millions of years ago, attached to Antarctica, New Zealand and South America (all called Godswana). And how New Guinea was formed as Australia moved North, slamming into Asia, and how it clearly folded that upper part of Australia like a piece of paper, with New Guinea forming mountains on the North and a sea to the South. But the power of mythology isn't reserved just for Aboriginal people (they believe they've been here since the beginning of time), a big smile came across this guy's face when he described to me how he had deduced that we came from Mars! He said that the Sphinx was built before the Egyptians and the face of the Sphinx had been spotted on Mars! Thinking as quick as I could, I managed a smile and said something about how there are so many mysteries we've yet to unfold.

Final tale: At the end of my stay in Alice Springs, I found myself in a gallery called Godswana, pondering buying some Aboriginal crafts after all. Some of the paintings were spectacular and spectacularly expensive too. I noticed each time I went in their there were different Aboriginal people milling around, somehow attached to this place.

Turns out they were artists and worked from a loft upstairs. One Aborinigal lady had the most brilliant and flamboyant clothes you could imagine, and the owner explained that she had a habit of litterally spending hundreds of dollars on second hand clothes, more than she could ever wear. Another striking tall, skinny old fellow in white jeans, white cowboy shirt, boots, cowboy hat evidently made boomarangs and had just arrived from the store with some sandpaper in hand. Another fellow with a white beard, the most perfectly worn bush hat you'd ever seen, and nothing but rounded features was one of the painters, and when he spoke the lady behind the counter could barely converse, I believe he was speaking English, but I'm not sure.

Another Aboriginal lady with a bonnet, perfectly crinkled face, crinkled smile and smiling eyes said absolutely nothing while handing over to the owner a beautiful strand of beads stranded together with human hair. It had alternating hand bored bright yellow and orange seeds about the size of marbles and the strand was identical to ones that were on sale for about $8 (U.S.), only this one was about 6 feet in diameter. The owner told her that they were very beautiful and commented that she had been a very busy woman, and then delicately mentioned that they could some that were a bit shorter!

The coup de grace came when I was told that the owner had just arrived back from Cambarra, the Australian capital, where her artists had been featured in an Aboriginal art show put on by the French consulate. A very shy fellow perhaps 35 years old walked in from the back and was greeted as a returning hero, his work, which sold in the store for perhaps $2,000 to $5,000 per painting had been the featured work on all the banners, pamphlets, and show booklet for the art show. From the brochure, you could tell that the exhibit was exquisitely produced by the French. This artist fellow walked about very shyly, nodding his head a few times, looking rather nervously at things around the shop, and never said anything. I'd caught everyone at a moment in time when everything was really going their way (the power the French hold cannot be discounted!), and it was great to be the lone customer there to see it all.

Bye for now!
Jeff.
 

To read more Field Reports, click here.