Tracks in the desert

I have just finished reading Yiwara by Richard Gould (1969) and I found his writing thoroughly engaging. He spent about a year living with some of the last Gibson Desert Aborigines in 1966-67. Gould writes just at the time when the last remaining family groups were coming out of the desert to live in Mission and government settlements. His beautiful and sensitive descriptions of their daily life in the desert and clearly explain the inter-relatedness of the sacred nature of their lives and the practicalities of survival in a desert environment. One gets a sense of the environment too, as he walks us through the landscape, over dunes, up gullies, in among the mulga, as they collect plant food, hunt animals, make spears and attend to sacred rituals. However, there are some photographs in the book that could be of a culturally sensitive nature to some people. In the last chapter he describes how some of their customs that work so well in a desert environment, are ill adapted for dealing with the enticements and 'dissatisfactions' of living in a 'whitefella' world. He recounts some of the positive changes made as they adapt to the new situation as well as some of the negative fallout.


I was fascinated by the chapter on Artists and Monuments. Finding one of the sites mentioned by Gould, in this aerial view, made the story so much more real. It is an important ceremonial site at which the dreamtime Water-snake, Pimara, crossed the salt lake and turned into the large stone alignment visible in the view below. Pimara's spirit resides in freshwater springs nearby. Outside of this aerial view can still be made out the track across the lake that was used by those people travelling from the eastern side of the lake. The track was said to be originally made by the Pimara. According to Gould, the set up of aligned stones, artificial cave, springs and rocky promontory suggested a very sophisticated game trap. While there he saw emus and kangaroos travelling through the gaps, beside the artificial cave and on to the springs. In Gould's view, this site combines the sacred and the practical.

Aligned stones on Lake Moore

He finishes on a melancholy note by saying 'Today the Gibson Desert is the loneliest place on earth ... what can be lonelier than a place where people have lived their lives and then left forever ... '  Today, people do go back to reconnect with country and perform sacred duties. But I know it is not the same as living there - at the same time the world has changed and people have to be free to live the life of their choosing.

My sadness is for the country. I think it was Deborah Bird Rose who wrote that country that is no longer being looked after/lived in is called 'wild' or 'lonely'. It is not just the absence of the people, but it has become increasingly clear that the land was managed as well, with selective firing of the country, maintaining a mosaic patchwork of habitats and reducing the risk of wildfires. Slowly, slowly we are learning how to keep the country healthy today.

And in the end the beauty of the desert remains. As Nicholas Rothwell said in The Blast Zone, 'there's still the presence and the pulse of life - and life's faintest trace is always the most beautiful ... you scrape down, you find insects moving; you look about, you see the spores of lichen; you stay quiet, and soon enough there's some hawk that flies over you ...'

Sunshine or study - the spring dilemma

Spring. 

White fog enshrouded us this morning. 

Our valley was swallowed. 

Ghostly giants, karri trees, slowly reappeared as the rising sun dissolved the mist in an arc of rays.

Later blue skies and warm weather beckoned. Too lovely outside to be stuck inside tapping away at the computer, studying. I heard the sounds of baby birds being fed from somewhere in the dense shrubbery. Stopped to listen and pinpoint their position. The background hum of bees, making the most of the warmth and spring flush of nectar, was louder than the baby birds. Wattle birds zig-zagged between our garden and a giant karri, feeding their young up high, then diving down into the eremophila for nectar and insects. Extremely territorial, they chased away even the parrots that dared to get in their way. A frog started croaking, so probably more rain is on the way. That is the way of spring.

This is the hardest time of the semester to keep motivated, between assessments, between seasons, but what you put off now still has to be done later. So, back to it. Lieutenant Dale and his contemporaries... I wonder what it was like around here back then. When speaking of birds in his Descriptive Account of  ... King Georges Sound and the Adjacent Country  (published in 1834), he noted that 'the whole of the continent seems to be deficient in the feathered tribe'. When travelling through the bush, Dale said they rarely saw an animal. He suggested it may have been the fires killing off the young birds and animals in combination with egg hunting by the local tribes people. Or perhaps the birds were there but they didn't notice them?

The consequences of hot sweet tea

There is nothing quite like a steaming cup of hot, honey sweet tea. There is also nothing quite like the contents of that hot cup covering my study desk, my books and the floor. Just as I was about to get stuck into Kay Milton's  Anthropology, Culture and Environmentalism, you guessed it, my cup tipped over. Over everything. #@*! I was really looking forward to my first sip.

But ... while cleaning up I saw a family of fire tail finches feeding in the seeding grasses just outside my study window. Dropped the cleaning cloths and raced for my camera and managed to fire off a few shots before they took off. Thanks to the spilled tea. They are extremely shy and consequently very hard to photograph. With a new cuppa I set down to read again. Happy all round.

Fire tail finches

Milton was talking about environmentalism and comparisons that have been made between industrial and some non-industrial societies. Comparing the environmentalist models as practised by some (for instance) rainforest peoples who obtain most of their sustenance from the forest with minimal impact on the forest with 'the destructive and exploitative activities of commercial loggers, who clear large areas of forest just to remove a few commercially valuable trees'.

Red lobed wattle bird

Milton then goes on to say 'the reverence and respect which non-industrial societies are seen as treating their quarry species is contrasted with the apparently wasteful practices of commercial fishing and whaling, which can decimate whole populations and bring species to the brink of extinction'. This immediately reminded me of the debate going on currently here in Australia about the super trawler Margiris. The operating company is applying for a quota of 18,000 tonnes, which is half of the total allowable fishing quota for the whole of the Small Pelagic Fishery. The fish would be processed on board and most sold to markets in West Africa for $1.00 a kilo. They need to catch 15,000 tonnes just to break even. The West Africans used to have viable local fishing industries until super trawlers entered the scene, now their fishing industries are on the brink of collapse. It seems like a bad idea to me - the thin edge of a wedge.

Twenty-eight parrot

I have to admit the large scale industrialised practices of clear felling and huge scale fishing that sucks up tonnes of sea life in one scoop make me feel sick in the stomach. I find it hard to read the words and I mostly try not to think about it. Several times when reading some of Tim Flannery's books I have had to put them aside for a while before I could face reading further. To keep my conscience clear I only buy locally caught fish - caught in the inlet. To save trees, our furniture is pre-loved or made from recycled timber. I refuse to buy newspapers as I can't bear the thought of all that wasted timber for a day's read. Plus I plant trees. But I do at least have the opportunity to make choices ... many others don't. Whether or not non-industrial societies are as harmonious with nature as some would have us believe, it is the scale of industrial practices that is my concern. A lot of damage can be done in a very short time in the pursuit of a quick buck.

Fire tail finches

It is very easy to ignore it all when I look out the window and see a family of tiny finches nibbling on grasses.

All these photographs were taken this morning through my study window.
Super trawler debate on the ABC website.

Five small diversions

We have puppies. Five roly poly black and white border collie pups. When I tire of researching Edward Sapir and his writings on language and anthropology I can sit and watch the puppies sleeping and feeding. The extent of their voice at the moment is mewling and soft little grffs. Most of their communication seems to be sensory: touch and smell, making a beeline for their mum whenever she comes within close proximity.

This is in total contrast to Sapir who grew up speaking and reading Yiddish (recording Yiddish folk songs), Hebrew (translating the Old Testament) and English. He then went on to study German, Latin, French, Greek and Spanish. At university he added Dutch, Gothic, Icelandic, Middle High German, Sanskrit, Avestan and Persian. Is it any wonder that after he discovered anthropology under the tutelage of Franz Boas that linguistics became his passion?

Sapir is well known for his fieldwork studying Canadian and American Indian languages. He came to believe language was not instinctive but was a product of culture. This could be another arm of the 'nature nurture' debate. The argument goes that if language is a cultural construct then cultures can have different ways of understanding . Here in Australia this is particularly significant when comparing the indigenous and settler understandings of relationship to country.  English defines nature separate to culture whereas according to Deborah Bird Rose, to the Aborigines, nature and culture are entwined and inseparable. In a very broad sense we settlers live on the land and do things to it and the Aborigines live in the land and country is a relationship. Our language patterns tend to frame the relationships in this way. This is what led me to Sapir in the first place.

Edward Sapir 

This image is from Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist by Regna Darnell, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990.