The persistence of hope

Arranye teaches Headband Dreaming at Bitter Springs Creek, 1995, 110 x 160 cms Collection of Kare Fraser, NewZealand

Alice Springs artist, author and teacher ROD MOSS, winner in 2011 of the Prime Minister’s award for non fiction, during his more than 40 years in The Centre has shown that black and white can plumb the depths of joy and pain together. This is the first of his nine-part series.

How providential has life in Mparntwe Alice Springs been? I’d never have met the varied professionals, visiting artists, musicians and authors in my cloistered city digs. Alice was a magnet. Nor would I have enjoyed the Arrernte friendships that familiarised me with their country which fed work honouring custodian’s Edward Arranye Johnson’s hope that it kept “a welcome line” open to non-indigenous people. It is a challenge for fellow citizens in distant cities to comprehend the lives of the Arrernte and the unequal distribution of wealth pleading for redress.

John Berger in Portraits: To face history is to face the tragic. Which is why many prefer to look away. To decide to engage oneself with history requires, even when that decision is a desperate one, hope.

By ROD MOSS

Come now. Walk with me in the slumbering hills east of town where lizards flatten themselves on overlapping rocks. I am hungry for country and drink the wild air.

Pebbles impress themselves in my thongs. Prickles penetrate and the gravel pulses heat. Dry heat vacuums the nostrils, brittling their membranes.

Kwaarking crows bully pigeons and wrens. Come when I walk at dawn or in the gloaming when the sun’s great bite has muted, enflaming the rocks. When the ear, the nostril and the eye are not troubled by the fly. These peach-coloured thinking tracks ground my experience. Here, I found my place and pace.

Like the majority of my non-indigenous friends and acquaintances, I came from elsewhere. To an extraordinary degree, Mparntwe/Alice Springs’ population is transitional. Of a population nearing 34 thousand about a fifth identify as First Nations.

Their identity with the country ties them to the region. Not so with the non-indigenous. It’s not usual for those that came for work to stay longer than a few years, but some do, and I am one of them.

I remember chatting with Rosie Kunoth-Monks, September 2014. Though living 260 km at distant Utopia, she was connected to the Whitgate / Irrkerlantye (kitehawk) camp’s families. Like me, she’d come to town to protest CLP Minister for Community Services, Bess Nungarrayi Price’s refusal to reconnect water to Whitegate.

I mentioned to her how she’d influenced my choosing a life in Alice Springs and hence my enduring friendships with the families. From the success of my first book, The Hard Light of Day, and the bush telegraph, she knew about me.

We Meet Here To Talk About Water, 2014, 102 x 170cm.Collection of Adam Knight, Tallangatta

For some years an arrangement between families had town water piped over the hills from Ilpeye Ilpeye camp, bordering town, to Whitegate. This gave some security for washing, cooking and laundering. Weeks earlier the supply was cut during housing developments at Ilpeye Ilpeye.

Despite street protests and national media attention, access to water remained critical. Until water and power, the fundamental prerequisites for building are in place, decent housing won’t occur.

Whitegate falls outside the brief of town camp service provider, Tangentyere Council. Yet it must be noted that if Whitegate residents ask,Tangentjere send a water truck to fill the tank they installed earlier in the century. Rosie knew all this.

I remember as a seven year old my imagination was captured by two movies at the local cinema, Bitter Springs and Jedda, the latter in which Rosie, aged sixteen, was the female lead in a doomed romance with Robert Tudawali.

I remember spending many morning recesses in grade 5 scripting a fiction peopled and set in country I’d seen only in these films. By presenting aboriginal people as fully human, both films were exceptional.

More typical of the era were demeaning images that elevated novelty songs, My Boomerang Won’t Come Back and Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport, high on the charts at home and abroad. There were other things.

(To be continued.)