CHAPTER 6

Clearings in the Bush

There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between
them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives…

—T. S. Eliot

 

 

A recurring preoccupation of Arthur Schopenhauer was the impossibility of finding happiness in the company of others. Insisting that “no man can be in perfect accord with any one but himself” ¹ and extolling the virtues of self-sufficiency, Schopenhauer nevertheless acknowledges that, for many people, the inner life is so empty and unsatisfying that they are driven “to the company of others which consists of men like themselves, for similis simili gaudet” (Birds of a feather flock together).² Elsewhere, he makes this point with a parable. A number of porcupines huddle together against the winter's cold, only to find that they cannot avoid pricking one another with their quills. They therefore disperse, only to be driven back together for warmth. It seems there is no middle way whereby the porcupines can draw comfort from being with others and avoid the discomfort of close proximity.³

It is tempting to read this parable as an oblique commentary on Schopenhauer himself, by all accounts a reclusive and misanthropic individual who felt more affection for dogs than people and found greater consolation in philosophy than friendship. But as Freud would remark in 1921,⁴ Schopenhauer's parable of the porcupine discloses something fundamental about intimate human relationships: that they are characterized by both attraction and repulsion, and that our desire to be with others is always accompanied by a countervailing search for autonomy, to not lose oneself in the other, to define oneself against convention, to not follow the crowd. This ambivalence toward social life is echoed in the West Sudanese view that sociality “is not an ideal; it is a necessity to which men must adapt and adjust themselves.” Social life is often compared to a bulb of garlic. “The cloves continue to cling to each other although all are equally evil smelling. It is the same with men and their communities.”⁵

The history of colonialism is replete with examples of the tragic dimensions of this quandary of how to strike a balance between losing one's autonomy in a foreign and possibly repugnant lifeworld and retaining one's independence from it. But this history is also marked by a terrible forgetting. Writes Schopenhauer: “Almost all are for ever thinking that they are such and such a man, together with the corollaries resulting therefrom. On the other hand, it hardly ever occurs to them that they are in general a human being with all the corollaries following from this; and yet this is the vital question.”⁶ Colonialism, it can be argued, suppresses this vital question; it censors it out; it forgets its corollaries.

In Australia, Aboriginal people quickly saw advantages in trade relations with whites. In exchange for sex, food, information, and labor, they could acquire glass to make spearheads, iron axes, sugar, flour, and tea. But relations between indigene and invader quickly degenerated. Assuming cattle to be game animals like kangaroos, Aboriginals hunted them. In turn, white pastoralists hunted down Aboriginals as though they were animals. And assuming that the land was unowned, if not unoccupied, white settlers seized it without a second thought.

Initially, Aboriginal people stood their ground, fighting to retain their lands and livelihoods. But as they were overwhelmed, they either submitted to a marginal and dependent existence on the fringes of white settlements or withdrew into remote areas where whites were less willing to venture. Though avoiding the quills of the invader meant great hardship, avoidance strategies ensured survival, or at least staved offthe evil day when the invader would discover in even the most inhospitable deserts, mountains, and forests minerals to mine and resources to exploit. It was then that the invader decided that the people it had treated so atrociously were fated not to survive. But if extinction was inevitable for the “race,” then perhaps an afterlife might be found for the children born of mixed parentage. And so began the government policy of forcibly removing “half-caste” children from their Aboriginal mothers, making them wards of the state, placing them in institutional care, and preparing them for menial work in white households.

Aboriginal people did not die out. They were rounded up and herded into missions and settlements. For a nomadic people, accustomed to living in small, mobile family groups, these overcrowded communities were demoralizing and destructive. Unlike the porcupines, it was impossible to keep one's distance, to follow customary protocols for avoiding in-laws or marrying “wrong-way,” or to act on one's own initiative, in one's own time, in one's own place. Of Wujal Wujal on southeast Cape York, a Kuku Yalanji man said that there was so little room to move that one felt “like a crane standing on one leg on a little island.” And because social distance was an index of respect, people described their lives in these concentration camps as pervaded by a sense of profound shame.

Only in moving away from such unintentional communities, only by returning to one's traditional land, could one hope to recover a viable existence. This is what the Salt family achieved in 1992, resettling a parcel of ancestral land purchased for them through an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission grant.

In 1994 my wife Francine and our small son, Joshua, spent a year living with the Salts in their rainforest camp, fishing each evening on the nearby beach and constantly negotiating, like the porcupines in Schopenhauer's parable, a viable distance between our families, as well as between the Salt's camp and the many “blow-ins” (mostly affines or distant kin) whose presence sometimes caused such mayhem that our hosts would simply move away to a temporary, separate camp on the beach.

A CLEARING IN THE BUSH

Peter Fisher moved away but did not return. He elected to make his home in the forested watersheds of the Daintree and Bloomfield Rivers. According to Mabel and McGinty, he rarely visited the mission.

“Does that mean he doesn't want visitors?” I asked.

“I dunno,” McGinty said.

I was used to McGinty's noncommittal way of responding to a direct question, this characteristically Aboriginal strategy for ensuring that no advice was ever given that might be later used against you. Better to say nothing than say something that might have negative repercussions.

Francine and I decided to make the trip anyway.

The road from the coast rose steeply, little more than a rain-gouged track. It took us through partly cleared grazing land, past the site of China Camp (named for the Chinese, Javanese, and Malay “wages men” who mined alluvial tin in the area from the mid-1890s to the period around the First World War), past Roaring Meg Falls, and across boulder-obstructed streams.

At last we came to a grassy clearing, cropped by a couple of untethered horses. I parked our Toyota near a barbed wire fence and gate. Beyond was a garden filled with citrus trees, pawpaws, and banana palms.

The old man, stiffin the hips, came hobbling through the pawpaws to the gate, but it was apparent from the relaxed and open expression on his face that he was happy to receive visitors.

After my wife and I had made our introductions, we sat in the small, opensided shed with a dirt floor where Peter slept and cooked. I noticed some onions, chili peppers, salt, and plates on a makeshift counter. “I don't eat much,” Peter said. “Tea and damper mostly, like when I was a boy.” He said he felt guilty that he had no maiyi (food) to offer us.

Francine said no apologies were needed; we had brought something to eat.

Peter had been living in the wilderness for fifteen months. It was the site of the old Collins homestead, he explained. He had had to clear the lantana and scrub before making his garden. The river ran nearby, so he had plenty of water. And the horses kept the grass down. I expressed amazement that he had accomplished so much in a little over a year.

Francine explained to Peter that we had visited the falls on our way up. “Kijanka,” Peter said, using the bama (Aboriginal) word for the locality (literally “moon place”). “You have to be careful when you approach the falls,” Peter warned. The falls had the power to draw a person over the edge. He also mentioned a rock at the top of the falls that could move to the bottom of the falls of its own accord, and back to the top. But when white miners began blasting with gelignite at China Camp, they killed the stone, which now lies immobile at the foot of the walls, bereft of life. “Same thing happened at Daintree,” Peter said. “There was a stone. No matter how many times bama rolled it to the bottom of the waterfall, it would find its way back to the top. But you know how pig-headed Europeans can be? Well, some policemen wanted to roll the stone down to the bottom. Bama said, ‘No, don't touch it, don't go near it.’ But they rolled it anyway. After that it stayed there at the bottom, dead.”

I thought, when stone was in the hands of bama, it was not stone, it was an enchanted thing, animated by the respect it was given, the songs that perennially brought it back to life. When it was taken from them, it lost its meaning and died, like the alienated land itself, now untended and untravelled. And as one's connection with the ancestral world atrophied, so time stood still as if turned to stone.

“I can tell you some terrible stories about this place in the early days,” Peter said. “Europeans were very bad to Aboriginal people. Bama would try to help them, but they were always repaid with unkindness.”

Peter's biological father was a part-Aboriginal man called Dick Fischer, the son of a German immigrant, who mined tin for a while at China Camp. Peter never met his father because when his mother became pregnant she was sent away. When Peter was a very small boy, the police came to his mother's camp looking for “half-castes.” He hid in the bush, but his friend and age-mate Oglevie was caught and taken to the Mission Station at Yarrabah, south of Cairns, where he died two months later, Peter said, “of homesickness and a broken heart.” As for Peter, his mother disappeared when he was seven, leaving him in the care of his maternal grandmother. “My granny was very good to me. She looked after me better than my own mother. When I was starving, she fed me wild yams. She is buried near here. That is why I came here to live and to die. I have had this place in mind all my life. I wanted to be close to her.”

Peter made us mugs of tea, and we shared the food we had brought with us, even though Peter's garden contained enough food to feed a small community.

After eating, we strolled along the grassy paths, Peter showing us his yams and taro, string beans, cabbage, tomatoes, cassava, and tropical fruit, while Francine plied him with questions about the changes he had witnessed in his seventy-six years of tin-mining, of working on pearl luggers and in the cane fields of northern Queensland, of living in places like Daintree, Mossman, Wujal Wujal, and Wonga Beach.

Peter wryly observed that if you visited another camp in the old days, as we had visited his today, you would sit and wait beyond the perimeter with eyes downcast, saying nothing, until the hosts approached you with food. But the worst infractions of traditional protocol centered, in Peter's view, on marriage. “These days, everything is mixed up. People marry just anyone, like dogs. Cousins, even in-laws. I can tell you about one man, he married his mother-i n-l aw. When he had a daughter, that means he was supposed to marry her. The old people had it the right way. Just like with cattle. You keep a bull in the pen. You don't let it in with the cows just anytime, anyhow. The breeding would be too close.”

Peter also spoke of young people's disrespect toward elders, their shameful indifference to the rules of in-law avoidance, and the various taboos that helped control the exploitation of natural resources. His twenty-something grandson had come and spent a few weeks with him. Peter had tried to teach him the names and uses of various trees—the wumburru (bull oak) that was good for making furniture, the gujiguji that was good for fence posts, the galkanji (spiky bark) that burned easily and cleanly—but the young man was uninterested and did not want to learn.

I asked Peter if he ever felt isolated and alone up there in the middle of nowhere.

“I am never afraid or alone,” he said. “I have seen God with my own eyes. He is with me. I pride myself in owning nothing. A storm could blow away this camp. It's nothing. I wouldn't worry. Not like those houses people build. I'm nothing. I was never cut out to be a boss over anyone. I'm just a storyteller.”

When it was time for us to return to the coast, Peter said: “I wouldn't want to live at Wujal. All that drinking, smoking dope, that confusion. I worked all my life. I couldn't just sit around like the people at the mission. I don't need money. I never smoked. I never drank. I can buy my flour and tea at Mareeba every three or four months. If my family come and visit, that's all right. But I never feel the need to leave here. Never.”

I felt drawn to Peter Fisher for reasons I could not, at first, fully fathom. His life in his rain forest clearing, midway between a tragic past and an uncertain future, came as close as any life I had ever known to absolute acceptance, to the peace that passes all understanding. At once anchorite and sage, he seemed more than reconciled to his lot; he appeared entirely at one with it. Here was a man whose freedom was defined by the confines of his clearing—a clearing I could not help but see, metaphorically, not as an Eden recreated on earth but as a form of enlightenment (Heidegger's lichtung). Here was a man who was avowedly “nothing” yet whose story was the story of “everyman.”

One might also say that Peter Fisher lived in a penumbral zone between the living and the dead, a place of ghosts. In ongoing conversations with Peter, and in the course of everyday life in our camp, Francine and I were constantly made aware of the ways that Queensland's violent past impinges on the consciousness of Aboriginal people in the here and now, perpetuating fears of further injustices, clouding the possibility of a future. During one of his reminiscences, Peter described what happened after the death of an old man known as Sandy.

When Peter was a small boy, Sandy would carry him everywhere and, at night, allow him to sleep close by for protection. When Sandy died in his sleep one night, the small boy was unaware that his protector had passed away.

“I'll tell you something that'll be hard for you to believe,” Peter said, “but I saw it with my own eyes when I was a child. People had come from Wujal, Daintree, Mossman, from everywhere, for Sandy's funeral. We all sat in a line so the spirit in the body could get out. It came out like a firefly. It stopped at the doorway. Then people spoke to him. It then brightened up, so we could see our shadows. They said, ‘All right now. You leavin’ us now. You gotta go see father. Before you go, you see our people at Banabila [a large Aboriginal camp near the mouth of the Bloomfield River]. There was a big mob there. It was a bright light. He flew down that way. And they said, ‘Oh, he came down and visit us now.’ I don't know if anyone else still remembers. You might ask.”

It was impossible to ignore this numberless and nebulous community of lost souls. They were like the afterimages of loved ones lost, semi-embodied memories. And, like the past, they were ever-present, hovering in the penumbra of consciousness, shadowy and repining.

Dubu, or ghosts, most often appear to the living as strange lights—a trail of fireflies moving in the darkness, a torch that mysteriously switches itself on in the middle of the night, a bright light that for several hours uncannily follows the car in which one is driving home after a funeral in another settlement, a blue light hovering in the sky like a UFO, or lights flitting among the trees. In almost every case, ghosts are spirits of the dead made manifest—unquiet shades that torment and haunt the living who have abandoned them, or spirits that are reluctantly making their way to the land of the dead. But ghosts are not only external phenomena, haunting the living. They are also projections of the inner distress of those who have lost loved ones. Ghosts are, to use Winnicott's term, “transitional phenomena.” They make their appearance in the “potential space” between intrapsychic and external worlds, and are important means whereby people undertake the difficult passage from attachment to separation. It is in this “potential space” that people disclose their fears and feelings, review the troubling phenomena they have just witnessed, and reach agreement as to its cause, its possible consequences, and what course of action may best deal with it. In other words, standardized cultural notions about the spirits of the dead and subjective feelings toward an individual who has recently passed away come together to produce a provisional understanding that then serves as the basis for dealing with one's confusion and dismay. Among the Kuku Yalanji, this involves sticking together (since ghosts don't trouble people in company), ensuring that proper mortuary rites are performed (notably, “smoking” the deceased's possessions by passing them over a fire and thereby decontaminating them), and reinforcing an avoidance relationship with the dead by not speaking their name or otherwise remembering them in public. Often, Francine and I would be enjoined not to leave water standing around our tent when we were away, as it might attract some errant ghost.

Kuku Yalanji responses to strange lights and inner grief demonstrate the healing power of shared experience. To be witness to unusual phenomena, or subject to disorienting thoughts and feelings, is to risk feeling different, isolated, and even crazy. But as soon as an experience is brought from the private into the public realm and shared, its character is instantly changed. Assimilated to the collective wisdom of the tribe, and subject to conventional actions, it is literally made common; it is brought within the familiar bounds of what is recognized and within reason. It is like bringing an outsider back within the social pale, or releasing a prisoner from solitary confinement—restorations of the sociality that alone provides security and sanity.

Primo Levi once observed that “If one lives in a compact, seried group, as bees and sheep do in the winter, there are advantages; one can defend oneself better from the cold and from attacks.”⁷ But in extolling the virtues of living “at the margins of the group, or in fact isolated,” he goes on to say that one may thereby enjoy the freedom of leaving when one wants to and getting “a better view of the landscape.” Levi would, for this reason, have admired Peter Fisher, though there is in Levi's life story and tragic end evidence of an ambivalent attitude toward the loner who chooses “a winding path, forming for [himself] a haphazard culture; full of gaps, a smattering of knowledge.” If Levi's reflections on other people's trades permit no resolution of these opposing life courses, it may be because they can never be fully separated, the one privileged over the other as a permanent ontological possibility.

A few weeks after our visit to Peter Fisher's camp, McGinty confided to me that his sister-in-law's daughter, Kimmy, was frightened to sleep alone in the house when her husband Algin was away. When kinsmen go away, it is as if they have died. And just as the spirit of a dead person will hang around the camp of its living kin, craving their company, yet vengeful because it has been abandoned, so something of an absent kinsman remains behind, a haunting presence, an afterimage, a ghost. I could not help but relate these anecdotes of lost souls to Aboriginal experiences of dispossession and loss. It was not simply the absence of a kinsman or spouse that preyed on one's mind; it was the violent history one had endured, of separation from the land from which one drew sustenance, separation from one's own children, separation from a dominant culture that treated one like shit. But ghosts won't trouble people when they stick together, I was told; they won't bother you as long as you are with others.

These themes of safety in numbers, the importance of solidarity with others, and the dangers of being on one's own and setting oneself apart or standing out were replayed day after day as our relationships with Aboriginal people developed. Driving back from Cooktown, through country to which Mabel and McGinty had no kinship or affinity, we passed a Land Rover in dark camouflage colors, parked on the side of the road. Hearing a beep-beep, I slowed down, thinking someone was in trouble. But our travelling companions knew that this was not a bama (Aboriginal) way of signalling for help, and nothing about this vehicle suggested that it belonged to any bama. As I reversed to see if help was needed, Mabel and her sister Lizzie crouched down to avoid being seen. When McGinty said we should drive on, and I did so, everyone collapsed in laughter. Relief at a narrow escape? Embarrassment at their overreaction?

I recalled other incidents in which people had recourse to strategies of avoidance and joking in dealing with the unknown and the strange: McGinty not asking in Cooktown if he could fill his plastic bottles with water, but waiting until we had crossed a river well away from town before laboriously clambering down the riverbank to fill the bottles; McGinty explaining that there was only one fast-food shop in Cooktown that bama felt comfortable about entering; bama sitting impassively outside the Reef Cafe, eyes averted, lest one accidentally look a stranger in the eye and suffer the consequences; Sonny telling me that “tourists bring sickness”; Louie telling me that Adelaide should not walk alone on the road because a “whitefella” will rape her; Mabel accompanying Adelaide (her daughter) into the scrub when she needed to pee, “to keep her company” and ensure no harm came to her.

We drove to Port Stewart on Princess Charlotte Bay, the area where McGinty spent his first years of life. It was a preliminary meeting of dispersed Lawa Lawa people, to prepare a legal case for reclaiming their traditional lands. For the first time in his life, McGinty spoke into a microphone, addressing the crowd. “I had a little bit of a hard time too, on cattle stations [another old ringer had just spoken of how Aboriginal boys were beaten and abused by white bosses]. When I was young, you couldn't leave the job on the station. Couldn't go back home. Anyway, no one was there. All the Lawa Lawa got rounded up, deported to Bamago Mission.”

McGinty was suddenly at a loss for words. He handed the microphone to a white lawyer.

That evening, McGinty told me that he went back to Lilyfield Station last year. The station owner gave him permission to visit his old camp. “There's nothing there,” McGinty said. “Only wild pigs. That made me real sad, you know. I left my country a long time ago.”

I thought of asking McGinty if getting land back was a case of too little, too late, but I knew that this process must be worked through, and that it might take several generations for something to come of it.

That night we woke to a hoarse keening in a nearby camp—ascending and descending scales, an alien melodic line, a sound as if from deeply disturbed sleep or possession. McGinty's brother, Alan, thought that someone had died. He followed the keening to its source and reported back to McGinty. One of the old Lawa Lawa men's daughters had just arrived from Bamago. He had not seen her in a long time. The keening was a bama way of showing one's feelings, McGinty said. “Fair dinkum. The tears are real. But not many people do it any more. People use grog now to let their feelings out.”

Drinking may enable a person to vent his or her feelings, even to gain a sense of substantiality and invincibility in a world that seems to conspire in making him or her feel worthless and small. But the aftermath of binge drinking is something else, particularly if one wakes up alone in a police cell with the dry horrors.

“After heavy drinking, you know, you get paralytic drunk and get the shakes, you can hear voices, voices saying ‘I'll kill you.’⁸ I've been through that, hearing voices and things. It makes you feel you want to commit suicide. Makes you think people coming to get you, makes you think that before they get you you'll kill yourself…When you're locked up and going through that thing, you need people around, you should have the lights on. In the light you're safe, but in the darkness you think that person [is] going to come and kill you.”⁹

AFTER FIELDWORK

Back in Sydney, after a year in the company of bama, it took time to readjust. I experienced the strangeness of having been away and having returned, changed, of being in possession of experiences that no one was particularly interested in or could understand. This was painfully familiar to our friend Peter Herbst.

Peter was born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1919. Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, Nazi storm troopers broke into the Herbst home and threatened Peter's father with internment in a concentration camp. Seeing no future for his intellectually gifted son in an anti-Semitic National Socialist Germany, Herbst sent his son to England to complete his education at Haileybury College. After graduating, Peter lived cheaply in London for a while, but after Dunkirk and the fall of France, it was widely rumored that German citizens living in England were enemy agents, planted to assist the planned invasion of Britain. Peter was arrested and sent to an internment camp in Liverpool. On July 10, 1940, he left England with 2,036 other Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany, on HMT Dunera.¹⁰ The voyage to Australia would become notorious for the overcrowded conditions on the ship (whose capacity was only 1,500 people, including crew, not 2,542) and the inhumane treatment the internees suffered at the hands of the British guards on board. Many were physically assaulted; others had their few possessions stolen; all endured the indignity of verbal abuse and nonkosher food. At first the refugees fared little better in Australia. While some Australian religious and political leaders had expressed outrage, as early as 1933, over the persecution of Jews in Germany, most Australians either turned a blind eye to events in Europe or argued that too many educated migrants would take jobs from Australians. At the Evian Conference, convened by Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1938 to discuss the issue of increasing numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, the Australian minister for trade and customs argued that Australia was “predominantly British” and should remain so. It was agreed that 15,000 Jewish refugees would be accepted over a period of three years.

Peter was interned at Hays in New South Wales and enrolled in the unofficial university that the well-educated refugees quickly established at the camp. As the fortunes of war changed and local attitudes toward the internees softened, many of the refugees were allowed to leave the Hays camp in 1941. Some returned to Britain; others, including Peter, volunteered for service with one of the employment companies of the Australian Military Forces.¹¹ In 1942 Peter met the family of the painter Arthur Boyd and resumed his study of philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

Reflecting forty years later on this period of his life, Peter remembered how drawn he was to this Australian family. Perhaps it reminded him of the family he had lost. “I was delighted to find an environment in which contact with literature and creative art was perceived as a joy in itself, without the dingy carrot of academic advancement or the puritan remorselessness of highminded self betterment.”¹² But even as he admires this close-knit group, he betrays reservations about its self-sufficiency, its contentedness with domestic life, its seeming lack of any “need for outside involvement.”¹³

I have often pondered Peter's ambivalence and wondered if the experience of losing his own family and fatherland found expression in a disenchanted view of both parenthood and patriotism, not to mention philosophers who lose the common touch.¹⁴ I find the following passage painful to read because of its thinly disguised autobiographic allusions, its poignant evidence that a child who has suffered abandonment will find it difficult, as an adult, to become a loving parent and an intellectual raised in the European tradition will find it hard to be accepted, let alone respected, in his country of adoption.

I admire the Boyds, but I do not regard myself as committed to the nuclear family as an ideal social unit. I lack religious and political reasons for doing so. On the contrary, I think that in our acquisitive society the family is often an instrument of torture. It subverts authenticity and encourages evasiveness and moral cowardice. All too frequently the family is a haven for mindless mediocrity. As for nationalism, we have had as much of it as we can bear….[It] takes the form of pommybashing, xenophobia, obsessional preoccupation with an allegedly distinctive popul ar national culture. The ancient cultures of other countries, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary, are relegated. The attitude of those who favour the exclusion of un-Australian or “irrelevant” cultural strands is often offensive and aggressive. “Multiculturalism” is basically a political idea. The level at which the survival of foreign cultures is encouraged is superficial. Migrants are induced to play-act at being themselves.¹⁵

There is so much in Peter's veiled autobiography that speaks to the plight of marginalized people, dispossessed on one continent and obliged to begin again on another, that when his book on the Boyds appeared in 1990 I began, despite myself, to see him differently. Indeed, Peter's references to Arthur Boyd's “habit of setting biblical subjects in the Australian bush,”¹⁶ his “attempts to locate European archetypes in the Australia landscape,”¹⁷ and the “expressionist, angst-ridden inclination of Arthur's imagination from the war years onward”¹⁸ seem to echo Peter's own struggles to reconcile the world he had lost with the world into which he had been cast. And in Peter's account of Arthur Boyd's life, “divided between two hemispheres,”¹⁹ I discern the Faustian pact that weighs on every exile's mind—whether, in one's desire to exchange hell for paradise, one ends up with the poorer side of the bargain.

We stayed with Peter and his wife Valerie at Bell's Creek, an old gold mining town near Araluen. Since finishing The Art of the Boyds, Peter had been working on a book about the Faust legend and devoting his spare energy to conserving the environment. But my own research on home was never far from my mind, and over lunch I asked Valerie where home was, for her.

“Here.”

“Bell's Creek, you mean?”

“Mmhm.”

Francine asked Peter where he called home.

“Nowhere, really.”

Val looked shocked.

“Well, perhaps, geographically speaking, this is my home,” Peter said.

“I guess home is somewhere you're recognized,” Francine said.

Valerie agreed. “My mother used to say, when she lived with us, I feel like a cabbage. She had no identity anymore. No one really knew her. No one recognized her.”

“Ubi bene, ibi patria,” Peter said, quoting the Latin proverb. “Your home is where they treat you well.”

After lunch, Peter walked us over the farm. He carried a machete, an adze, and a trowel for grubbing thistles. His asthmatic fox terrier raced ahead of us through the wet grass. Peter turned over cowpats, looking for dung beetles to show Joshua. He bemoaned the blackberry that was getting away from him. And he told us about the gold rush in the late nineteenth century and the Chinese who flocked to the diggings. There were still rusting pipes in the long grass and a collapsed water race. But almost all traces of the miner's camp had disappeared.

“What became of the Chinese?” I asked.

Peter recounted the story of one young man called Quong Tart (Mei Guangda) who immigrated to Australia with his uncle in 1859. Only nine at the time, Guangda found his way to the goldfields around Araluen, where he lived for a while in the store of a Scottish immigrant called Thomas Forsyth. Guangda was then informally adopted by the wealthy family of Robert Percy Simpson, whose wife Alice was charmed by the boy's Scots accent. Under the tutelage of the Simpsons, Guangda converted to Christianity and prospered by investing in gold claims. At twenty-one, he built a cottage at Bell's Creek and became a naturalized British subject. After a trip to China, he went into the tea and silk trade in Sydney, and married a young English schoolteacher in 1886. Though Chinese, he dressed and behaved like a Victorian gentleman, played the bagpipes, and had his five children baptized in different denominations to avoid charges of prejudice. “In his dotage,” Peter said, “Quong Tart became quite autocratic. Everyone at Gallop House, family as well as servants, had to race around, doing his bidding. Then the old man was murdered for his money.” He was assaulted with an iron bar in his office in the Queen Victoria Building in downtown Sydney, and never recovered. He died, almost a year after the bashing, at age fifty-three. Gallop House became a heritage building, and after the passing of many years was expanded as a home for elderly Chinese.

“A few years ago,” Peter continued, “Quong Tart's elderly granddaughter turned up at Bell's Creek, wanting to see the site of her grandfather's cottage, and be guided around the Chinese diggings. She had some old maps. I don't know who made the maps, but they were all ridiculously inconsistent. Some reminded me of childlike treasure maps, and the cardinal points were all in the wrong place. Val and I wondered if she was looking for buried gold. She stayed with us for a year. She drove a majestic Mercedes Benz. She'd drive into Braidwood for supplies, cultivate friendships in Araluen, and spend days wandering around the farm. A year after she first turned up, she erected a tent on the hill where she thought her grandfather's cottage must have stood. She worked out a way of weatherproofing it. But the big Mercedes sat out in the paddock, neglected and exposed to the elements. One day she turned up at the house with some tattered legal documents and explained they were the deeds to Bell's Creek, including our land. I had to trick her into moving away. She pitched her tent across the road. Then she got bitten by an insect, the bite became infected, and she died. Lonely and dispossessed, looking for the past, her imagination [was] fed by her need of the place that was once home.”

In central Australia, Warlpiri do not speak of life and death as poles apart. Rather, they speak of an oscillation between absence and presence.“Palka” means embodied in present time (jalanguju palkalku). “Lawa” means just the opposite. These words capture the perpetual comings and goings in Warlpiri life. Anything that has “body” is palka—a rock hole or river with water in it, the trunk of a tree, a person whose belly is full, a country where game is plentiful, the desert blooming after rain, anyone who is in your presence. But if a rock hole is dry, a stomach empty, tracks erased, the desert devoid of game, or a person faints, falls asleep, or goes away, then there is lawa, nothing. Palka is that which is existent and life-giving. By contrast, lawa connotes the loss of the persons and things that sustain one's life. But just as the cycle of nomadic life necessitates the periodic dispersal and reunion of kin, so ceremony can bring the ancestral order back into being, fleshing it out in the painting, song, and mimetic dance of the living. Giving birth to a child, naming him or her after a kinsman or kinswoman who has passed away, having a dream in which ancestral motifs are revealed, visiting a sacred site, or singing and dancing the Dreaming into life are all modes of “bringing into being” (palka jarrimi) that which was temporarily absent, latent, or hidden. They are ways of “drawing out” the Dreaming from pastness and potentiality and realizing it as an actively embodied presence. All these modes of transformative activity are “signs,” “prints,” “marks,” or “traces” (yirdi) of the circumambient Dreaming as well as ways of reanimating it.

I like to think of writing as a way of bringing something that has passed away back to life.