Big Blue Sky Page 18

  We enlisted the help of didgeridoo player Charlie McMahon, known as ‘Hook’ on account of the metal apparatus he manipulated with wire that substituted for his right hand, blown off when a schoolboy experiment with explosives went wrong. Charlie had jumped up on stage a few times in the early days, and the sound of his growling didg became a signature part of our sound in this period. He’d also spent time in the outback, working with the Pintupi and other tribal people from the desert and knew his way around.

  As camp coordinator he’d itemised the food each four-wheel drive would need to carry, including: ‘self-raising flour, corned beef, dried fruit, nuts, 1 kg powdered milk, 2 packets tea, biscuits, cheese, cereal, washing scourer . . . 1 sharp knife, 1 large & 1 medium billy can, 5 enamel plates & mugs, 1 wash basin’. In addition, ‘each vehicle will have a 20-litre water container’. And there was a warning: ‘Utensils and containers are for the whole tour—look after them.’

  For most Australians, suburban dwellers used to the conveniences and tidiness of modern living, visiting an outback community is an eye-opener. The Oils’ natural habitat was Sydney’s inner city and suburbs, and, when working, various hotels, pubs and recording studios. We were creatures of the night, at home in the cauldron of white noise. We were now heading to the heart of the continent. At the time, I made a note about my gut feeling that if we were to get a clearer fix on where the nation sat, we had to go to the roots of our history, and so it proved. Sure, you could read about it, but once you took the step to head to a place where the wounds and the memories were as fresh as today, there were no excuses, no turning back.

  So, in the midwinter of 1986, we flew to Alice Springs, picked up four-wheel drives and stores, and from there headed west along rutted dirt tracks, skirting low hills covered in spinifex grass, past rocky outcrops with desert oaks scattered over an undulating landscape that went on forever.

  We slept in canvas swags, setting up camp outside the tiny settlements that usually consisted of a collection of humpies, some dilapidated houses and sheds, a store that was the central meeting place, a sports oval of hard-packed dirt, a makeshift school and, sometimes, a church. Abandoned car bodies dotted the landscape, left disintegrating in the scrub by their owners, who no longer had the wherewithal to keep them going.

  Meanwhile, the skeleton crew, led by our long-time stage manager Michael Lippold, a feisty scrapper from the working-class suburbs of Melbourne, along with tougher-than-nails sound man Pat Pickett, would pull the gear from the truck and scout the landscape for a place to set up. Lippold could make just about anything happen when it came to getting the Oils on stage, but he was tested in these conditions—especially with me, Gary and a nervous film crew breathing down his neck every step of the way.

  We were well out of phone range, out of sight and, it seemed after a while, out of mind as well. One time, as Charlie McMahon and I were travelling back into Alice Springs, the main town in the Centre, I had the distinct impression that we were lost. We’d been driving across ridges of sand dunes and through washouts and dry creek beds for a couple of hours and couldn’t find the ‘road’ we had been mistakenly told would lead into town. As we consulted the only guide we’d brought—an old Reader’s Digest map of the world—Charlie stabbed at a square box that encompassed about 500 square miles of the Northern Territory. ‘See, Rock?’ he said. ‘We’re here. As I told you, we are not lost!’

  The only enquiry from the rest of the crew, when we finally limped into Alice well into the night, was the inevitable, ‘What took you so long?’

  While most of Australia’s First Peoples are a diaspora, dwelling mainly in cities and towns, there are also populations a long way out who still live in or around their traditional country. For a century or so it was believed that Aboriginal people were a ‘dying race’, so great was the collision of cultures. Once the white sails of the Endeavour appeared in Botany Bay, everything changed. This was the real shock of the new: disease and displacement, alcohol and alienation.

  In 1986 the people of the Western Desert had only recently been gathered up and housed in the settlement of Papunya—the home of the Warumpis—250 clicks west of Alice. For Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri and other clans who had been forcibly removed from their own country, it was a place of great unhappiness. Their languages and cultures were under siege, their health was failing and for some, like the Pintupi, the only way out was escape. Thirty years after the disintegration of their hunter–gatherer way of life, some of the older men simply walked home. They were followed by community members in an old truck, lumbering across some 200 kilometres of desert, eventually to resettle in the lee of the mountains at Kintore.

  We were strangers in this timeless land, where the grandeur and fine detail of the landscape took your breath away, but in the same instant, the pervasive poverty and extreme conditions brought you up short, as did the ever-present sense of ennui and grief. The story of Aboriginal peoples following the arrival of white settlers was one of loss: the loss of country that sustained them and gave their life meaning; the loss of family and neighbours to the sickness that followed; and, finally, the loss of interest in living, still tragically evident in the suicide rate of young Aboriginal men.

  Here in the desert we had to slow down, in the way we played, in the way we thought. In the great silence that enveloped us, we had to listen carefully—to the words that were deliberately chosen, to the long gaps in conversation, to the odd angry shout erupting in the night. Only then did we get a glimpse of the depth of the culture of those we had come to perform for, and a sense of the scale of their daily struggle.

  Out there everything was different: no artificial light, massive blue skies over red earth, each community an island surrounded by an ocean of desert. Picture an indifferent camel standing at the front of a makeshift stage—actually a canvas tarpaulin in the dirt—with less than a hundred people sitting quietly, almost out of sight, as we ran through the song list with the winter wind blowing dust down our throats, the low hills surrounding the settlement turning to purple in the late afternoon. This was the world Midnight Oil now found itself in.

  On arrival we’d touch base with the handful of whitefellas in the settlement: community workers putting in the hard yards as teachers and nurses and in various support roles. We’d then meet with the elders and other clan leaders, and where possible with the women as well, as they tended to do much of the work, and listen as they described the seemingly intractable problems they were all grappling with. These included how to get young people into school, teachers to come and stay longer than a month, people into work when there were no jobs, the road fixed when the grader had broken down and they’d been cut off for weeks because of sudden rain. How, even this far out, to maintain their identity in the face of a tidal wave of popular western culture—cartoons, soapies, ganja, liquor, Penthouse, all dished up on white bread with sugar.

  After leaving Alice we went first to Uluru and then further west. By the time we reached Kintore—Walungurru to the locals—close to the border of Western Australia, nearly two weeks later, we’d found a travelling rhythm, a foretaste of making music a different way, and now and then connection. The window into another world was opening up: a world of learning and lore that preceded the arrival of the European explorers.

  Johnny Scobie, a big Warlpiri warrior who was the Kintore Council chairman, decided along with other elders, including noted artist Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, to take us to a secret location where traditional artefacts and sacred objects of great significance to the Pintupi were stored. We drove out into the desert in the late afternoon, veering off one of the many dirt tracks that surrounded the remote settlement, to visit the cultural storehouse of the Pintupi. It was a great honour; it isn’t too far-fetched to say we were being shown the Pintupi equivalent of the Ten Commandments. This act of sharing enabled us to understand a little more of the real depth of their people’s law and culture. It is one thing to be told about something with great meaning, and another th
ing altogether to see it. If part of the act of creating is a search for truth, then it was Midnight Oil’s great good fortune to be invited to share Aboriginal people’s truth—forever seared into our memory.

  I’ve returned to the Centre many times since, when working on environmental issues and, more recently, in my role as a government minister. It’s always confronting and I’ve never grown used to the bittersweet sense of estrangement and distant promise I find in these communities. There are hard choices ahead. The gaining of rights to land, important as this was, hasn’t led to overall improvements in social conditions. How best to ensure young people get the education they so desperately need, and communities remain safe and healthy, is still strongly contested. Still, coming out and reconnecting means more to me than all the gold records packed away in the storeroom at home or any other emblem of success.

  After three weeks in the desert we quit the vehicles and swung north in small aircraft, traversing the massed escarpments and river catchments that separate settlements across the Top End. Used to doing most of the driving, I wanted to try flying as well, so once we had a clear horizon and were in uncontrolled air space, I’d ask the young pilots for a go. Getting hold of the joystick and steering a small light aircraft through the open skies over the vast green swathes of Arnhem Land was a blast—more so for me than the rest of the Oils, who exited the Cessna muttering enough was enough.

  I blamed this high-flying desire on a new set of touring companions who had joined us for the northern leg. They were the Swamp Jockeys, a knockabout group of skydivers and musicians who hailed from Darwin. They’d flown over in a couple of single-engine Cessnas with their equipment squeezed into a battered Cherokee Six. At Elcho Island and a few other locations, the Swamp Jockeys startled everybody by parachuting into an open clearing as a warm-up before we played—Top End showbiz: I doubt there’s been anything like it since.

  Here again the contrasts were great, and there was plenty to learn. Many of these communities—especially on the coast, where contact with Macassan traders from Indonesia and Timor had been going on for centuries—had not been removed or forced to flee their homes following the European incursion. Despite the welter of social issues they were facing—youth alienation, unemployment, alcohol abuse—there was a feeling of resolve in the air. There was plenty of food, they knew their land intimately and, while there’d been earth-shattering change, people here could work things through given time and support from governments of goodwill.

  Their proud recent history of resistance to European overlay stood out. There had been a firm assertion of local people’s rights, as evidenced by the first-ever bark petition calling for recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land and culture, which had been crafted at Yirrkala, home of the Yolngu. It said in part: ‘This is Aboriginal people’s place. We want to hold this country. We do not want to lose this country.’ It was presented to the federal parliament in 1963.

  The presentation did not succeed in making good their grievances, and neither did an ensuing High Court case, which again sought to have the prior occupation of land recognised and compensation paid on account of a government decision taken in early 1963 to allow bauxite mining without consultation with the Yolngu. And so the campaign for land rights was joined across Australia as other Aboriginal clans and supporters from the wider community pressed for recognition of their rights.

  Again in 1985 at a small community festival at Barunga, near Katherine, a statement written on bark, now known as the Barunga Statement, was presented to Prime Minister Bob Hawke. We were self-government from the start, it asserted, and Hawke agreed that a treaty should now follow.

  It was at Yirrkala that I first met Mandawuy Yunupingu. At that time he was the first Yolngu man to have trained as a teacher, and he went on to become the principal of the local primary school. He later embarked on a second career as frontman for the band Yothu Yindi.

  Sitting in a clearing under stands of casuarinas and pandanus, speaking in a soft voice, he described his journey so far. Little did either of us know where it would lead, and how intertwined our lives would later become. Fast-forward five years and Alan James, then the manager of the Swamp Jockeys and now Yothu Yindi’s manager, calls up to say he and Mandawuy are in Sydney. He asks if I can help them finish a new song that Mandawuy had written with Paul Kelly. The song was called ‘Treaty’, and he was pretty excited about it.

  They came across to the Oils office in Glebe with Paul to play the track and right from the first listen it sounded like the business—it was a big jump for Yothu Yindi, and had the potential to go the distance. Later that night I dropped in to the Vault studio close by, where we spent a bit of time figuring out how to make the phrasing of the words match the rhythm of the music, and then I recorded a guide, adding a few lines for a bridge section to reinforce the message.

  At first ‘Treaty’ struggled for airplay, but following a dance-style remix featuring extensive passages of Aboriginal language, it became a hit; it was the first record to break into the mainstream with such a direct call to make good on the taking and occupying of Aboriginal country.

  We later took Yothu Yindi with us to the US on the Diesel and Dust to Big Mountain tour. Later still, I worked with Mandawuy and his wife Yalmay as they, with others in their community, founded the Garma Festival in north-east Arnhem Land and fought for better health services for the region.

  …

  The Warumpis had kept pretty much to themselves for the desert leg of the tour, but that would change as we hit sea country, as different to them as their home was to us. From that point on we began to spend more time together. Unlike his band mates, George Rrurrambu wasn’t from the desert originally. He hailed from Elcho Island, off the northern coast, and had ended up in the Western Desert settlement of Papunya after marrying a woman from that area (which also entailed breaking a tribal taboo). He’d ventured a long way from home and, used to explaining his different circumstances, was more outgoing.

  It was at Elcho that George came into his own. His drinking had exasperated everyone on tour, not the least his band companions, but once back on home soil he was irrepressible; togged up in rock-star gear of tight jeans and a funky T-shirt, he swaggered through the settlement like Jagger in his heyday, with a gaggle of admiring kids at his Cuban heels.

  The show that night lifted off, with the returning hero strutting his stuff to a crowd both astonished and highly amused by the unfolding spectacle, from skydiving to a local legend cutting it in fine style, and so they were in good spirits when we took to the stage.

  The next morning a few of us got up early and, at George’s invitation, went fishing at the local beach, armed only with hand spears. Despite the shoals of good-sized fish visible near to shore, I came up empty-handed, much to the amusement of the Warumpi singer and those of his mates who’d tagged along to watch this balanda (white person) make a fool of himself. I didn’t disappoint.

  My fumbling attempts weren’t getting us any closer to a feed, so a grinning George grabbed my spear and with one quick throw skewered lunch. The fish, still wriggling, was put directly onto a small fire lit on the sand near the water’s edge. It was delicious, a real treat after days of canned food and stale biscuits.

  There was one large town we hadn’t yet visited, and soon we were winging our way back across the Top End to Port Keats. Located well away from most other settlements on the remote north-west coast, wedged between the mangroves and the scrub, this former Catholic mission, also known by its Aboriginal name of Wadeye, was growing quickly. Like Papunya, more than a thousand miles to the south, it was home to different clan groups, and disputes and arguments were common in its early days.

  No band had ever ventured this far out. During the wet season Port Keats was often cut off from the rest of the country for up to five months at a time, with supplies either flown in at great expense or barged across from Darwin. The dilapidated hall we played in—tin roof and walls, cracked concrete floor—was packe
d to overflowing. Up to now, audiences had hung back, watching from a distance, though young kids occasionally darted towards the stage and performed a few lightning-quick gyrations before fleeing back to the cover of darkness, accompanied by squeals of laughter from their friends.

  At Port Keats the audience seemed more animated than usual. Then, midway through the show, a tall young man wearing a pair of overalls modelled on the stage clothes we’d worn for a ‘Read About It’ film clip leapt onto the stage and lunged towards me. A roar unlike anything we’d heard to this point went up. Unsure what would happen next, and whether there was a hidden significance in this bold action, I just said hello and gave him a pat on the shoulder. He grinned at the audience, danced around briefly, then leapt back into the crowd—a bona fide legend from that moment on.

  The young man’s name was William Parmbuk, and he later came to national attention when—incensed by the impact that alcohol was having on his community—he commandeered a bulldozer and, with the assistance of a large crowd, demolished the only liquor outlet in Wadeye, the quixotically named Sport and Recreation Club. (I got to know William better when he and Tobias Nganbe, a Wadeye leader, visited Canberra to resolve a Human Rights Commission complaint Tobias had lodged after years of government inaction regarding the school in this rapidly growing community—but more of that later.)

  The frantic pace of six weeks of setting up and putting on shows then moving on the next day was nearing an end as we descended over Kakadu National Park for our final performance, to be staged at Jabiru township.

  Kakadu encompasses an amazing array of environments, from coastal floodplains and wetlands to magnificent rock escarpments, covered, as are many rock surfaces in Australia, with cave paintings and drawings. Giant waterfalls cascade down these rocky walls in the wet season; billabongs are a haven for a huge range of wildlife. Above all it is a living cultural landscape and home to Aboriginal people since forever. In the words of one of the region’s leaders, Big Bill Neidjie: