3 DECEMBER 1983, Page 7

Dreamtime in the Bush

Robert Haupt

Melbourne

Ayers Rock sits in the belly of the Australian continent like a navel jewel. It is the world's largest inselberg ('island mountain) and events that occur in its shadow — the disappearance of a baby, carried off (if you believe the mother's story) in the jaws of a dingo, or a double- trailer truck driven at 40 mph into a crowd- ed bar — acquire in the popular mind an in- sidious significance, as would a midnight murder at Stonehenge. In this culturally diverse (some would say confused) country, Ayers Rock is everthing from a marketing device (`Build your savings upon the rock', declares the United Permanent Building Society) to a place connected to the most subtle aboriginal myths, some so secret that they may not be told to an outsider, nor their shrines shown, or even named. So what does it mean that Mr Bob Hawke's government has given Ayers Rock (including the Olga Mountains) to its 'tradi- tional' owners, three or four families of the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara tribes, say 200 Aborigines in all?

This announcement came as a surprise, delighting the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjant- Jatjara families, who promptly held a cor- roboree, and dismaying, one gathers from their, silence, the white interests who are opposed to acts of organised benevolence towards Aborigines on the grounds that what has been done for them already (notably putting money in their pockets) has caused enough harm. From the aboriginal perspective, the story begins in the dreamtime, when the mulga-seed men came to the Rock to visit vengeance on the wallabies and carpet snakes camped there, who had refused their invitation to a ceremony in the distant Peterman ranges. In the manner of the television chroniclers of Irish history, we shall now skip to 1873, When deputy surveyor-general William Gosse became the first European to visit the Rock. He adeptly named it after Sir Henry Ayers, then Premier of South Australia, and so Gosse's boss. Gosse came through on the rails to beat the favourite, Ernest Giles, who had seen the Rock almost a year earlier, but whose expedition had foundered in the blue, gluey mud of Lake Amadeus (like all central Australian 'lakes', a salt pan).

Giles got to name the Olgas, a set of stone domes a few miles away on the strength of his mud-bound sighting, and \v. hen you consider the 'circumstances, his inspiration was almost fantastically bizarre: the Grand Duchess Olga Constantinova of Russia, wife of King George I of the Hellenes. I have not managed to discover the Duchess's comments on learning that

her name had been commemorated in stone in the middle of an antipodean desert, but had she reflected for a moment she would have foreseen that the formation, having 500 million years on the clock already, was likely to outlast the crowns of Russia and Greece, though she would hardly have ex- pected the contest to be so unequal.

When Giles finally reached the Olgas in September 1783, he found them cir- cumscribed by the camel and dray tracks of the dreaded Gosse. The moral might make an explorer's motto: when you see something, name it. Neither Gosse nor Giles nor any other European was much in- terested in what the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara aborigines thought about these natural monuments. Oddly enough, they concurred with the Aborigines' view of their own identity as organically related to the vegetation, animals and land. That the Aborigines might 'own' Ayers Rock would have occurred to Gosse or Giles only in the way that you might say the wallabies or lizards own it. Had they been able to ac- quire the language and the way of thinking necessary to an investigation of these ques- tions with the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjant- jatjara, they might have been shown the Dome of the Dying Kangaroo Man, the Valley of the Mice Women, and the Pillar of the Lizard Woman. They would certain- ly have been told that the Olgas already had a name, thank you, Katatjuta ('The Place of Many Heads') and that far from being a memorial to Sir Henry, the Rock was Uluru ('Giant Pebble'), a place of great mystical significance.

Mr Hawke used the word Uluru. He has in this one act earned praise and perhaps even respect from Aborigines and — more to the political point — the white Australians who speak for them. Many of those who support the land rights claims of Aborigines also oppose the mining and ex- port of Australian uranium — between ac- tivists in either cause there is, I would say, 95 per cent agreement on these questions.

• Mr Hawke revealed himself as the patron saint of Uluru less than one week after he fought like the devil to allow Australia to develop another site in the Australian desert, Roxby Downs, into the world's big- gest uranium mine. To the left of his party, Mr Hawke presents a moving target: he clobbers them one day and cuddles up to them the next. But land rights for Aborigines has become a cause with sup- port well beyond the aboriginal movement and the Left. True, the issue has American- Indian and Eskimo overtones and, true, its support among whites is greatest among those who have least contact with Aborigines. Whatever its origins, many Australians have come to subscribe to the idea that the Aborigines were wronged when they were dispossessed of their land, and deserve some form of reparation. This view implies that the possession of land first by the British Crown, then by large numbers of hardworking settlers from the Old World, was in some way and degree im- moral.

Once guilt has entered the white breast, it will be fed by the evidence of how Aborigines live today. The most immediate- ly evident cause of their disease and squalor is alcohol. Recently, in Normanton, an out- back town in North Queensland, 1 saw a sort of black theatre of the absurd: aboriginal men and women fighting and staggering about before 11 a.m., children steering their pickled elders around like seeing-eye dogs, an old man refused service at one pub endeavouring to reach another, stopping at a bench to rest and, as he crouched to sit, falling forward on his head.

A 'flagon' (a very large bottle of port) costs eight dollars, and the Aborigines I saw seemed to come equipped with 20-dollar bills with which to buy them.

An effort is being made, with some suc- cess, to break the cycle of booze. Rut one

wonders whether the source of the malaise is not just what aborigines lost, land and the animism identified with it, but what they failed to acquire, the force that drives western (and for that matter, Chinese and Japanese) man: the desire for esteem, large- ly defined in material terms. An Aborigine is the closest thing on earth to a natural socialist. He is doggedly unwilling to 'get on'.

There are really only two responses to this for white Australians; Aborigines must be made to change, or they must be left to themselves. The first response is out of style now, condemned by the label 'paternalist'. (It is not, however, in disuse. In Norman- ton I heard a severe woman from the Bush nursing service admonish an aboriginal man on his return, with a prodigious number of pills, from a course of medical treatment in the city: 'You lucky man, see. Other man fall down dead. You stay off that drink, see.') Leaving the Aborigines to themselves has a voguish label — 'autonomy' — but it prevails less because white Australians real- ly believe in it than because they cannot think of anything that would be better.

Aborigines will have more opportunities to profit from tourism at the Rock, now that they have won title to it. They already sell crafts, they conduct 'food tours' into the surrounding scrub, on which you may get to eat honey ants, witchetty grubs and (if you are particularly lucky) lizards. The ranger for the Uluru National Park, Derek Roff, a pleasant Yorkshireman who came here via Kenya, feels optimistic that the whole thing will work. But the white man has been a cautious donor.

The Aborigines have got the Rock on condition that they lease it back to the Australian government. White Australia would soon react should the Aborigines use the most basic prerogative of ownership, and erect `no trespassing' signs.

For in spite of the new sympathy of European man in Australia for the world of Putta, the marsupial pouch, Bularri, the fertility cave and Loonba the home of the kingfisher, there now dreams happily among them at Uluru the ghost spirit of Sir Henry Ayers.