Alice and Me: An Alice Springs Experience

ALICE AND ME

An Alice Springs Experience

by

Bryan Clark

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Copyright 2015 © Bryan Clark

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Images copyright © Bryan Clark, unless otherwise stated.

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Other books by Bryan Clark:

YAMMATJI: ABORIGINAL MEMORIES OF THE GASCOYNE

Hesparian Press, Western Australia, 1992.

IN THE WAKE OF HMAS SYDNEY II

Hesparian Press, Western Australia, 2010.

POEMS OF CENTRAL AUSTRALIA

Coleman’s Printing, Alice Springs, Central Australia, 2013.

CARTOONS AND YARNS OF THE OUTBACK

Coleman’s Printing, Alice Springs, Central Australia, 2014.

This book is dedicated to my sister

COLLEEN

INTRODUCTION

Having survived over seventy years of life in this land, I have at various times stood with my back to Australia – at Seaford, Scarborough, Townsville and Darwin – and in each place I have felt the bulk of the country behind me like the hand of a protective parent: huge, ancient, wild and inhospitable.

I have felt the sharp coldness of the waves in southern climes, the affectionate warmth in sub-tropical waters as brilliant sunsets perished over western oceans, the almost foreign loneliness of western islands with their petroglyphed rocks, and always in the background the hot breath of inland deserts gasping, yet beckoning.

I have wandered lost on horseback for several days in Arnhem Land eating the mullabungor (freshwater mussels) shown to me by the Ritarrngu Aborigines of the Roper River region, chewed the watery stalks of water lilies from the billabongs such as Yallawarra, and looked as a privileged stranger on the timeless cave paintings of Burrunjor where few, if any, white men have ever ventured.

I have loitered in exotic cities – Hong Kong, Tokyo – and seen my red-bearded strangeness reflected in the eyes and on the faces of other cultures, then winged my way back to Sydney to feel the strangeness all over again in the midst of my sport-fixated, grog-swilling countrymen who have rarely faced drought, thirst, – or fought wars that were not those of England or the USA.

I have seen impoverished Chinese villagers cultivating the strips of imported soil between railway tracks to grow household vegetables, and later wondered as I flew over the illimitable expanses of our Northern Territory which no man occupies or cultivates.

I have relished wild watermelons along the Wilton River, near south-western Arnhem Land, delighted in wild mangoes and coconuts and paw paws on the lovely beaches of the north-western coast of Western Australia, hunted big crabs for lunch with a wire spear in the Arafura Sea, helped paint the bodies of young initiates for a sacred Yabuduruwa corroboree, using sugar and water for glue, tail fluff from wild geese, white and red ochres and even human blood.

I have played the didjeridu on distant streets of the planet, in concert halls, schools and university auditoriums, on television and radio, even in a palace, and seen its vibrations energised in the wondrous, multi-coloured eyes of crowds who were totally ignorant of its origins in a Great South Land.

I have cracked a stockwhip – the Sydney Flash, in fact – in the echoing concrete canyons of Tokyo and Kyoto with an audience of one rather startled policeman who recoiled and shivered in his neon-lit dreamtime.

I have huddled under a tarpaulin in torrential rains with nary a dry stick to start a campfire, and sweltered on northern beaches with my Milingimbi friends, Wynyamarra and Ngulupani, swatting mozzies all night long in a sweaty tropical vacuum.

On an isolated north-western river bank I have touched the bones of men protruding from the arid red earth, some with bullet holes through the skulls, while over one shoulder was the deteriorating homestead of an early settler who came to tame the land and was himself tamed by hopelessness and a waterless river.

I spent sixteen years in the north-west of Western Australia as a newspaper editor, contending continually with village mentalities, the soaring egos of little men, and the cruel death of my wife far removed from her beloved Pennsylvanian hills.

I finally stopped travelling, far away from the sea, in the middle of Central Australian deserts where everything craved water and lay in wait of it over long and thirsty months; then came the sudden awakening, the budding of dormant weeds, the juices of life surging through lethargic gumtrees, and wildflowers flaunting their brilliant colours where once death had reigned unchallenged.

And so I came to Alice Springs...

IN THE BEGINNING

When I was a two year old kid and my little sister, Colleen, was still a babe-in-arms (as we used to say in the colonies), World War 2 was still raging and I remember at night watching search-lights exploring the darkness for enemy aircraft.

This was in Melbourne – West Coburg, in fact – circa 1941.

My Scottish-born father, George Murray Clark, was called into the Australian Army. His doctor was a little apprehensive about his enlistment; sometime earlier he had been involved in a motorbike accident and it was suspected that he might have clots in his blood system.

My Mother later told us: He was allowed to join the Army, but only as a tradesman (boot-maker). The doctor said he should never be made to do heavy physical exercise.

On that basis George Clark joined the Army to become a corporal (V611) and settled down as a military boot-maker.

While based at the Broadmeadows army camp, 1942, the hierarchy decided that all personnel were to start a training programme in preparation for duties overseas.

Like it or not, my Dad was ordered to start training, despite his doctor’s instructions. While exercising, he suddenly dropped unconscious to the ground and was found to be dead, presumably caused by a blood clot moving to the heart, obviously precipitated by the sudden strenuous exertion.

The army hierarchy duly presented to my Mother two silver medals to commemorate my Father having giving his life for his country, and this was accompanied by an official scroll by order of the King celebrating the same bullshit. It was often suggested that I should wear my Father’s silver medals in Anzac Day marches through the streets, but I always refused. Had I obliged, I know I would have felt like a traitor to a man who was, in truth, irresponsibly sacrificed by an indifferent government.

An alleged link with Australian military was my Grand Father, Sgt. Michael James Lynch, of the 8th Australian Light Horse, who was lost on the 11th day of October, 1918; he had part of a leg blown off, according to family accounts related via my Granny, his sister. Undergoing surgery on the battle field without anaesthesia, Michael Lynch died and his body was buried at Al Qahirah, in Egypt. As children, our Nan, as we called her, proudly showed us photographs of her brother’s horse, Sandy, which, she claimed, was the only horse to be brought back to Australia. It was returned, she told us, to be ridden by some major in a street parade through Melbourne. Afterwards, Sandy was released to graze out the remainder of his days on the banks of the Maribyrnong River, in Victoria. Sandy’s photograph was presented to her family by Australian Army officials and always held pride of place on her bedroom wall.

As a little kid in Melbourne, I can clearly recall watching through a tram window a teeming mob of brawling Australian and American soldiers, cluttering the road with swinging fists, jabbing knees and vicious boots, completely running amuck in a blood-splattered state of raw violence. The explosive mass stopped all traffic as everyone stood on the sidelines watching the anger and even hatred.

I remember an old man nearby muttering almost to himself: The Japs would love to see this.

Later in life I learnt from returned soldiers that the American troops were spoilt rotten; they were loaded with money, had the best accommodation, and they tended to despatch their Australian comrades into the worst battles while they stayed behind seducing the women, boozing and safe. The Yanks treated the Australian military as underlings who could be manoeuvred like puppets into doing all the dirty work while they, the dominant class, preyed on their females in the cities, getting their evil way with lavish gifts of money, chocolates and stockings.

THE ALICE

During my wild and reckless youth, working as a freelance contributor for Australasian Post, in Melbourne, I became a great admirer of a distant Alice Springs journalist, Alan Wauchope, who wrote for the magazine a weekly column, Straight from the Heart.

I loved Wauchope’s anecdotes of the bush folk of Central Australia in general and Alice Springs in particular: the funny old cattle drovers with Aboriginal wives, the eccentrics who shunned mankind and wandered alone through the outback with a swag on their back and a head cluttered with mad dreams, the horse breakers, misfits, missionaries, and camel teamsters, all rugged individualists who lived out their strange lives under the sun and stars, and I could never get enough of them. To anyone who would listen, I would say: One day I’m going to live in Alice Springs, and my dreamy-eyed statement was generally greeted with a raised eyebrow and sceptical frown, the inference being: ‘Who would want to live in that God-forsaken place out in the middle of no-where?’

Well, it took over 50 years, but I finally made it. Following the death of my wife, Delores, in 1992, I relinquished my editorial position, sold up everything I owned in Western Australia and started to drive across the Nullabor Plain, my destination being no-where in particular. Reaching the outpost of Port Augusta, I noticed a signpost pointing ambiguously north to Alice Springs and in an instant I was reminded of my youthful ambition; without much consideration, I turned up the Stuart Highway, roughly following the track once pioneered by the old Scottish explorer, John McDouall Stuart. When at last I drove through the rough, rocky entrance of Heavitree Gap (about four kilometres south of the Alice) I felt a warm coming home feeling and I instinctively knew this was to be my future camp, come what may. Much later I learnt that Alice Springs becomes the spiritual home of many who have spent their lives in search of the lost.

***

A rather misguided mythology can sometimes haunt the streets of Alice Springs. To the uninitiated, it is still a raw, untamed frontier town in Central Australia, basking under desert suns where colourful bush eccentrics spin yarns and go out droving cattle across arid hinterlands, where Aboriginal people dance their moonlit corroborees and perpetuate an ancient dreamtime culture.

According to my experience, Alice Springs seems to have evolved as a sort of sanctuary for misfits and the unsalvageable. It is truly a country town still afflicted with a village mentality.

Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice, which is undeniably the most commonly known book on the subject, is hardly about Alice Springs at all; it was portrayed as a mythological outpost, or as a romantic camp for the hero, from whence he originated and to where he returned after undergoing horrific war experiences overseas.

Following in Shute’s track came the late journalistic giants, Douglas Lockwood, Keith Willey, Alan Wauchope and Jim Bowditch, with their various experiences of life in the Red Heart of Australia. All added to the established myth that became firmly embedded in the universal consciousness: a rough, old, bush town out in the middle of nowhere with its population of misfits, lunatics, stray dogs, bushflies and camels, ever colourful and hardly ever of the real world.

Into the fray eventually strayed misfits of another genre: the yankee bullshit purveyor, Marlo Morgan, and her fictional tome, Mutant Message Down Under, plus Bruce Chatwin’s scarcely researched The Songlines.

It was (and is not) uncommon to see international tourists today (written in 2009) alighting from planes, or strolling the streets of the Alice, a copy of either book clutched under their arms as they eagerly go off in search of prophetic tribes whose ancient culture holds all the answers to the questions of the universe.

One German tourist observed perusing Morgan’s imaginative prose was told that the whole book was a fabrication.

It doesn’t matter, the tourist replied, I’m enjoying it very much.

In matters of human enjoyment, it seems, the matter of fact and fiction is totally irrelevant.

In a very different vein to the others was the late Alice Springs journalist, Peter B. English (Paddy Ethell) and his brilliant expose, Storm Over Uluru, revealing the truth behind the Aboriginal claims on Ayers Rock and how the government of the day orchestrated the fallacy in a collaborated effort to attract international tourist dollars. All copies of this book seem to have mysteriously disappeared.

Just about everywhere you look around Alice Springs it is the high fences with barbed wire on top that attract attention. They seem to exude the silent message: Go Away! Piss Off!

Out in the bush in all directions around Alice Springs are what is called the homelands of the various Aboriginal communities. Many of these groups were formerly Christian missions of the Methodist/ Catholic/Church of England variety who were once intent on saving the souls of pagans. Over many years of frustration, the missionaries have mostly accepted the reality of their lives and gone back home to their respective coastal cities, having their only successes in what are known among the Aboriginal folk as tea and sugar Christians. This stems from the old practice of the ministers, parsons, priests and nuns handing out gifts of tea and sugar to those who attended the Sunday services and went through the motions of being saved from the devil.

Realising at last that their hypothetical conversions were essentially without any real substance, over time the god-men and their bicycle-riding nuns packed up and went home. Left to government care, their protectors were, in the main, public servants who did not care a damn about the people, but cared for their daily needs with a semblance of decency. Many went through the motions of caring without really caring at all. In this pit of apathy, the Aboriginal people soon enmeshed themselves in alcohol and drug addiction, petrol sniffing and random criminality; their tribal laws fell into disuse, partially or fully, incest became rampant as brain-addled individuals mated indiscriminately with close relatives, and intellectually and physically disabled offspring emerged to be accepted as normal.

The former missions-cum-Aboriginal reserves-cum-homelands degenerated into sanctuaries for feral, partly-educated, conniving people who lived out their brief lives in an atmosphere of hopelessness. The worst examples lived ruthlessly off each other, supplying daughters and sisters for prostitution, selling a coke bottle of petrol to addicted sons, daughters and cousins for fifty dollars, murdering their brothers so their wives could be taken over, abandoning the elderly and ill as unnecessary and superfluous. When tribal law deteriorates and is finally abandoned, chaos reigns; the people struggle in some spiritual hinterland that seems wonderfully lawless. Alcohol, drugs, petrol sniffing, accompanied by indiscriminate matings, eventually corrupt the people and they start to die. Successive governments tried to attract European staff to the homelands with offers of unusually lofty salaries, free 4-wheel-drive vehicles, free fuel, free electricity, free housing, cheap groceries, subsidised holidays every few months to ensure recuperation. Mostly attracted to this decadent life style were the petty criminals and sleazy entrepreneurs who took the opportunity to capitalise and amass great profits. Decent staff who refused to be corrupted were ostracised by the crooks, both black and white, and ultimately they relinquished their positions within twelve months, realising in their hearts that they were not going to affect anything in these rotten societies.

When I survived as a community advisor for eleven months on a Pitjantjatjara homeland out in the desert near the South Australian-Northern Territory border, one of the government staff in Alice Springs commented: Congratulations. You lasted the longest. Most of the others couldn’t complete six months.

During my frustrating time out on the homeland, we were one morning surprised by an unannounced visit by a Minister for Aboriginal Affairs (Liberal Party) and his entourage. He quietly said to me: We want you to show us everything that’s going on here. We just want the truth, just the bare facts.

So we piled the Minister and his friends on to the back of a rickety Toyota and slowly drove around the settlement showing him the new houses that had been burnt down by our resident petrol sniffers; we showed them the homes without windows or doors, the wrecked trucks, cars and tractors, the petrol bowsers contained in wire cages and heavily padlocked, the filthy medical centre, the vandalised school and teacher’s accommodation, a fully-equipped (but unused) garage where the mechanic kept ordering expensive motor parts and other equipment supposedly for use on government vehicles when, in fact, he was selling the stuff in his own Adelaide shop – as investigators later exposed.

Viewing the extent of the corruption, the Minister took me aside before boarding the chartered aircraft to say: I know you are a journalist. Would you do me a huge favour? You must be writing all this stuff down somewhere, I’m sure. Would you write me a full report on what’s going on here, the crooks, the corruption, how money is being mishandled – everything, the guts of it, and would you send it down to my office in Adelaide?

I agreed. Within the week I had completed forty or more typewritten pages, detailing the illegal activities occurring around me. I held nothing back. The Minister received what he demanded, the guts of it! Everything down to the Aboriginal chairman of the local council who secretly sold bottles of petrol to young female addicts in return for sex. His own teenaged son, incidentally, was buried on a nearby hill, killed by the incessant inhalation of lethal petrol fumes.

Despatching my report, I awaited a result. Some days later he phoned me from Adelaide to say: Look, I’m deeply shocked by what you have sent me. I will tell you what’s happening. I am flying out today for Canberra and I will be taking your notes with me to show the Federal Minister. Something will have to be done about this. I will let you know everything on my return.

A week went by. Nothing from the Minister. Not a word. Then most of two weeks went by before I decided to call him as his Adelaide office.

On the phone he sounded slightly nervous, rather uncertain until he finally spilt it out with the statement: I’m sorry about this … we really can’t do anything about it … It’s rather sad … I was told the whole mess is too politically sensitive …

Around Alice Springs today (written in 2014) I have noticed a singular lack of curiosity in fellow inhabitants. There appears to be a massive preoccupation with self. The lives and experiences of others is treated with complete apathy; you are rarely asked of your experiences in other places, enquiries rarely solicit information on achievements, goals fulfilled or hopes unrealised. In the first instance, when this realisation originally dawned, I thought, perhaps, many of the residents were hiding from something in their past, or trying to avoid discarded relationships of one kind or another. Perhaps the outpost of Alice Springs was a sanctuary for the lost, the aimless and obsolete. When questioned about personal history, there seemed to be an aura of reluctance with some to venture into the past, and information was scrappy without any emotional attachment. Conversely, there were at least two characters of my acquaintance with opposite attitudes. Both were middle-aged males always trying to create an image of themselves as being former military personnel. They had a repertoire of tales featuring their own courage in the face of danger. One bloke even wobbled about with the aid of a walking stick, his reason being an old war injury. The same pretender even claimed he was of Aboriginal descent, but had received no remuneration for his contributions to the country. Discreet enquiries revealed he had, as a toddler, been partially raised in a part-Aboriginal household after being abandoned by European parents, and he had never enlisted in the armed forces of Australia.

In general conversation one day the name of the Australian entertainer, Rolf Harris, was recalled and I mentioned I had taken part in an A.B.C. television documentary with him, his wife, Alwen, daughter, Bindi, and the West Australian naturalists, Harry Butler and Vincent Serventy. Almost simultaneously, the faces around me registered immediate scepticism and quizzical looks were exchanged. I then realised I had over-stepped the mark of credibility and quickly aborted the memory. The attitude seems to be: the grubby little inhabitants of Alice Springs could never associate with celebrities, so get off your high horse, Charlie, and slip back into the gutter with us.

One time I was chatting in the Todd Street mall with a colourful character when he was abruptly confronted by two policemen who started enquiring into his recent activities.

What is your job? the copper asked. Where do you work? How do you make your money?

I’m a businessman, proudly announced the fellow, puffing out his puny chest.

Methodical questioning by the two policemen quickly revealed his entrepreneurial skills. He kept an eye of the second-hand clothing stores run by various religious organisations; from their racks of donated clobber he picked out stuff in reasonable condition and purchased it for a dollar or two, and then sold it off at the outdoor markets for greatly inflated prices. A rabid capitalist in full flight!

***

As the homelands people move in greater numbers into Alice Springs, coming with them is their criminal behaviour. Begging for money in the streets is now commonplace. So is property damage, robbery, physical assault and welfare fraud, not forgetting pissing, shitting and fucking. Alice Springs is the place where Aboriginal drunks curl up and go to sleep in the middle of the Stuart Highway and on the railways track. When inevitably they get run over and killed, the do-gooders start raving about the carelessness of European drivers! Everywhere protective fences, barbed wire, chains and locks, guard dogs proliferate to the point that the town itself resembles a prison. Elsewhere throughout Australasia the do-gooders berate the Northern Territory for its predominantly Aboriginal gaol population, believing in their ignorance that the cause of this matter is basically racism, ignoring the possibility that the real cause is excessive criminality.

Probably a more genuine cause for concern are the number of Aboriginal murders that remain unsolved. Some believe the police do not even waste their time in trying to locate and charge offenders; when it occurs, as it does with incredible frequency, Aboriginal society closes ranks and pretend to be collectively ignorant. Unsolved fatalities in that one section of the community are astronomical. Nobody seems to care. The matter seems to be lodged by officialdom in the Self-Inflicted Genocide category.

Old-timers are often heard to complain: Alice ain’t what it used to be. Once you didn’t have to lock up your house or your car.

Today, as stated, the town resembles a prison, with high fences everywhere, padlocks on everything, barbed wire, sometimes electrically charged as an additional precaution.

The bulk of the population were incubated in our capital cities and, when they transferred themselves to Alice Springs, they brought with them their suburban attitudes and standards. Transplanted among detribalised and semi-tribal folk, there have been explosions of incompatibility all over the place; it was almost as if the inhabitants of two different planets were cast together as some sort of societal experiment. The only element that has had a degree of enduring