We flew into Broome from Melbourne. 5000 kilometers that took four and a half hours. It would take me many years to walk. In fact I'd die trying. I'd have to walk through what the Europeans named the 'Dead Heart' of Australia. Red and orange deserts that would slow cook your innards. It was nice to watch from above with a cold one in hand reflecting those thoughts. I frowned a bit. Maybe I deserved to walk through the dead heart, maybe it's what I need.
I was with an English mate. We had worked together in the 90's. Our lives had moved on through the universe but our humour had stayed the same and we both remembered how to crack a joke and laughter rode along.
I had been reading a lot about the indigenous Australians. There's a general swing of ideas to acknowledgment that the peoples were living a much more intricate existence than the colonists gave them credit for and for what we had been taught in school. I wanted to put my own changed opinion to a test by looking at the people. There are big Aborigine communities throughout Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Those people have hung on, unlike the southern states of Victoria and Tasmania whom could not withstand the slaughter.
We arrived at a good hotel, a Dutch girl made us feel at home. Broome was a pearling town, it still is but tourists are as important as pearls. Me and my mate went straight to a bar that overlooked the gas blue sea. We were both that type, not adventurers but people watches, joke tellers and keen to meet people ready for easy humour. We were thrown from our story line early, an Aboriginal guy made to us and held up a boab nut decorated with rough patterns. The whites of his eyes were yellow. He didn't look at us as he held the object at us. The nut wasn't beautiful, childlike whirls and what was perhaps a starry night looked at us from the nuts brown surface. My eyes traveled from nut to man.
He was worn, part of the bridge of his nose was indented, there were nicks and cuts that had healed all over his face, he smelt but not of the decay of the truly unkempt. Just stale sweat.
We were playing crib. When he understood we wouldn't buy the decorated boab nut he turned his attention to the cards.
"I'll show ya a trick." He wasn't drunk. "Here, Gimme the cards." My mate was looking away, this was uncomfortable for him but I had my recent reading and a new attitude. I tried to lock eyes without success, I asked:
"Okay, what's the trick?" It became obvious after much shuffling and turning and seeming trying to remember that there was no trick. Eventually he just sat with us at the small table with the cards in his gnarled hands. We were being watched by the management but there was no trouble. We just all sat in silence for many heart beats.
Above us twenty, more, thirty kite hawks were catching hot drafts and spiraling up and up. The raptor is successful off the roads, the bitumen highways are full of the dead. Like great black whips cracking across the land, when the whip snaps you better not be on the road, but there's always some little creature caught out. Sometimes big creatures, red kangaroos stand seven foot high. Wedge tail eagles have nine foot wingspans and they too are dead to the cracking whip that is a road. The kite hawks like the whip, as they do the fires, riding just ahead of the flames and road trains to gobble up the dead and wounded.
"What are they?" I ask and the Aboriginal guy looks up, my mate is looking at his smart phone, he is possibly catching pokemon's, more real to the westerner than Dreamtime. The heavy browed guy next to us whispers:
"Kite hawks." He looks at them wheel and turn, they weren't hunting, they seemed to be having fun. Excess makes you able to that, or be artistic.
"What are they doing?"
"Telling their story." I looked back at him and he placed four tens in front of me. I guessed that was the trick.
"What other stories are there?" He shrugs, says find the Boab Prison Tree, it's near Derby. Then brightens saying:
"Have a bit of beer for me trick?" There wasn't a spare glass so I drained mine in one gulp and poured from the schooner. It was frothy and would only be a mouthful when it settled, I said as much but he walked off happy, contented not so much for the beer itself, but for getting something, as if he had found a great fat oyster on a shoreline when expecting none. I said to my mate:
"He is gathering, we aren't even people to him but an element of landscape."
"Huh?"
"Don't worry, I'm not sure what I mean."
We walked around Broome, the red soil and the particular blue of the sea is dream like. We walked from bar to bar, listening to locals, joining in with banter. The day wore on, little groups of Aboriginal people sat in circles in the well kept parks. The women faced away from the men, the sitting circles were arranged according to an old custom they hadn't lost. They were whiling away time I thought, or just being. Preparing boab nuts to sell to tourists. There were signs of them getting drunk, me and my mate were merry with our own drinking. They asked us:
"Boab nut, tells a dreaming, 30 bucks!"
"Nah nah." I say and veer towards the man who has spoken. There was a rustling in the group of ten, a preparation for engagement. The man held my eye and I felt as if I had encroached, a woman said something that sounded like I was challenging them. The first true eye contact I had made unsettled me, It was like I had stepped from behind a curtain onto their stage and wasn't particularly welcome.
"It's good," I say, "but I don't want it." I wasn't being rude I was trying to be polite by talking. I smiled, at last the men disengaged eye contact and shrugged, I stepped away and they went on in their world as I turned back to mine.
We caught a taxi to Cable Beach, it is wide and the tide rises 14 meters. The expanse of sand is corrugated thoroughly, at night when there is a full moon the corrugations present an optical illusion, they look like steps leading to the moon. For now the sun is setting. It is a beautiful place, there are a lot of tourists about. I don't see any Aboriginal people, not even serving in the restaurants. There are no boab nuts for sale. Me and my mate watch the sun settle, around us the worlds of people not from here do too. We drink and eat and watch camels sail across the beach, long trains like explorers of old. In fact these camels are the descendents of the ones the Afghans brought to open up the dead heart. There's millions wild in the desert, these ones have it good though. In the morning we are taking off to Darwin, in a Camper we fluked for no cost.
"We'll stop at the Prison Tree on our way." Says I, wondering if I can see any story.
