THE PUB HAD FOUR DIVISIONS. The Saloon Bar, where I worked, catered for many of the regulars — truckies, station hands, some of them part-Aboriginal, and the occasional black ringer (station hand) who had just been paid a two-hundred-dollar cheque to be cashed at the pub, of which little would be left by the next morning. However, blacks, despite the easy pickings, were tacitly frowned upon here and didn’t often come in. The Lounge Bar catered for tourists and some of the regulars of a slightly higher social standing although there was general flow between the two areas. The Pool Room allowed blacks in but grudgingly, and the Inner Bar, a cosy, tastelessly decorated room, was where the police, lawyers and upper-class whites drank. Here blacks were forbidden. This was not legal or stated but it was enforced none the less under the guise of, ‘Patrons are requested to wear neat attire etc.’ It was known by the hard cases in the saloon as the Poofters’ Bar. At least this pub didn’t have a dog window, as most of the others in the Northern Territory had. These were small windows around the back where booze was sold to the blacks.
I lived in a draughty cement pigeon-hole out the back, furnished with an aluminium bed covered by a stained shocking pink chenille bedspread. I wrote cheery letters home, telling everyone how I was practising animal training on giant cockroaches, how I bullwhipped them into submission but was afraid they might one day turn against me, which was why I had refrained from putting my head in their mouths. But the jokes hid a growing depression. Getting camels or even information was turning out to be infinitely harder than I had thought. By that time, word of my scheme had spread and it brought much derisive laughter from the patrons, and enough useless and incorrect information to stock a library of the absurd. Suddenly everyone, it seemed, knew all there was to know about camels.
One does not have to delve too deeply to discover why some of the world’s angriest feminists breathed crisp blue Australian air during their formative years, before packing their kangaroo-skin bags and scurrying over to London or New York or any place where the antipodean machismo would fade gently from their battle-scarred consciousnesses like some grisly nightmare at dawn. Anyone who has worked in a men-only bar in Alice Springs will know what I mean.
Some of the men would be hanging around the doors at opening time and, after a full twelve hours of saturation, leave reluctantly, and often on all fours, at closing time. Others had their set hours and set places and set friends and swapped yarns for a while, always the same stories, always the same reactions. Others sat on their own in a corner dreaming of god knows what. Some were crazy, some were mean, and some, oh those few rare gems, were amiable, helpful and humorous. By nine p.m. some would be in tears over lost opportunities, lost women, or lost hope. And while they wept, and while I held their hands across the counter saying there there, they pissed silently and unselfconsciously up against the bar.
To really come to grips with the Australian cult of misogyny, one has to plod back through all two hundred years of white Australia’s history, and land on the shore of the ‘wide brown land’ with a bunch of hard-done-by convicts. Actually, the place where they landed was relatively green and inviting, the wide brown stuff was to come later. Life was none too easy in the colony, but the boys learnt to stick together and when they’d done their stretch, if they were still sound of limb, they ventured into the forbidding country beyond to try to scratch a pitiful living. They were tough and they had absolutely nothing to lose. And they had alcohol to soften the blow. By the 1840s it began to dawn on the residents that something was missing — sheep and women. The former they imported from Spain, a stroke of genius that was to set Australia on the economic map; the latter they brought over in boats from the poor-houses and orphanages of England. Since there were never enough to go round (women, that is) one can visualize only too clearly the frenzied rush on the Sydney wharves when the girls came bravely sailing in. Such a traumatic racial memory is hard to blot out in a mere century, and the cult is sustained and revitalized in every pub in the country, especially in the outback where the stereotyped image of the Aussie male is still so sentimentally clung to. The modern-day manifestation is almost totally devoid of charm. He is biased, bigoted, boring and, above all, brutal. His enjoyments in life are limited to fighting, shooting and drinking. To him a mate includes anyone who is not a wop, wog, pom, coon, boong, nigger, rice-eye, kyke, chink, Iti, nip, frog, kraut, commie, poofter, slope, wanker, and yes, sheila, chick or bird.
One night in the pub one of the kinder regulars whispered to me, ‘You ought to be more careful, girl, you know you’ve been nominated by some of these blokes as the next town rape case. You shouldn’t be so friendly.’
I was devastated. What had I done but patted the odd shoulder or helped out the occasional paralytic or listened in silence to some heart-breaking hard luck story. I felt really frightened for the first time.
On another occasion I had taken over from someone in the Inner Bar. There were maybe half a dozen men drinking in there quietly, including two or three policemen. Suddenly an old dishevelled drunken Aboriginal woman came in and started yelling abuse and obscenities at the cops. A big burly policeman went over to her and started banging her against the wall. ‘Shuttup and get out, you old girl,’ he shouted back. I was about to deparalyse my limbs, leap over the bar and stop him, when he dragged her out to the door and shoved her into the street. Not a person moved off their stools and presently everyone went back to their drinks with a few cracks about the stupidity of coons. I shed some tears behind the bar that night when no one was looking, not of self-pity but of helpless anger and disgust.
Kurt, meanwhile, had overcome his fierce pride and popped in occasionally to talk me into going back. Gladdy, whom I was much more eager to see, came in from time to time, to check on my progress and secretly to urge me to accept. After two or three months at the hotel I had saved enough to make that idea once again feasible, if not attractive. It was obvious that Kurt’s was the best place to learn anything and if that meant putting up with his eccentric ways then perhaps it was the best solution. Besides, he had been charming on these visits, and had lulled me into thinking I might have made a tactical mistake.
So I began spending my spare days out there, sleeping the night, this time inside the house at Gladdy’s insistence, and going back to work early in the morning. It was on one of these occasions that the pub dealt me its final blow.
I returned to my little dungeon in the wee hours of the morning to find a large, well-moulded lump of excrement snuggling almost lovingly on my pillow. As if it belonged there. As if it had found its final resting-place at last. I had the most absurd notion that I should address it in some way — let my presence be known as if I were the trespasser. Something like, ‘Excuse me, I think you have the wrong bed.’ I gazed at it, mouth open, hand poised upon the door, for at least five minutes. My sense of humour, my self-confidence and my faith in humanity were all doing a perceptible fade. I handed in my notice and fled to the relative sanity of the ranch.
After that, even the rigours of Kurt’s company seemed bearable. Hard physical work out in the fresh air and hot sun, camels to be entertained by, and Gladdy, all made life look promising again. Besides, Kurt, though never exactly kind-hearted, was at least being intermittently civil. He was a wonderful teacher. He forced me to work with the animals in a way that I would have been too cowardly to attempt, but he never pushed so hard that I lost my confidence. The result was that I was fearless. There was nothing those creatures could do that scared me in the least. How I escaped serious physical damage during that time must have a lot to do with guardian angels, Kurt-cleverness and outrageous good luck. He seemed pleased with my progress with the beasts and began introducing me to the secrets of handling them.
‘Remember, alvays vatch de animal, vatch him day and night and see how he tinks. Und alvays, alvays, de camelt’s needs come first.’
Each of his eight animals had a distinct personality. Biddy was the matronly grande dame of cameldom and infinitely superior to anything merely human; Misch-Misch was the highly-strung, vain young aristocrat; Khartoum was the likeable nervous wreck; Ali was the sad and stoic clown; Fahani was a poor senile old lady; Aba was the backward child having trouble with puberty; and Bubby was the eternal practical joker. Dookie was the camel born to be king. I loved them all with an anthropomorphizing devotion. No matter how much I discovered about them, there was always more to learn. They continued to surprise and fascinate me until the day I left my own four on the Indian Ocean coast. I spent hours gazing at them, laughing at their antics, talking to them and touching them. They consumed all my thought and what little there was of my spare time. Instead of watching TV with Kurt and Gladdy of an evening, I would be out in the paddock moon-struck, listening to cud-chewing, and crooning one-sided conversations. And while this love affair was going on I didn’t have to think too much about my proposed trip — it could remain a safe glow at the end of a very long tunnel.
Kurt continued to scream and berate me when I did something wrong but this I could take, even masochistically appreciate, as it kept me on my toes, combated my inherent laziness and made me learn quickly. Besides, when he actually came out with a word of praise, or a rare smile, it brought relief and pride past description. A compliment bled from the master was worth a million given freely by anyone else. There have been many happy slaves.
The ranch itself was fantastic and uncanny perched out there in the middle of the oldest rocks in the world. And it was perhaps the cold desolate lovelessness of the place that threw into sharp focus the magical and life-affirming qualities of the country around it. To enter that country is to be choked with dust, suffocated by waves of thrumming heat, and driven to distraction by the ubiquitous Australian fly; it is to be amazed by space and humbled by the most ancient, bony, awesome landscape on the face of the earth. It is to discover the continent’s mythological crucible, the great outback, the never-never, that decrepit desert land of infinite blue air and limitless power. It seems ridiculous now, to talk of my growing sense of freedom given the feudal situation I was living in, but anything could be mended, anything forgotten, any doubt withstood during a walk through those timeless boulders, or down that glittering river-bed in the moonlight.
I worked sun-up to sun-down and sometimes long after, seven days a week. If we closed the ranch down for a day because of rain or because Kurt had declared a holiday, there was still mending and cleaning to be done. I began to realize that Kurt related to me exactly as he would to a camel in training. He did not, for example, allow me to wear shoes, so an extremely painful process of foot-toughening had to be suffered while my skin learnt to resist burrs shaped like maces and half an inch across. Some nights I could not sleep for the pain in my swollen, punctured and infected feet. If I objected it was taken as insubordination and, besides, my pride did not allow me to complain too often. I had created my own prison and now I had to be able to withstand anything the warder could dish out. Eventually, when my feet became blackened, tough, split and calloused, Kurt allowed me a pair of sandals. He also took a strange pleasure in watching me eat.
‘Eat up, girl, that’s it,’ he would say as I wolfed down a gargantuan meal. ‘You need your strength.’ Indeed I did. He watched me like a hawk, castigated me for mistakes, and patted me and fed me when I had been good.
Drawn closer by our common enemy and our alliance with the people down in the creek, Gladdy and I were developing a deep friendship. Without her, I simply could not have stayed with Kurt as long as I did. She had got a job in town primarily as a respite from her husband and because Kurt was constantly fretting and grumbling about their financial situation. The fact that the ranch was not doing as well as it should have been was due to two things; one was the long-standing feud between Kurt and Fullarton, who, according to Kurt, bribed all the tourist bus drivers into staying away; the other was Kurt’s outlandish contempt for and rudeness towards the people who did come.
‘Vat do you tink you are doing, you bloody idiot, on dat fence? You bloody goddamn tourists, can’t you bloody read? We’re not open today. You tink we don’t haf bloody holidays out here or sometink?’
And it was one of the few things I liked about the man. The only time Kurt and I really communicated at all, apart from camel business, was when we chuckled together about the awfulness of what he called the ‘terrorists’. When Kurt was in one of his moods, he took it out on everyone, including his bread and butter. It was the only sign of some innate integrity. That we developed over those months what almost amounted to a friendship I put down to the fact that I still laboured under the middle-class delusion that everyone was a good guy at heart if you could just get to the bottom of their problem, but he was to knock that foolishness out of me eventually. His inner workings were better left untouched. At this stage in my development, I was fatally caught in my desire to understand someone so totally outside my ken, before I came to realize that you can understand and excuse until there is nothing left to hate.
It strikes me as sad, now that I can look back on that era relatively calmly, that Kurt manufactured his own hell, because there were wonderful moments with him, long peaceful rides through the back country and learning to race camels down in the creek-bed. I galloped bareback on these occasions without a thought for the ground whizzing below those pounding legs. It was exhilaration past description. I usually rode a young bull — Dookie. He was my favourite and, I suspected, Kurt’s also. One develops a special attachment to an animal in training, following the fear and concentration and difficulty to see a perfect beast gradually emerge from a frightened and unmanageable one-thousand-pounds of trouble. This was intensified by the fact that I was in training also, and Dookie and I were a team, to be put through the hoops together.
There was one flaw in Kurt’s relationship to the animals: when his temper was up he could be brutally cruel. While it is true that a camel must be dealt with firmly, and bad behaviour must always be countered with severe reprimand and a few resounding clouts, Kurt almost always went overboard. The young camels especially were quite terrified of him. The first time I was witness to this fire and brimstone treatment was shortly after I arrived. Dookie had let fly a kick at Kurt who retaliated with a good fifteen minutes of beating with a chain across that leg until I thought it must surely break. I went inside to Glad and couldn’t speak. I didn’t speak to him for two days, not out of a desire to punish but because I just couldn’t look at him. For the first and only time in our relationship Kurt was contrite. He didn’t want to lose me again. But it was to happen over and over and it seemed as if everyone, including the camels, saw it as unavoidable, to be endured like everything else.
During those first months I was often overwhelmed by such despair that I thought of packing up and going home, beaten. This was countered effectively by a singularly cunning manoeuvre on Kurt’s part. He had given me a day off — a reward I accepted with suspicious gratitude. I could smell a rat. After complimenting me on my work, he informed me of a new financial agreement he had thought up. He would keep me working there for the eight months, then for two or three he would help me build my saddles and gear and prepare for the trip, after which he would give me three camels of my choice, free, to be returned when the trip was finished. It was, of course, too good to be true. I knew that he was playing with me, knew it, and then rejected the knowledge because I needed to believe. I looked into his eyes, through which self-interest shone like a torch, and accepted. It was a gentleman’s agreement. Kurt refused to sign anything, saying that was not the way he did business, but as everyone knew, most of all me, Kurt had never been a gentleman. He had me over a barrel but there was nowhere else to go if I wanted to breathe life into my dream.
I had often told Kurt how I loved crows — they were to me the essence of wild freedom and intelligent survival. I wanted one. This is not as selfish a desire as it sounds. If you are careful, it is easy to steal a baby crow from a nest without disturbing the others or apparently distressing its parents. You can then teach it to fly and to come to you for food and affection and it need never be caged or clipped. It will, after spending an overindulged childhood with you, begin bringing its pubescent wild friends home for afternoon teas and parties and will eventually leave you to begin a new life with its own kind out in the bush. A good system whereby everyone lives happily ever after. Kurt said he would get me a crow if it was the last thing he did. We began watching nests in the creek-bed. The parent birds were feeding several sets of squawking hungry heads forty feet up in the river gums. One hot midday, when every living thing seemed to be drowsing or sleeping, a grey crane flew into the tree opposite one of the nests and began to nod off in the heat. One of the parent crows, who had been laconically chortling to itself and who was by now obviously bored, flew across to the tree and alighted on a branch a little below the unsuspecting crane. It then hopped up on to the others branch and, ever so quietly and nonchalantly, began sidling along it. When it was right next to the sleeping crane, it let out a raucous caw and flapped its wings. The crane shot six feet out into the air in a flurry of feathers before it realized it was the butt of a rude joke and regained its composure. After recovering from our helpless guffaws of laughter, we decided upon that nest.
The hunting of the crow was a major expedition; ropes, riding camels and lunches. Kurt assured me that he was an excellent climber and could reach the nest. However, after several attempts, although he could see the four young crows perfectly well, he could not quite reach them. He shimmied down the slippery trunk and announced plan B.
‘But, Kurt, you can’t do that. We don’t want four crows and besides they’ll be killed in the fall.’
‘Nonsense. De nest is light and it vill float. Besides, da branch will cushion da fall. Anyvay, vot’s it matter to you? You vanted a crow, didn’t you?’
There was no dissuading him. He hoisted the rope over the branch, pulled with all his strength and down it came, branch, limb and nest with two dead birds, another which died in my hands and one with a broken leg.
I carried Akhnaton home on Dookie, wrapped in nest feathers and inside my shirt. I rode in front so Kurt wouldn’t see me crying.
Two major developments had occurred by this time that made life a shade less taxing. My sister sent me a tent which I pitched on the other side of a hill from the ranch and which gave me a certain amount of privacy. I had also begun to make friends with our neighbours. They were potters and leather craftsmen — archetypal hippies with attractive desperado overtones, who were friendly, hospitable and who talked to me in a language I had almost forgotten. They lived in the only building in Alice Springs that looked as if it belonged — a dilapidated old stone house called Basso’s Farm, nestled among hills, which I loved as much as its occupants. Polly, Geoff and their small child lived at one end; Dennis, Malina and Dennis’s two small boys lived at the other. Malina was a fair-skinned, red-haired Scottish lass who made superb pots but was covered in tropical ulcers, insect bites and heat rash. Unlike the rest of us, she found it hard to eulogize about the wonderfulness of deserts.
Every spare moment I had I was over there, hanging around doorways in my baker’s outfit, chatting, laughing, or watching Polly stitch and fiddle with leather or change her daughter’s nappies without once raising her voice or looking harassed. She was an excellent craftswoman. The bags she made were untooled, delicate, beautifully designed, fastidiously detailed and she offered to teach me how to do it. I found that I lacked her patience, dexterity and talent, but after much sweat I managed to complete two goat-skin bags that were very pretty but proved to be totally useless on the trip. The lessons, however, came in handy when I eventually began to make my own pack gear, a year later.
My social life was now centred around Basso’s Farm. I would wedge in an hour or two most nights, sitting and drinking with them, waving away the flying insects that suicided around the pressure lamps, belly-aching about Kurt, and meeting small rare handfuls of sympathetic, friendly Alice-Springians. But by this stage I had become emotionally remote from outsiders. I found it hard to relax, especially when I had to face being introduced as someone with a label — something that always instigates an identity crisis. ‘I’d like you to meet Robyn Davidson, she’s taking camels across Australia.’ I didn’t know quite how to deal with that one except to fall in with it. Another trap. It was the inauspicious beginning of the ‘camel lady’ image which I should have nipped in the bud right there.
It was here too, one crisp night, that I experienced my first and only vision — alcohol induced. I had put away half a bottle of tequila during the course of the evening and had stumbled outside to pee. There before me stood three ghostly camels, all saddled and in beautiful Bedouin gear, staring out from the lemon trees. One of them, a white one, slowly ambled towards me. Although prophetic, it was too much for my reeling neurons at the time. I hitched my trousers with trembling fingers and fled the half mile to my tent. On the way I tripped into a ditch and lay like a felled tree, semi-conscious and blanketed in frost for the rest of the night. My headache in the morning was the size and power of a Kenworth truck which continued to change gear inside my skull for the whole of that day. During those long months I found that I was constantly projecting the images of camels on to whatever I looked at for longer than three seconds. Swaying branches became munching camel heads, dust patterns became galloping camels and drifting clouds became camels sitting down. It was a sure sign that my fragile mind was obsessed to the point of dementia and it had me vaguely worried. Whether my new friends were conscious of it or not, they helped me get through that time without too much brain damage because they formed a tenuous link with my past life, and because they made me laugh.
My tent was hardly comfortable, plonked out in the middle of the desert sun, but it was mine — my space. Akhnaton would swagger into it well before dawn, attack Diggity until she crawled protesting out of bed, and then proceed to pull the covers away from my face, peck gently at my ears and nose, and croak until I got up to feed him. He was insatiable. God knows where he put all that meat. When it was time to go to work, he would sit on my shoulder or hat until we three had climbed the hill and could see the ranch spread out below like a fake emerald, then he would gather himself for flight and soar down to the roof-top. It was the closest I have ever come to a vicarious knowledge of flight, and was well worth the rigours of his demanding nature and chronic kleptomania.
After I had made a bucket of sweet milk for the young camels, Diggity would leap six feet in the air to snap at any long neck that was trying to steal what she considered her breakfast, and the crow would dive-bomb all of them. He was an uncontrollable tease and Diggity would have dearly loved to swat him but was forbidden. She learnt eventually to accept him if not actually like him, and even tolerated taking him for rides on her back, something he enjoyed immensely, crooning and talking to himself all the while and egotistically preening his glossy blue-black feathers, and occasionally pecking her to make her hurry up. I found for the first time in my life that I really did enjoy the company of animals better than people. I was shy and confused with my own kind and did not trust them. I did not understand the change, did not realize that I had become isolated, defensive and humourless, did not know that I was lonely.
The demise of my tent was a sad affair. I was sleeping in it one night during a monumental hail-storm. The balls of ice gathered in the roof until it ripped and dumped a ton of frozen water on the occupants. It was back to Kurt’s, and gradually the pressure began to build again. He complained continually that there was no money left so I decided to get a job a few nights a week at a restaurant in town. It was disgusting work but it meant I was once more relating to humans and cracking jokes in the kitchen with real people. It also meant that I was overtired at work the next day. Kurt had become increasingly truculent and lazy, leaving most of the running of the place to me which I now found I could do quite capably. It suited me because I didn’t have him breathing down my neck.
One morning, however, he announced that I was to get up two hours earlier to bring in the camels. I stared at him incredulously and for the second time in my life, and the last, I fought him.
‘You bastard,’ I whispered. ‘You incomparable bastard, how dare you ask me to do that.’
I had been with him for eight months and the day of reckoning when he would have to start helping me was looming ever closer. He had been twisting the knife harder and harder lately, in the hope that I would crack and leave of my own accord. He had performed countless little cruelties that only strengthened my resolve not to let him get at me. But now, because of my tiredness, I could hold my emotions down no longer. Kurt was shocked into stony silence, but when I returned an hour later he was deathly white and his lips had set into a hard line.
‘You vill do exactly vat I tell you or you vill get out,’ he hissed, as he grabbed me and shook me till my teeth rattled.
The next day I left the ranch in a daze. I was never going to get my camels or anything else. I marvelled at whatever blindness it had been that allowed me to stay as long as I did as his dupe. I moped around the neighbours’ house for a few days and cried a lot and beat my chest. Then I was offered a job by that irascible old gentleman Sallay Mahomet who was to become a friend, camel-guru and saviour. He told me that anyone who could put up with Kurt for that long deserved a break, and he promptly produced a signed guarantee that if I came to work for him for a couple of months he would give me two of his wild camels. I felt like covering him in grateful kisses and grovelling at his feet saying thank you thank you thank you, but that was hardly Sallay’s style. We shook hands on the deal and so a whole new era began.
It was absurdly generous on Sallay’s part, as he knew I would be of little assistance in the kind of work he was doing. He had heard of my plight through an acquaintance who arrived from Brisbane — a camel-man also who had crossed Central Australia twice with three of his own, the first person to do so since the early days of exploration. We both worked for Sallay during that awful summer. Perhaps it was the intolerable heat in our work-tent, perhaps it was the poisonous snakes that crawled incessantly from under the flaps across the grass floor, perhaps it was the inch-long mosquitoes who bled you during the night until you were anaemic, perhaps it was simply that all people who deal long enough with camels go slightly troppo. But whatever it was, I managed to alienate Dennis too, who earlier on had been so willing to help me, and our squabbles often thudded out into the soggy, broiling air. I couldn’t work out this new capacity I’d acquired for creating enmity in the hearts of men.
At Kurt’s place, I had learnt the finesses of camel-handling. With Sallay and Dennis I learnt the rough and tumble; the fact that these animals could and would kill if given the opportunity. With the help of Dennis’s nervous ‘Watch outs’ and ‘Be carefuls’, and with Sallay’s instinct to protect what he would always consider the weaker sex, I began to live in an almost permanent state of fear, not helped any by my own performance anxiety in front of these two men. While I was there, I was kicked, struck, stamped on; I fell off a bucking wild camel and had my shin crushed between the iron bar of a saddle and a tree. This was an old camel trick to get rid of unwanted people on their backs: squash them or scrape them off on a limb, or sit down and roll on top of them. I was not a good enough rider, nor did I have the physical strength to deal with this. I began to feel useless and clumsy.
The most important things Sallay taught me were how to use ropes to tie up a camel, how to carve and whittle nose-pegs from white-wood or mulga, how to splice, how to fix saddles, in fact all the myriad little bits of knowledge that would play such an important part in my survival out in the bush. He was an endless mine of such information. He had been with camels all his life, although his relationship to them was anything but sentimental, and he treated them somewhat roughly for my soft-hearted tastes. He knew the animals as well as the back of his own hand, and some of that knowledge seeped into me and came out when I least expected it on my journey. I had met his wife Iris, who had an outrageous and wonderful sense of humour and who helped me to laugh at my predicament. She was a perfect contrast and complement to Sallay. They were two of the nicest people I met in that god-awful hole and I like, admire and respect them to this day. I am also eternally grateful.
One afternoon I was sleeping on my cot in a pool of sweat when I woke with the eerie feeling that somebody was watching me. I thought perhaps some townsfolk had arrived and went to grab my clothes, but there was no one. I lay down again but the feeling persisted. I glanced up and saw through a two-inch hole in the roof of the tent the beady blue eye of Akhnaton, first the right, then the left, staring fixedly at my naked body. I threw a boot at him.
He was also becoming an insufferable pest with his stealing. Just when you were about to clean your teeth, he would fly into a tree with the toothbrush and not drop it until you had given up shouting and shaking your fist at him. The same thing happened with spoons the minute you sat down with the sugar bowl and a cup of tea.
I had a small ancillary sleeping tent, shaped like a cone and lashed to the jutting limb of a tree. Because of the intense heat, I slept half inside this tent and half out of it, with the branch six feet above me. One morning before dawn Ark was beginning to wake me up as usual, but I had grown tired of this procedure; he was perfectly able to feed and fend for himself and should not be relying on his surrogate mother any longer. After he had unsuccessfully tried to rouse me, and after I had sworn at him to go find his own bloody breakfast, he hopped up on to that branch, walked along it, aimed deliberately, and shot a dribbling white present right into the middle of my face.
I had been in the Alice for almost a year now and I was a changed woman. It seemed I had always been there, that anything I may have been before was a dream belonging to someone else. My grip on reality was a little shaky. I wanted to see my friends again because I was beginning to realize how removed from everything but camels and madmen I had become. The time with Kurt had had a weird effect on me — I was self-protective, suspicious and defensive and I was also aggressively ready to pounce on anyone who looked like they might be going to give me a hard time. Though this may sound like a negative quality, it was essential for me to develop beyond the archetypal female creature who from birth had been trained to be sweet, pliable, forgiving, compassionate and door-mattish. I could be grateful to Kurt for that if nothing else. I also had a reinforced concrete strip down my back which successfully hid the yellow one. It wasn’t so much strength I had gained, as tenacity — bulldog tenacity. I decided to fly home to Queensland, to see Nancy, my closest friend. She and I had been confidantes for years, having been through the tedium of Brisbane’s post-1960s doldrums together, and come out of it with a close, tolerant, and loving friendship such as can exist only between two women who have worked hard for it. She was a yardstick against which I could measure what I had learnt and what I had felt. She was ten years older and wiser than me, and could always be depended upon to penetrate what I was thinking and help me put it into perspective. I valued that perspicacity and warmth above all else. And right now I needed a good talk over a kitchen table with her.
I flew back home in a light aircraft over the endless wastes of the Simpson Desert which had me thinking twice about the foolhardiness of my trip. Nancy and Robin lived on a fruit farm in the granite hills of southern Queensland. Oh the lush green sogginess of coastal country. It was so long since I’d been there and it now looked closed in and cluttered.
Nancy noticed immediately the changes in me and we talked into the wee hours of every morning over coffee and whisky and cigarettes. Many of my friends were there and it was indescribably good to be once again in an atmosphere of loving kindness. I entertained them with tall tales and true of the legendary West. It was like medicine to be able to laugh like that again. The afternoon before I was to leave, Nancy and I went for a walk in the bush. We didn’t talk much but eventually she said, ‘Rob, I really like what you’re doing. I didn’t understand it before, but getting off your butt and actually doing something for yourself is important for all of us. And although I can’t say I won’t miss you like hell, and won’t worry about you often, I can say that what you’re doing is great and I love you for it. It’s important that we leave each other and the comfort of it, and circle away, even though it’s hard sometimes, so that we can come back and swap information about what we’ve learnt even if what we do changes us and we risk not recognizing each other when we return.’
That night, we had a going-away party in the barn and danced and drank and laughed and talked until dawn.
I have never uncovered anywhere the same bonds of friendship as I found in certain small sections of Australian society. It has something to do with the old code of mateship, and something to do with the fact that people have time to care for one another, and something to do with the fact that dissidents have had to stick together, and something to do with the fact that competition and achievement are not very important aspects of the culture, and something to do with a generosity of spirit that can afford to grow within that unique sense of traditionless space and potential. Whatever it is, it is extraordinarily valuable.
The trip home reinstated a faith in myself and what I was doing. I felt calm and positive and strong, and now, instead of the trip appearing out of character, instead of worrying about whether or not it was a pointless thing to do, I could see more clearly the reasons and the needs behind it.
A couple of years before, someone had asked me a question: ‘What is the substance of the world in which you live?’ As it happened, I had not slept or eaten for three or four days and it struck me at the time as a very profound question. It took me an hour to answer it, and when I did, my answer seemed to come almost directly from the subconscious: ‘Desert, purity, fire, air, hot wind, space, sun, desert desert desert.’ It had surprised me, I had no idea those symbols had been working so strongly within me.
I had read a good deal about Aborigines and that was another reason for my wanting to travel in the desert — a way of getting to know them directly and simply.
I had also been vaguely bored with my life and its repetitions — the half-finished, half-hearted attempts at different jobs and various studies; had been sick of carrying around the self-indulgent negativity which was so much the malaise of my generation, my sex and my class.
So I had made a decision which carried with it things that I could not articulate at the time. I had made the choice instinctively, and only later had given it meaning. The trip had never been billed in my mind as an adventure in the sense of something to be proved. And it struck me then that the most difficult thing had been the decision to act, the rest had been merely tenacity — and the fears were paper tigers. One really could act to change and control one’s life; and the procedure, the process, was its own reward.