Encounters on the Ngintaka Songline
Travelling in Mythic Landscapes
We were on the Gunbarrel Highway returning to Fregon after a trip to Nyapari. I was high in a way that often happens from very full days, discussing Tjukurpa, freedom and the struggle for cultural maintenance around the campfire at night and sleeping under the starlit outback sky in a swag that is one of the most comforting beds I have ever slept in. We were travelling in convoy of two troopies, mine in second place some distance behind, allowing the dust to drift away from the road before we encounted it. Murray, John and various family along for the ride were travelling in front, or perhaps John was with me, I don't recall.
Up ahead was a Landcruiser stopped by the side of the road. We stopped and checked to see if we could help. It was a day's walk in either direction to the nearest community. Thinking, we have one of the most adept bush mechanics with us, perhaps there is something we could do.
"Have a look underneath, maybe there is something wrong with the driveshaft. Perhaps they can drive temporarily on the front wheels."
Hey! Open the bonnet. We peered in. Where one would normally expect to see the engine, there was a vacant space."
It was then we noticed the chain connected to the front of the vehicle. Clearly, the vehicle had been towed to this place, then left, for whatever reason.
The occupants were a couple of young women and a pile of kids plus some bags of groceries suggesting that they had been to the store recently. They didn't want to talk. After a while, a young man walked in from the north. We saw him coming for about 20 minutes before he arrived. My Pitjantjatjara wasn't good enough to follow the conversation that ensued.
Murray said, "Come on. We'll go." And that was that.
Ngintaka Hunt
We took up our positions and continued towards Watinuma. Up ahead, I watched as Murray's vehicle turned off the road making a big loop through the tall grass to the left of the road. As we drew closer we were signalled to stop. We got out of the vehicle to investigate. A full grown ngintaka (perente lizard)standing on his back legs peering over the long grass was pointed out to us. He had been crossing the road as the first vehicle approached. I took a minute to locate him, standing there still as a stump. No rifle at hand, Murray picked up an hatchet and a jack handle and got in position. The hatchet flew slightly to the right of the ngintaka, but now with his eye in, crack... the jack handle caught him right on top of the head. A short scuffle ensued and it was over.
We lay the ngintaka out on the road, and inspected him, a mature male I was told. Murray sent one of us to get a branch from a small bush nearby from which he fashioned two short pegs with sharp points. "This is how you do it," he said and used the back of the hatchet to break the legs and fasten them back on top of the body using the two pins through ankles and wrists. The tail then takes its position coiled around to pass under the arch made by the pinned legs. Whether it is done because the animal might recover and deliver a venomous bite or whether there is deeper law I do not know. From experience, I suspect both.
We stock up on bread and tea at Watinuma Roadhouse, then proceeded to the gravelly creek bed. Murray demonstrateds how to eviscerate the ngintaka and then cooks it in an earth oven we make there on the spot. I filmed the process which is included in Two Brothers Walking.
In the Flow
It was hard work travelling on the APY Lands. As the youngest adult male and the least skilled culturally, a fair share of the menial camp tasks fell my way and it was often difficult juggling roles of driver, cameraman, caterer, student etc. But the experience was out of this world. I was struck by the correlation between the ngintaka we hunted that day having an abscess on one of his feet, and the dreaming ancestor Wati Ngintaka, surreptitiously spearing himself in the foot so as to be excused from the hunt, giving opportunity to seize the special grindstone which produced seed cakes superior to all others.
That evening, I asked Murray about the people we found stranded on the road. He said, "No, don't worry, they will be right. Their family will help them." This gave me as renewed sense of both the resourcefulness of Anangu, the connection with kin far beyond anything that I have experienced and a reminder that pirinpa's (white fella's) reflex to help often does not take account of subtleties, and how good intentions can inadvertantly become interference, because in our eagerness to assist it is too easy to impose our "solutions" assuming that western culture is the envy of all others. For a fuller discussion, Check Out: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/twobrotherswalking for our documentary on keeping Tjukurpa alive.
