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 The track was said to be originally made by the Pimara.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 ...'