Chapter 9. Of Rocky Knolls And Claypans; and Knowing When Not To Speak
Simon Tyler and Alex Watts were not familiar with this part of Central Australia and, from the things Sayd Kaseem had told them, presumed the land south of Marshall Bar to be Simpson Desert country of the more classical type.
Yet this is not the case, and were Sayd to have used the words “desert margin” they may have gained a more accurate insight …
No ranks of giant sand ridges stand here above spinifex covered valleys. Instead the sand hills are smaller, irregular in shape and fewer in number. Like the ever present mallee, they occur at random, sometimes in groups, more often by ones and twos.
Also scattered across the region are a dozen or so small rocky hillocks, a few of which have companion sand hills of their own. Some are accompanied by a claypan: clean, flat, circular features that endure despite the blowing desert sand. Yet the wind driving the sand is the wind that sweeps them clean, for wind was the means of their creation. And when rains come their hard-bottomed pans hold water, until the wind returns to reclaim it.
None of these hills are documented. They appear on no maps and, except for satellite images, are absent from any formal repositories of knowledge. Yet the local Aboriginal people know them intimately and for them one holds immense spiritual significance. This one they call “Appoota Mbulkara”.
Its outcropping is smaller than most out there, with a base barely fifty metres by a hundred. Others stand twice the height of the mallee and are visible from afar, yet the summit here scarcely tops the tree line. As a result the hill becomes lost to view from beyond a half-kilometre, its outline blurred by desert heat and the haze of grey-green mallee.
In general these outcrops are all much the same; each part of a buried landform, each a fractured brown-stained quartz reef supporting a knoll of granite gneiss, their unremarkable forms worn to a rough-edged roundness by the relentless weathering. All have hardy shrubs on their coarse sandy flanks, and grasses, briefly, after rain, yet for some reason they remain free of the Simpson Desert’s spinifex and fine red sand.
Appoota Mbulkara, though, is different. Certainly it is clear of spinifex and desert sand, but a long, gently rising northern gradient ending at a vertical rock face sets it apart from the others and gives it a profile that is decidedly wedge shaped.
Yet it’s the quartz reefs that really mark this hill as special, for here there are two. Parallel and five metres between, they stand on the northern slope like the ruins of some ancient porcelain fortress, more alike than twins and whiter than ice.
Both average by width half a metre and both rise taller than a man, though overall they are mostly shoulder high. They terminate near the summit in a pile of white boulders and their lower ends descend into the sand.
Fragments from the reefs litter the hill’s flanks, along with the scattering of dead and struggling shrubs common to them all, yet the ground between the reefs is strangely bare. Eons have gone by since this place was first cleared and cleaned, and eons, too, since the story of its doing became part of the hill’s Dreaming Legend. And to here, from time beyond memory, boys of the tribe have been brought for their initiation into manhood. Yet this is not all.
High on Appoota Mbulkara’s southern rock face is a cave of some three cubic metres volume, a wind-eroded cavity with deep nooks and crannies in its back wall. Only the most senior men of the tribe can access this cave and only they can tread the ground it commands. And the ceremonies the old men conduct out there are secret and unrecorded.
Interestingly, Appoota Mbulkara lacks a companion clay pan, most likely due to the effect its shape has on the wind. It does have a short term water supply, however, and one very much in keeping with its special nature.
About sixty metres north of the hill near a particularly robust thicket of mallee lies a depression in the sand – one of a great many to be found in the desert’s surface and one almost indistinguishable from the rest. Yet the irregularity here is man-made, for beneath it there exists a temporary reservoir.
Rain falling between the quartz reefs soaks into the hill’s coarse sandy soil. On reaching the shallow underlying rock the water migrates slowly downhill, to where it collects at a holding point below the depression. The quantity available depends on rainfall, but a pit dug there a week after a half decent storm can yield six or eight billycans-full per hour. A month later, however, an afternoon’s wait may be required to fill just one.
Soon after that the soakage will be dry again, beyond which the pit will once more gradually fill with sand. After a time the only thing remaining will be the original depression.
Because of its proximity to Appoota Mbulkara the soak is only accessible to initiated men, so it is they rather than the women on whom water carrying duties fall during ceremonies – a duty which naturally goes to the more junior among them…
Jack Cadney was certainly familiar with the place. His father’s group had lived at Marshall Bar a number of times during his childhood, and his first visit there was to the women’s area with his mother at age three – one of several littlies in Twofoot’s party at the time.
A more significant trip came when he was fifteen. A couple of weeks prior there’d been storms through the area, and early one morning the entire clan had suddenly gathered up and set out walking. South into the desert they’d gone, following storm-tracks through the endless fields of newly greened spinifex and fresh-blooming, honey-sweet mallee.
Cadney and two of his male cousins were suspicious, however. Going south after rain was not unusual, as for a time there’d be bush tucker and water aplenty. But moves like this were usually talked about for days, especially amongst the children. It meant a change in routine, new sights and experiences and the promise of adventure. Yet not a word had been spoken on the subject and it happened without notice.
Each of the three was aware their time must soon be at hand, as the youngest of them had come of age more than a year back. And each of those three had buried that thought as deeply as possible.
Tribal Business was never rushed, however. The elders planned and organised these matters well in advance, with the ceremonies only eventuating after everything had fallen into place. Where Appoota Mbulkara was concerned some rain was required to activate the water supply.
For most of the day the group wandered southward, catching lizards and collecting and eating bush tucker as they went. Late in the afternoon they came on some people camped at the edge of a handy sized patch of spinifex-free sand. They were the women and children from Arkarnina Soak on the Plenty River, all of whom had trekked across from there the day before.
The sand patch was the women’s dancing area, where the women played their part in the ceremonies. It was situated some four hundred metres north of Appoota Mbulkara, though nothing of the hill could be seen from there. Even so, matters were always arranged to have them facing in the opposite direction.
At that point Twofoot’s party divided; the women and children remained there and Cadney and his cousins were shepherded on. Closer to the hill they met up with the Arkarnina men; they were waiting to one side of it with two more teenage initiates. And it was then, as Jack Cadney glimpsed the white quartz reefs for the first time, that Twofoot finally confirmed his son’s worst fears.
“Here you are going to be man-made,” he commanded, “and to be a man you must be strong. I don’t want to hear you cry out when they cut you.”
And much much later, as the dancing and ceremonies proceeded, when he was numb and at the point of collapse from days of total sleep deprivation, the young Jack Cadney had screamed his throat ragged from the searing pain.
Yet his father never heard it. At the critical moment the men had pinned the naked boy to the ground and shouted as loudly as they could. And the shouting had continued without letup until the worst of it was over, until the bleeding had been staunched with clean cold ash and the screaming had subsided to gulping, agonised sobs.
Strangely, Cadney??
?s memory of that painful event no longer carried any feeling. Yet ever since that time the faintest whiff of desert mallee in bloom would have his guts knotting-up with the dread and sick apprehension he’d felt that day, as the three were marched out to their initiation.