One evening I observed a group of young half-caste Aborigines in their early twenties putting petrol into cans, then inhaling it as they walked downtown. They became visibly intoxicated from the fumes. Petrol is a mixture of hydrocarbons and chemicals. I knew they were potentially destructive to bone marrow, liver, kidneys, adrenal glands, the spinal cord, and the entire central nervous system. But like everyone else on the plaza that night, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t say anything. I made no attempt to stop their stupid play. Later, I learned that one of those I had witnessed had died of lead toxicity and respiratory failure. I felt the loss as deeply as I would have felt burying a longtime friend. I went to the morgue and viewed the tragic remains. As someone who was spending my life trying to prevent illness, it seemed that the loss of culture and loss of personal purpose must have been contributing factors in the gambling with death. What bothered me most was that I had watched and didn’t raise a finger to stop them. I questioned my new Aussie friend, Geoff. He was the owner of a large automobile dealership, my age, unmarried, and very attractive—the Robert Redford of Australia. We had been on several dates, so at one candlelit dinner following the symphony, I asked him if the citizens were aware of what was taking place. Wasn’t anyone trying to help do something about it?
He said, “Yes, it is sad. But nothing can be done. You don’t understand the Abos. They are primitive, wild, bush people. We have offered to educate them. Missionaries have spent years trying to convert them. In the past they were cannibals. Now they still do not want to turn loose of their customs and old beliefs. Most prefer the hardship of the desert. The Outback is hard country, but these are the world’s hardest people. Those who do straddle the two cultures are rarely successful. It is true they are a dying race. Their population is declining by their own free will. They are hopelessly illiterate people with no ambition or drive for success. After two hundred years they still don’t fit in. What’s more, they don’t try. In business they are unreliable and undependable—act like they can’t tell time. Believe me, there is nothing you can do to inspire them.”
A few days went by, but never without my thinking of the dead young man. I began to discuss my concern with a woman in the health-care profession who, like myself, had a special project under way. Her work involved dealing with the elderly Aboriginal natives. She was documenting wild plants, herbs, and flowers that might scientifically be found to help prevent or treat illness. The authorities on that sort of knowledge were the bush people. Their track record for longevity and low incidence of degenerative disease spoke for itself. She confirmed that little headway had been made in any true integration of the races but was willing to help me if I wanted to try and see what difference, if any, one more person could make.
We invited twenty-two young half-breed Aborigines to a meeting. She introduced me. That evening I talked about the free enterprise system of government and discussed an organization called Junior Achievement for underprivileged inner-city youth. The goal was to find a product the group could make. I agreed to teach them how to purchase raw material, organize a workforce, make the item, market it, and get established in the business and banking community. They were interested.
At the next meeting we talked about possible projects. My grandparents lived in Iowa during my youth. I remembered Grandma pushing up the window, taking out a little adjustable screen, stretching it to the width of the window as it rested on the sill, then pulling the pane back down. It gave about a foot of screened space. The house I was living in, typical of most older suburban houses in Australia, had no screens. Air conditioning was not common in residences, so the neighbors merely lifted their windows and let the winged creatures fly in and out. There were no mosquitoes, but we did have a daily battle with flying cockroaches. I went to bed alone but often awakened to find my pillow shared by several two-inch, black, hard-shelled insects. I felt the screen would be a shield against their encroachment.
The group agreed screens were a good item to launch the business. I knew a specific couple in the United States to contact for help. He was a design engineer at a large corporation, and she was an artist. If I could explain what I needed in a letter, I knew they could create a blueprint. It arrived two weeks later. My dear elderly Aunt Nola back in Iowa offered to lend financial support to buy the initial supplies and get us rolling. We required a place to work. Garages are rare, but carports are plentiful, so we acquired one and worked in the open air.
Each young Aborigine seemed to slip naturally into their most talented position. We had a bookkeeper, someone to shop for supplies, another who took pride in perfect calculations of our running inventory. We had specialists on each segment of production, even several natural-born sales representatives. I stood back and observed the company structure forming. It was apparent that, without my input on how to do it, they mutually agreed that the person who liked to do the cleaning up, the janitoral duties, was as valuable to the overall success of the project as the people who made the final sale. Our approach was to offer the screens free for a few days on a trial basis. When we returned, if the screens had been satisfactory, the party paid us. We usually got an order for the rest of the windows on the property. I also taught them the good old American concept of asking for referrals.
Time slipped by. My days were spent working, writing training material, traveling, teaching, and lecturing. Most evenings were spent enjoying the company of the young black people. The original group remained intact. Their bank account grew steadily, and we established trust funds for each one.
On a weekend date with Geoff, I explained our project and my desire to help the young people become financially independent. Maybe they wouldn’t be hired to work for companies, but they couldn’t be stopped from buying one if they accumulated enough wealth. I suppose I was boasting a little about my input into their budding sense of self-worth. Geoff said, “Goodonyou, Yank.” But the next time we met he brought along some history books. Sitting on his patio overlooking the world’s most beautiful harbor, I spent one Saturday afternoon reading.
History quoted Rev. George King in the Australian Sunday Times, on December 16, 1923, as saying, “The Aborigines of Australia constitute, no doubt, a low type in the scale of humanity. They possess no reliable traditional history of themselves, their doings, or origin; nor, if swept from the earth at the present time, would they leave behind them a single work of art as a memorial of their existence as a people; but they appear to have roamed over the vast plains of Australia at a very early period of the world’s history.”
There was another more current quote from John Burless regarding the attitude of white Australia: “I’ll give you something, but you haven’t anything that I would want.”
Excerpts from ethnology and anthropology of the Fourteenth Congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science said:
The sense of smell is undeveloped.
Memory is only slightly developed.
Children are without any great willpower.
They are inclined to be untruthful and cowardly.
They do not suffer pain as acutely as do the higher races.
Next came the history books that say an Australian Aboriginal boy becomes a man by having his penis split from scrotum to meatus by a dull stone knife, without anesthetic, without expression of pain. Adulthood is obtained while having a front tooth beaten from one’s head by a holy man wielding a rock, it is having one’s foreskin served as dinner to male relatives, and being sent into the desert alone, terrified and bleeding, to prove one can survive. History also says they were cannibals and that the women sometimes ate their own babies, relishing the most tender parts. One story in the book tells of two brothers: The younger one stabbed his older brother in a dispute over a woman. After amputating his own gangrened leg, the older brother blinded the younger one, and they lived happily ever after. One walked along on a kangaroo prosthesis, leading the other at the end of a long pole. The informatio
n was gruesome, but the most impossible to comprehend was a government information pamphlet about the primitive surgery that states the Aborigines fortunately have a less-than-human threshold of pain.
My project companions were not savages. If anything they were comparable to the disadvantaged youth at home. They lived in isolated sections of the community; over half the families were on the dole. It appeared to me they had settled for a life of secondhand Levis, a tin of hot beer, and one individual every few years who made it big.
The following Monday, back with the screen-making project, I realized I was witnessing genuine noncompetitive support, alien to my business world. It was truly refreshing.
I asked the young employees about their heritage. They told me tribal significance had been lost long ago. A few remembered grandparents telling about life when the Aboriginal race alone inhabited the continent. Then there were tribes of saltwater people, and Emu people, among others; but quite truthfully, they did not want to be reminded of their dark skin and the difference it represented. They hoped to marry someone of lighter color and eventually for their children to blend in.
Our company was by all standards very successful, so I was not surprised one day when I received a phone call inviting me to a meeting that was being held by a tribe of Aborigines across the continent. The call implied it was not just a meeting, it was my meeting. “Please make arrangements to attend,” the native voice requested.
I went shopping for new clothes, purchased a round-trip flight, and made hotel reservations. I told the people I was working with that I would be gone for a while and explained the unique summons. I shared my excitement with Geoff, my landlady, and in a letter to my daughter. It was an honor that people so far away had heard of our project and wanted to express their appreciation.
“Transportation from the hotel to the meeting will be provided,” I was told. They were to pick me up at noon. Obviously that meant it was an award luncheon. I wondered what sort of menu would be served.
Well, Ooota had been there promptly at twelve o’clock, but the question of what Aborigines serve for food still remained unanswered.
6
THE BANQUET
THE INCREDIBLE healing oil mixture, made by heating leaves and removing the oil residue, was working—my feet finally felt relieved enough that courage to stand once again entered my thoughts. Off to my right was a group of women who seemed to have an assembly-line project under way. They were gathering large leaves; while one woman poked into the brush and dead trees with a long digging stick, another removed a handful of something and put it on the leaf. Then a second leaf topped the contents and was folded so the final package was given to a runner who in turn took it to the fire and buried it in the coals. I was curious. This was our first meal together, the menu I had wondered about for weeks. I hobbled over for a closer view and could not believe my eyes. The scooped hand held a large, white, crawling worm.
I took another deep sigh. I had lost track of the number of times today I had been left speechless. One thing was for certain. I knew I would never be so hungry I would eat a worm! At that moment, however, I was learning a lesson. Never say “never.” To this day it is a word I have tried to eliminate from my vocabulary. I have learned there are things I prefer, and others I avoid, but the word never leaves no room for unseen situations, and never covers a long, long time.
Evenings were a real joy with the tribal people. They told stories, sang, danced, played games, had heart-to-heart chats. This was a real time of sharing. There was always some activity while we waited for the food to be prepared. They did a lot of massaging and rubbing of each other’s shoulders, backs, even their scalps. I saw them manipulating necks and spines. Later in the journey we exchanged techniques—I taught them the American method of adjusting the back and other joints; they taught me theirs.
That first day, I did not see any cups, plates, or serving bowls unpacked. I had guessed correctly. This was to remain an informal atmosphere with all meals eaten in picnic style. It wasn’t long before the folded-leaf casseroles were removed from the charcoals. Mine was handled with the devotion of a special-duty nurse. I watched everyone open theirs, and eat the contents with their fingers. My hand-held banquet was warm but there was no movement, so I became brave enough to look inside. The grub worm had disappeared. At least it didn’t look like a worm any longer. It was now a brown, crumbled bed, resembling roasted peanuts or pork rind. I thought to myself, “I think I can handle this.” I did, and it tasted good! I did not know that cooking, certainly cooking things beyond recognition, was being done for me and was not a common practice.
That night it was explained to me that my work with the urban-dwelling Aborigines had been reported. Even though these young adults were not full-blooded natives and did not belong to this tribe, my work was a display of someone who truly seemed to care. The summons came because it appeared to them I was crying for help. I was found to have pure intent. The problem was that, as they saw it, I did not understand the Aboriginal culture, and certainly not the code of this tribe. The ceremonies performed earlier in the day were tests. I was found acceptable and worthy of learning the knowledge of the true relationship of humans to the world we live in, the world beyond, the dimension from which we came, and the dimension where we shall all return. I was going to be exposed to the understanding of my own beingness.
As I sat, my soothed feet now encased in their precious and limited supply of leaves, Ooota explained what a tremendous undertaking it was for these desert nomads to walk with me. I was being allowed to share their life. Never before had they associated with a white person or even considered any kind of relationship with one. In fact, they had avoided it for all time. According to them, every other tribe in Australia had submitted to the rule of the white government. They were the last of the holdouts. They usually traveled in small families of six to ten people but had come together for this event.
Ooota said something to the group, and each person said something to me. They were telling me their names. The words were very difficult for me, but luckily their names meant something. Names are not used in the same way that we would use “Debbie” or “Cody” in the United States, so I could relate each person to the meaning of the name, instead of trying to pronounce the word itself. Each child is named at birth, but it is understood that as a person develops, the birth name will be outgrown, and the individuals will select for themselves a more appropriate greeting. Hopefully, one’s name will change several times in a lifetime as wisdom, creativity, and purpose also become more clearly defined with time. Our group contained Story Teller, Tool Maker, Secret Keeper, Sewing Master, and Big Music, among many others.
At last Ooota pointed to me and spoke to each person, pronouncing the same word repeatedly. I thought they were trying to say my first name but then decided they were instead going to call me by my last name. It wasn’t either. The word they used that night, and the name I continued to carry for the journey, was Mutant. I did not understand why Ooota, who was spokesperson for both languages, was teaching them to say such a strange term. Mutant, to me, meant some significant change in basic structure, resulting in a form of mutation and no longer like the original. But actually it didn’t really matter, for at that point, my whole day, my whole life was in total confusion.
Ooota said in some Aboriginal nations they only used about eight names total—more like a numbering system. Everyone of the same generation and same sex were considered the same relation, so everyone had several mothers, fathers, brothers, etc.
As darkness approached, I asked about the acceptable method of relieving oneself. Then I wished I had paid closer attention to my daughter’s cat, Zuke, because our bathroom facilities consisted of walking out into the desert, digging a hole in the sand, squatting, and covering the contents with more sand. I was cautioned to watch for snakes. They become most active after the hottest portion of the day is over, but before the cool of night. I had visions of wicked eyes and poisonous tongues
in the sand being awakened by my action. When I traveled through Europe I had complained about the dreadful toilet paper. For South America I had packed my own. Here the absence of paper was the least of my concerns.
When I returned to the group from my desert venture, we shared in a communal bag of Aboriginal stone tea. It was made by dropping hot rocks into a container of precious water. The container had originally served as bladder for some animal. Wild herbs were added to the heated water and left to steep toward perfection. We passed the unique vessel around the group back and forth. It tasted wonderful!
The tribal stone tea, I found, was saved for special circumstances, such as my novice completion of the first day’s walk. They realized the difficulty I would experience without shoes, shade, or transportation. The herbs added to the water to form the tea were not intended to add variety to the menu, nor were they subtle medication or nourishment. They were a celebration, a way of recognizing the group accomplishment. I did not give up, demand to be returned to the city, nor did I cry out. Their Aboriginal spirit was being received, they felt, by me.