Some consider it unsophisticated to explore the nonhuman world for clues to solving human dilemmas, and wisdom’s oldest tool, metaphor, is often regarded with wariness, or even suspicion in my culture. I’ve felt for a long time that the great political questions of our time-about violent prejudice, global climate change, venal greed, fear of the Other-could be addressed in illuminating ways by considering models in the natural world. You must, at the very least, establish a truce with realities not your own, whether you’re speaking about the innate truth and aura of a landscape or a person.
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Each person, I think, finds their own way into an unknown world like this spinifex plain we’re all by definition naive about the new, but unless you intend to end up alone in your life, it seems to me you must find some way in a new place-or with a new person-to break free of the notion that you can be certain of what or whom you’ve actually encountered. You might choose to handle an encounter with a stranger you wanted to get to know better in the same way.
Should I go now? Over the years I’d found this way of approaching whatever was new to me consistently useful: establish mutual trust, become vulnerable to the place, then hope for some reciprocity and perhaps even intimacy. This simple technique of awareness had long been my way to open a conversation with any unfamiliar landscape.
My goal that day was intimacy-the tactile, olfactory, visual, and sonic details of what, to most people in my culture, would appear to be a wasteland. Starlight alone, in this sparsely populated country lying on the southern border of another, much more stark, challenging, and enormous desert, the Tanami, would be enough to guide me home. (I could easily have strayed unawares into some broad, shallow depression on that plain, from which all horizons would appear identical.) But getting lost seemed most unlikely. It was midday when I left so if I happened to walk too far to the west (on what would soon be a moonless night in June) darkness might conceivably force me to lie down and wait for dawn. Many of these sites were close to the Lander. These were mostly innocuous-looking spots to my eye-rocks, trees, small sand hills-but they were important elements in the Dreamtime narratives that form the foundation of Warlpiri identity. Petra then returned to her home in Alice Springs and I was on my own.īefore she left, Petra had pointed out numerous places in the countryside nearby that I should neither approach nor show any interest in. She’d been working for some years around Willowra and when the biologists dropped me off-that work now completed-she helped move me into a residence in the settlement, a guesthouse where she had been living. The animal had been eliminated locally by feral house cats, domestic pets left behind decades before by white settlers.) When I arrived in Willowra, I was introduced to several Warlpiri people by a friend of mine, an anthropologist named Petronella Vaarzon-Morel. They were intent on reintroducing a small marsupial in the vicinity, the rufous hare-wallaby ( Lagorchestes hirsutus or mala in the local language). (I’d driven into the area several days before with a small team of restoration biologists.
A small village, it’s haphazardly situated on the east bank of the Lander River, a dry watercourse. Some years before things went bad, I arrived in an Aboriginal settlement called Willowra, in Australia’s Northern Territory. This world is just a little place, just the red in the sky, before the sun rises, so let us keep fast hold of hands, that when the birds begin, none of us be missing.
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