Change Everything No 28: First Nations flourishing in Australia's Western Desert

'Aṉangu knew the country - they could go everywhere. But whitefellas, they would just go anywhere'

Book news

Going north this week to the wonderful Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh and the Wigtown Book Festival with Change Everything, the book. And have just booked in an event in Cheltenham next month.

Abundance in the desert

Few books of Australian history are as fascinating, deeply perceptive and compassionate as Unmaking Angas Down: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, by Shannyn Palmer, which won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History. It essentially tells the story of the 20th century in the Western Desert, an area best known for the presence of Uluru, through the yarns, explanations and memories of the First Nations people, while also engaging with the white settler accounts and current day science and historical research. (An ABC interview with the author here.)

Palmer contrasts the European perspective of the desert and drought (our words), shaped by the land’s extreme difference from the fertile soils and reliable rainfall of the UK (as it was then anyway) with the understanding of the Aṉangu of the Western Desert. Their world consisted of shifting places of plenty, built on “efficient land use, detailed knowledge of Country, and fluid and inclusive social relationships” (p. 40). There were hard times, Ailuru, but these were regarded as exceptional, rather than the norm. Although when these came in the 20th century, the colonialists used them as an excuse to further damage traditional ways of life - while they also drew on depictions from early modern Europe of the crime of “vagrancy”, used particularly against Roma and Gypsy-Travellers, that were aiming then, and in the 20th century, to cement the borders of the nation state and the idea of a work ethic by demonising those who did not live under those strictures (p. 143).

Science now has a better understanding of a “pulse-reserve” system by which this ecosystem is shaped: “A rain event triggers a pulse of activitiy, like the growth of vegetation, a variable portion of which is ‘lost’ to mortaility and/or consumption but some part is put into a reserve such as seeds or reserve energy stores in roots and stems. The magnitude of the ‘pulse’ varies as a function of the trigger event and season of the year as well as the magnitude and duration of the event.” (p. 35)

The Western plateau Source

The role of incorporating First Nations knowledge into that science has - slowly begun. What has been even less acknowledged is the role in First Nations knowledge in teaching the white settler arrives how to at least navigate the land, even if they proved far less proficient at finding a way to live with it.

Tjuki [Palmer’s chief informant] said that the world of the Aṉangu started changing when sheep began to walk on the land; this marked the time that he began to ‘learn the new way’. However, Tjuki also said that Aṉangu knew the country - they knew where the water was , and because of this, they could go everywhere. But whitefellas, they would just go anywhere. Sitting under the canopy of a large desert oak at Ulanga, the place where Abe Andrew and his family decided to settle, Tjuki Pumpack told me that when Aṉangu see a large body of water, they know there is a wanampi inside it. Popularly understood as the Rainbow Serpent, the wanampi is the most powerful and revered of all the ancient beings… sustain life on earth… Having visited a number of water sources with Aṉangu, I have learnt that certain protocols are adhered to, and great care taken, so as not to angwer of otherwise upset the wanampi. Upset the wanampi and the water source will dry up.” (p. 57)

The white settlers, of course, were not interested in such guidance, brought in their destructive and thirsty flocks and herds, drilled for artesian water, and very often destroyed the very foundations on which they were trying to build an enterprise in a matter of a few years. The book is illustrated with evocative photos of the ruins of Angus Downs, abandoned vehicles and collapsed windmills.

Yet Palmer finds those white settlers were not always, or even often, in this highly marginal land, the fervent agents of capitalism that might have been expected.

“What motivated these men to live a life of isolation and obscurity in the outback? What compelled them to live a life of discomfort and privation when the reqards seldom took material form. There is a sense that emergences in the descriptions of deprival and denial that characterise these men of seeking out and, at the same time, trying to escape, something. Of being both in and out of place…. The Andrews family, the sole exception to the lone white male running sheep or cattle in the isolated southwest, were staunch socialists.Perhaps it wasn’t just a new life that they sought in the desert but also avoidance of the capitalist economy and way of life… Ward observed that most of the men he encountered in the Northern Territoty in 1930 were there because the remoteness offered them a ‘vagabond life free from conventional restraints”. (p. 73)

Palmer - aided by other recent scholarship - does an amazing job of capturing a very different perspective on the indigenous experience of invasion. She quotes the historian Robert Kenny, writing about the impact of the arrival of the newcomers in mid-19th century colonial Victoria, where the Wotjobalak people saw their worldview disrupted not so much by the settlers, but their livestock. From a world where the biggest living things - soft-footed kangaroos and emus - were bipeds similar in size to people, to which they had a kinship relationship, to one with hard-footed domesticated horses, cattle, and sheep plus camels that were treated purely as sources of economic value. So Palmer writes:

“Tjuki Pumpack recorded on several occasions the story of his family’s arrival at Walara. Each version of the story prefaces the end of the long journey with the sighting of sheep tracks. Hundreds of sheep tracks. They followed them, and eventuallty arrived at the camp to be reunited with his auntie and uncle. Although Tjuki grew up from a young age with sheep in his world, his mother and father must surely have recalled the encounter somewhat differently. Imagine the stories they must have told… The work of shelpherding represented an entirely new relationship with animals… Just as Kenny described that process as the ‘lamb enters the Dreaming’… the sheep, too, became enmeshed in the enactment of social relations that sought to incporate strange structures and animals into the Anangu lifeworld… I can ask of Anangu how they couldn’t have believed that sheep and cattle were whitefella ‘totems’ to which they were mystically linked…. [Quoting Tjuki] ‘in recent years, I noticed something new - sheep living freely without human shepherds watching over them! So all those years, there we were caring for those sheep night and day, and yet they don’t need that! Going down towards Port August, I could see the sheep walking around everywhere by themselves!” (p. 79-81)

The book left me reflecting on the contrast of First Nations life with my white settler Australian childhood in the Seventies and Eighties (I was born in 1966). My family (that is Mum, Dad and myself) lived in two houses that I remember: a two-bedroom weatherboard bungalow (as the British would call it, we just thought of it as a house as most were single-storey then) in the working class suburb of West Ryde, and the rather more upmarket rambling Edwardian brick home (I had both a bedroom and a study big enough for a table tennis table) not far from Epping train station where we moved when I was 11. The way those homes were thought of was not primarily place-based, rather they were a store of cash. What was happening to property prices, how much more each might be worth, was an almost daily topic of conversation.

In West Ryde, I recollect no sense of community at all. Under the influence of my snobbish, aspirational working class grandmother, I was not allowed to play with other children in the street (that was “common”), and I do not recollect my parents ever speaking to the neighbours. In Epping, my parents were friendly with one neighbour across the road; I babysat (very ineffectively) his children when I was in my mid-teens, and latter worked extensively for his small business, but there was no community. No one walked down the street - everyone got into their cars (in their driveways) to leave their house. I broke with my grandmother’s influence to learn to ride a bicycle (not allowed when I was smaller as it was not “ladylike”), but in practice I almost never rode it. No one did beyond small children in their own gardens and driveways. I had no sense of what the streets were like beyond the main road to the railway station, which I walked on the school run until I got a car the week after my 17th birthday.

The only non-human life that had an impact (and this was exceptional), was the giant oak tree in our Epping front garden. The story I was told was that before the house was built it had been used to shade work on a plant nursery there, which means it must have been planted by an early farmer-settler. It was home to a small army of possums - which occasionally got into our roof. One time I was sitting in our “sunroom”, separate from the formal “lounge room”, which was occupied maybe half a dozen times a year - when we “entertained”, when one urinated on my head. And we used to collect funnel web spiders (alive) from the back door to give to efforts to develop an antivenom. Not a lot of constructive engagement with nature then and no community. No wonder that from age five I escaped into the world of books.

The oak tree, and the house, are now gone, knocked down early this century to build half a dozen “villas” on the giant block. Suburban Australia does not do history, or nature.

What strikes me is the arid, isolated, artificial nature of that suburban white settler life, in contrast to the rich, healthy, nature-based indigenous one recounted even from the physically challenging deserts of Western Australia in Unmaking Angas Downs. That First Nation life has so much to teach us.

After reading Unmaking Angas Downs I understand better what Tyson Yunkaporta was saying in his interview with the Green European Journal, about how indigenous thinking might be used to take on the populist authoritarian tendences now so strong in the Global North, particularly its focus on meaning being built around place, community, animal and plant life and geography. The destruction of that distinctiveness of community of place is central in the creation of late neoliberal capitalism; the homogenisation and awful melanging of discordant, exotic influences as “luxury” is toxic: the destruction of local food systems just one of the worst symptoms. My father later lived on a outer suburban development where the “Roman villa” was beside the “antebellum plantation house” beside the “Georgian country home” - all horribly overlarge and malproportioned, with a swimming pool almost filling the garden). Again no one walked along the road; everyone drove in their isolated tin boxes.

Learning from indigenous thought in no way means going backwards. As Palmer notes, much 20th-century anthropological thought viewed Aboriginal knowledge as ancient, fixed and unmoving. That has surely never been true. “This divorces relationship to place from the social practice - residing, sharing, loving highting and dying - in which they are made. Rather than the anthropological standards of ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition; to which many Aboriginal people are still held accountable (none more so than in the realms of popular understanding, and legislative forms of recognition in land rights, and native title), in both Tjuki and Sandra’s oral histories it is the social practices linking people and place that emerge as central in continuing ways of placemaking.” (p. 104) Palmer recounts how the Aṉangu learned to catch, tame and use for transport (and tourism) wild camels that were released by Arab and Afghan camel men when their trade was supplanted by lorries and cars, something that enabled them to continue and even expand ceremonial activities. (p. 154)

Green thinking talks of bioregions. That’s a concept we should develop further in cooperation with indigenous thought, bringing together animals, plants and land all as active agents.

P.S. I also have to note the reflection on gender in white settler life that Palmer provides through the account of the “Petticoat Safari”. “ Operated by Trans Australia Airlines (TAA), it was one of the first ‘official’ tours to ‘the Rock’ [Uluru]. A women-only tour to ‘Alice and beyond’, its purpose as [Edna] Bradley described it, was showing the rest of Australia ‘that if women could travel to a far-off, inhospitable place, so could anyone else’.” (p. 110) Media coverage made much of the women climbing Uluru; I’m pleased to say that this finally stopped in 2019, showing white settler culture can, if slowly, adapt to living more appropriately on Country. Something I could hardly have imagined when this photo was taken in around 1986 (in western New South Wales).

Picks of the week

Reading

A fascinating long-read reflection on the way in which our knowledge of written history is shaped by the accidents of preservation (as is indeed our archaeological understandings), when the vast majority of texts (even those we know existed) are lost. And an explanation of how everything we know about the Spartans may well be wrong - shaped perhaps by the propaganda but not their reality.

“If you thought you might go to war with Athens, and you knew the Athenians thought you were crazy, why divest them of that belief? This is known to historians as the Spartan mirage.”

Photo by Vladan Raznatovic on Unsplash

Listening

The men of the Enlightment wanted to classify animals, to - after killing them - push them into neat boxes, drawers and categories, but as Whitney Barlow Robles, author of Curious Species How Animals Made Natural History, those men were not so nearly in control as they thought. She tells the New Books Network about how raccoons, rattlesnakes, corals and fish, specifically a sample of the chain pickerell flattened into a box in a Boston museum in the late 18th century, interacted with and acted on humans in the 18th century, allowing their modern ancestors to guide her research with alternating chapters of history and present-day reportage.

In neither period are the animals simply acted on. They are also agents. This is not just a modern understanding - it was grasped, if reluctantly, at the time. In the book (yes, I couldn’t resist a peak and it is definitely going on my to-read list) Robles quotes the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon: man’s “empire over animals is not absolute. Many species elude his power, by the rapidity of their flight, by the swiftness of their course, by the obscurity of their retreats, by the elemnt which they inhabit”… “by the minuteness of their bodies; and others, instead of acknowledging their sovereign, attack him with open hostility”. Okay, marks for practical knowledge, less for humility.

Thinking

The general narrative of human breeding programme for animals is “improvement”, but of course what we are doing is taking them further from any kind of fitness to survive on their own. If we are to restore them as actors working with us in wild or semi-wild environments, that damage has to be undone. Researchers have been thinking about how that could be done with horses, tackling “low genetic diversity and high susceptibility to hereditary diseases in animals under human selection, as well as insufficient consideration for the social behaviour of horses in wild-living populations”. (I was pointed to this by the excellent Inkcap Journal.)

Ready to cope? Photo by Martin Jernberg on Unsplash

Researching

The term microplastics was first published 20 years ago. Science has published a useful, extensive survey article (sorry £) about what we have learnt since, and it is not pretty. Nor will be the future of the planet’s and our own health, unless we get a handle on this, fast. “Under business-as-usual scenarios, microplastic leakage to the environment could rise by 1.5 to 2.5 times by 2040.” That UN Plastics treaty is looking more and more important.

Almost the end

If only I had such a thing as spare time, a whole day conference at the Institute for Historical Research on Dorothy L Sayers next month sounds like enormous fun!

What did you think?

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