Several years ago, I had the extraordinary honor of spending a week with an Australian Aboriginal family group on their land title in the Great Sandy Desert of western Australia, learning as a participant observer in one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies on the planet. This week was the culmination of a seminar about indigenous Australia taught by two Stanford professors who had been instrumental in fighting in court for the Martu – an Aboriginal cultural group – to get their land legally restored to them. The relationship between the professors and the Martu made it possible for 14 students not only to visit the land title but also to stay there for a week and learn from the Martu in traditional ways.
What struck me the most was the incredibly deep connection the Martu have to the land on which they live. Every aspect of life is governed by this land: food and drink; spiritual beliefs; sleeping arrangements; songs; stories; dances; play; interpersonal relationships; coming-of-age ceremonies; death rites. This vast interconnectedness within the culture and to the land gave rise to a staggering sense of time-depth as I learned more and more about these peoples’ lives.
"These people have lived on this land in this way for tens of thousands of years. Doug [one of the professors] was saying too that that vast history is reflected in Dreamtime [spiritual] stories: for example, there are stories that have been handed down through the generations about giant carnivorous kangaroos, and those kangaroos did used to live in Australia – 30,000 years ago."
This is an example of a piece of information about the landscape as it was 30,000 years ago, now reflected in a spiritual creation story – pretty amazing! Nancy, the elder who held the land on which we were staying, called this kind of information “old memory.” As the holder, her responsibility is to
Picture to Left: Lizard (parnajalpa/sand goanna) in the foreground; desert turkey (kipara) in the background (feathers all over the ground and the carcass spread over a spinifex plant just to the right of the shovel)
keep track of this sort of knowledge that catalogues the stories about the land, its features, its inhabitants, and the changes it undergoes through time. This information was presented both to the next generation of Martu children and to the Stanford students alike through Dreamtime stories, dances, and songs, just as it had been taught to the current group of elders. Even though today’s Martu children straddle their parents’ world and the encroaching white world, they still grow up with the same cultural underpinnings and the same remarkable connection to the land as their parents and grandparents have.
"The kids grow up in such a different way [than most children I know] – a month in Parnngurr [the outstation] for every week out at Kurta-Kurta [the field camp], pulling water from a soak via a windmill and sleeping under the most spectacular sky I’ve ever seen, setting fires in extremely flammable material and eating lizard and camel and kangaroo that they’d caught earlier that day."
The children also learn about the hunting and gathering traditions that play a major role in the Martu lifestyle. Children learn by observing their elders and at a young age are capable of pulling witchetty grubs from trees; tracking lizard, kangaroo, and desert turkey; and identifying and collecting roots and tubers. Even at a young age, a child is expected to bring in the majority of his or her own calories. While a small child isn’t going to be going out hunting with a gun, to successfully bring in that much food requires enormous attention to detail. This attention to detail is a learned skill: children not only follow along during hunting and gathering expeditions led by adults but also play traditional games that encourage close observation. They certainly have a leg up because this skill set is so highly prized (and necessary!) in their culture, but the skill is developed and sharpened throughout childhood and on into adulthood.
"After digging for ganjimarra [tubers] in a dry riverbed (you find the plant and then excavate the root, straight down, until the whole thing is exposed and you can pull it out without breaking it) we got distracted at a white tree that was full of lungki [witchetty grubs] – Brianna and Alicia [Martu girls aged about 10 years] were up the tree armed with axes before I knew what was going on, and after only maybe 20 minute there was a ziplock bag full of squirmy gooey grubs."
Picture to Left: Children pulling witchetty grubs (lungki) out of a hole in a tree using a twig. The kids made it look easy, but the grandmas laughed while the Stanford students tried (and failed) to hook the grubs with the end of the stick and pull them out.
Like most Aboriginal groups, the Martu relate spatially to the world in an absolute fashion rather than in a relative fashion. This means that there are literally no words in their language for right or left, or front or back, for example. Instead they use directions – north, south, east, west – acknowledging their position within the landscape as a whole and using unmoving reference points rather than relying on a single individual’s own perception of his or her place in the landscape. So when asked where someone wants to lay the fire, for example, the response isn’t “over to the left of the trucks” but rather “to the south of the trucks” – and that is equally clear to everyone, regardless of where they’re standing in relation to the trucks.
This way of relating to the world isn’t limited to the adults. From a very young age, children hone their own skills as expert navigators. While this is easier for these children because it’s an integral part of their culture, it’s not in-born. It’s a learned skill, just like tracking and collecting food. I once saw a mother ask her son to point to where his grandma lived. We were out in the middle of the desert and I couldn’t have pointed to where we’d parked our truck a few hours back, let alone where our base camp was, but the child pointed without hesitation in a particular direction. His mother then adjusted his pointing by a few degrees – that precise! – and said, “That’s where your grandma lives.”
It can be tempting to paint indigenous Australians as nature-lovers, living in perfect harmony with each other and never disrupting the world around them. This can be pretty far from the truth, especially when their culture comes into contact (and conflict) with white culture. But even when on their own land title where they’re most comfortable, the Martu certainly have a major impact on the landscape: they use extensive fire management to promote a diversity of food sources, make it easier to track game, and keep plant reproduction at a steady and predictable rate. If they were to leave the landscape alone and just take what they could find without the creating a burn mosaic, they would have a vastly harder time finding enough to eat and would have to move base camp locations much more frequently. So while the Martu do move lightly on the earth (particularly in comparison to what I’m used to as an American), they also manipulate the landscape to suit their own needs, and have been doing so for long enough that the landscape now depends upon their presence.
With that said, though, spending that week with the Martu was an remarkable lesson in living simply and turning to the land as an unendingly generous source of life, if only you know how and where to look. So while it was spectacular fun to hunt and swim and hear stories and eat weird things in the desert, the real take-home message was about deep observation, true gratitude, and the value of paying very close attention to the world around you.
-Tara Laidlaw
Also, in case anyone is interested, the two professors who led the trip have websites with information about their research:
Doug Bird: http://www.stanford.edu/~dwbird/DWBIRD/main.html
Rebecca Bliege Bird: http://www.stanford.edu/~rbird/RBIRD/main.html
Rebecca has brief and (relatively) understandable summaries of the different research projects she and Doug are working on with the Martu; both have links to their publications, many of which are about the Martu and some of which are available as pdfs. These tend to be pretty dense but if anyone is really into it they might be worth a look.
Further reading & viewing:
The Mardu Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia’s Desert, Robert Tonkinson, 1986.
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines, Fred R. Myers, 1978.
Rabbit Proof Fence, 2002.
10 Canoes, 2006.
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