Reflections III: Seeing with the Natives

The picture: Petroglyphs at N'Ghala Gorge. See previous post for more info.


A fresh and unexpected result of Australia Fourteen is my greater sense of Aboriginal culture. I’ve of course been aware of Aboriginals and their history since my first visit in 1985. I even went to a show of Aboriginal art at the state gallery that year. On previous trips I made little effort to explore or learn about Aboriginal culture. I kept looking at art, which resonated in some inchoate way, but I did not reflect on it deeply. I didn’t interact with many Aboriginals. This is a mixture of where I spent most of my time: in remote areas looking at rocks, and my innate natural reticence.

Nonetheless, preFourteen I’d built an impression of Aboriginals, their culture, and their experience. Three strong memories epitomize this. First, in 1987 I went to the Fremantle Markets, probably to buy cheap produce for the field season. There was an Aboriginal sitting at the entrance playing a didgeridoo. He was busking rather successfully. I stopped and watched. At some point we made eye contact. From the glimmer in his eyes, I intuited that I was seeing another human whose life experience and world view were radically unlike than mine. It was a feeling of utter dissimilarity. This profound difference was far greater than I’d ever felt in other places: Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, Costa Rica. The moment was disturbing. It challenged my comprehension of the breadth of humanness.

This experience fit into my evolving appreciation of the Australian land. The outback feels quite different from anywhere else I’ve been. The great age of the deeply weathered red rocks, the acacias of all sizes, the hopping animals, and the frequently harsh conditions create a unique environment. It’s matchlessly beautiful. This man was from a different and separate landscape, which had influenced his distinctive and rich culture. This is what showed in his eyes. I’ve sensed a similar heritage and power of place in the Aboriginal paintings and artwork.

My second experience is uglier. I was visiting friends in Karratha in 1990. At some point we drove through the old town of Roebourne on the Pilbara coast. Roebourne had a wide, arched main street, probably for drainage during cyclones. I though, geez, this town is filthy: the main street gutters seemed to be full of trash. As we got closer, I saw that some of this apparent debris was moving. It was literally piles of drunk and sleeping Aboriginals. This reminded me of seeing inebriated Native Americans in Arizona. Yet there was a sense of conformation here that was different. If I’m right that these were Aboriginals recovering after a drunk, it was like their bodies melded with the ground. They seemed to belong, to fit into the landscape; not or accidentally fallen down. My emotional memory of this scene is this sense of belonging. As with the busker, I felt that these people were of this land in a way that was across a very wide gap from me.

Finally, Newman 2003. In the early 21st century, Aboriginal settlements were established near most of the Pilbara mining towns. I don’t know the politics of this. I am pretty sure that the Aboriginals were the descendants of the pre-white inhabitants of the local areas. I suspect the new settlements are part of the ongoing race reconciliation process through which Australia is going. Many of the mining areas were originally Aboriginal places, taken away by Europeans. Now they’ve been somewhat returned.

We flew into town, and set about the usual assembling of gear for the field season. I was in the town centre shopping area. Newman was originally a one company mining town. Most of the workers were white. The population was a mixture of families and single males. Being the shopping centre felt like entering an excised chunk of Australian suburb: lots of consumer goods, clean people. The new Aboriginal settlement across the highway had changed this. Clusters of Aboriginals wandered the centre. A group of men waited for the liquor store to open, chattering in the local language: rapid, guttural, clearly expressive. I called home; it was hard to hear my parents in America because of another loud Aboriginal conversation going on behind me. There was trash in the streets and on the sidewalk. This seemed to correlate with the density of Aboriginals. I watched white shoppers walk by. Their faces showed distaste, resignation, and even fear.

I was watching a cultural clash in action, certainly. It showed the reverse of what I’d seen before; the unconformation of the Aboriginals to norms of white Australia. At the time, no one seemed happy with this. To be fair, Newman was already changing; the one company town had become a base for a diversity of businesses as the iron ore business expanded. I should note to; the situation did seem more resolved this year.

I didn’t make much effort to understand or integrate these experiences or the many others that took place over the years. The events were transient. Aboriginal culture seemed so far away from my experience. It was not my primary interest about Australia. My eyes and heart were for the rocks and the land. I was content with a cryptic sense of Aboriginals and Aboriginal cultures.

Australia Fourteen was different. Tnorala, which I’ve written about, was the crux. At the crater, my sense of the land aligned with the Dreamtime origin of the place. I could finally sense a bit of what I’d seen in the busker’s eyes back in Fremantle. Uluru and Kata Tjuta had similar although less overt affects. Relaxing and feeling these places was more difficult.

As I wrote this, I realized that Aboriginal art has moved me since I first saw it. This is a gut resonance about place. I didn’t intellectually attempt to figure out the paintings and other works that I saw, but some part of me understood. During Australia Fourteen, Paul was on a quest to buy art in Alice Springs. At some point on this traverse I found a decently sized introduction to Aboriginal art. I read it in the Pilbara. It gave me a basic appreciation for the diversity and breadth of Aboriginal culture and modern art. I don’t pretend to get Aboriginal art, but I do appreciate it more richly. It comes back to place. Fifty centuries have rooted the native culture on this continent. My fifty weeks here have given me appreciation of the land. This is where I can truly meet and understand the people of the place.

Tnorala

On a second day of looking at gorges, gaps, and rocks...

The road eventually turned south, just in time for the sun to continue shining on me from the west. I guess I’ll return to North America with the usual asymmetric drivers tan.

A lookout turnoff appeared. At the base of a larger telecommunications mast I had my first look at the Gosse (or Gosse’s) Bluff impact structure. It was formed when something extraterrestrial – the guidebooks say a comet, although there is no positive evidence for this that I am aware of – hit this part of Australia about 143 million years ago. The hypervelocity impact was enough to make a crater that was 20+ kilometers in diameter. That structure has long since been eroded. What I was seeing from the lookout was its roots; the rocks that were deformed by the impact an estimated 2 kilometers below the surface. Today, these remnants form a range of hills more than 5 kilometers wide. From the lookout, it was clear why the early white explorer Giles called these bluffs. They form a series of sharply eroded, overlapping flat-topped hills that rise from Missionary Plain. A distinct contrast from the rolling spinifex hills on which we were standing.

We made a decent camp several hundred meters off an access road. Accessing what I don’t know, maybe better not to. A second night of frost and wondering why the hell swags are still made in Alice Springs. This camp was notable for its wildlife. I saw brumby tracks all throughout our campsite. Louis went walkabout and eventually spotted a pair of wild horses which looked about the right size to have made the tracks. They came to visit throughout the night. Paul suggested the fire either attracted or agitated them. It just might have been how we smelled too.

After the morning gear drying event, on to Gosse Bluff. I’d discovered we could visit this spot using Google Earth. Driving down the bumpy corrugated dirt road, I imagined viewing the truck on the access road from space. A different way of knowing where I was. I’m used to visualizing locations on maps, but placing myself on a satellite image so precisely felt strange. Almost like knowing too much information in advance.

Gosse Bluff is a circular ring of hills comprised of vertically dipping sedimentary strata. In English, this means the beds trend straight up and down. These rocks were flat-lying at the time of the impact. The massive overpressure of the event deformed them downwards, and they then sprang back, freezing vertically. Think of how a stretched rubber band moves; now imagine several kilometers of rock doing the same thing in the space of a few seconds. I sure can’t; but it’s the best scientific explanation for what’s happened.

The bluff is pierced by a stream on its east side; the access road enters here, stopping at a day use area in the center of the structure. Odd; impact features this size often have some kind of a central uplift. Not here; maybe it was eroded.

We parked and hiked around. I wanted to find shatter cones, which are a hand-scale feature formed in rocks by extraterrestrial impacts; they’re diagnostic of such. This was easy. A sandstone layer in the first bed we walked up to was full of them. They were defined by slightly radiating lines – microfractures – which cut across the layering in the sandstone. I’ll stick a picture in here somewhere. We did not see any cone apexes, but this shape was obvious.

We climbed up the side of on of the bluffs. I took the obvious wide angle and telephoto images. Paul shot video. Louis took pictures, climbed around and kept finding more shatter cones. He has a good eye.

Eventually I just sat. I was struck by how uncanny the bluffs looked. We’d seen plenty of tilted sedimentary rocks in the MacDonnell Ranges, folded by mountain building during the Alice Springs Orogeny. They were of course fractured and eroded, but these modifications occurred in a rational context. Tilting, folding, and erosion are comprehensible. Besides being vertical the Gosse Bluff rocks look – smashed. Fracturing is common in rocks, but here pervasive crushing had broken every layer into shards. The strata remained defined, but on close examination look like a splintered and reassembled sheet of glass. Maybe I was preconceiving this, but it was easy to infer that some catastrophic event had formed these features. However, confronted with the evidence, my mind could not comprehend what happened. I’ve read and studied impacts for a long time, but seeing an actual crater, I could not imagine what happened. The forces and time scale are too far out of my experience.

How would this have appeared to the Aboriginals who lived throughout this area? They would have astutely observed the difference in the rocks that I’ve written about. There’s no other structure like Gosse Bluff in Australia. In the local Western Arrente language Gosse Bluff is named Tnorala. Its mythic origin is in fact both cosmic and cataclysmic. According the interpretation of the NT Parks and Wildlife Service, “Tnorala was formed in the creation time, when a group of women danced across the sky in the Milky Way. During this dance, a mother put her baby aside, resting in its wooden baby carrier. The carrier toppled over the edge of the dancing area and crashed to the Earth, where it was transformed into the circular rock walls of Tnorala”.

I didn’t connect with this story when I first read it in California. Here, looking at the far wall of the bluff, it made more sense than trying to force my mind around an actual impact. This place is Tnorala in my mind from now onwards.