Requiem with Yellow Butterflies by James Halford

Author:James Halford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UWA Publishing
Published: 2019-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

Uluru: How to Travel Without Seeing

While my library contains the works of travel writers, I have mostly searched for those who speak about their own place in the world.1

– Alexis Wright

I’ve spent my life gazing east. The Americas have obsessed me since my teens: rock-and-roll and the Beat writers, Latin American fiction and poetry. An east coast Australian, and a city boy through and through, it never occurred to me to see my country’s desert heart until my wife R was invited to Alice Springs in September 2014, the only Mexican to give a paper at the Ecological Society of Australia’s annual conference that year.

Flying home to the coast, I felt less confident in my use of the possessive pronoun. That smouldering, red-black plain didn’t feel like my country. The terrain was as dry and rough as a scab, with the same scorched palette of colours as the dot paintings I’d seen at the Araluen Arts Centre. I could see spirals and swirls hovering over the cracked red earth. Beside me, R was watching Charlie’s Country, Rolf de Heer’s harrowing film about Indigenous Australians’ experience of the Northern Territory Intervention. In 2007, the Intervention, an emergency response to allegations of alcoholism and child sexual abuse in remote communities, suspended the Racial Discrimination Act in order to apply blanket-coverage welfare and alcohol restrictions on Indigenous people in certain parts of the country, regardless of their behaviour as individuals.

Tears rolled down R’s cheeks. ‘Worse than Mexico,’ she said, dabbing her nose with a tissue. While in Alice Springs we’d visited Monty’s bar, a drinking hole fortified like a prison, where the security guard outside had looked her up and down as we approached, taking in her lovely golden skin, before deciding she was white enough, and swinging the gate open.

And then there was the Rock itself, that great, silent, ominous thing, crisscrossed by the gaze of footsore thousands. How could an outsider feel any connection to it? Less than a year earlier, I’d spent a fortnight in Peru with my father, playing the old Latin America hand. The truth was I felt less of a foreigner there.

Two boys built Uluru, playing in the mud after rain. Then, they travelled south to Wiputa, where they speared a wallaroo and cooked it. The wallaroo’s tail broke in the heat of the fire, so the boys threw it away. Today, a long crack can be seen in the hillside where the tail fell. Heading north, one of the boys threw his club at a hare wallaby but missed. A fresh water spring opened where his weapon struck the ground. When the first boy refused to tell where he’d found water, his companion nearly died of thirst. Finally, the boys fought to the death. Their bodies are preserved as boulders on the top of Attila, the flat-topped mountain whitefellas call Mount Conner.2

Uluru’s importance as a landmark has a practical dimension: it’s a sandstone monolith in the desert, marking a well-watered location. But for the Anangu, its

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