I set my swag up on Murrays verandah. Actually I set up a little office there with a collapsable table and a couple of camp chairs. I've brought a lead to connect into his power supply to recharge my camera batteries, run my laptop for data wrangling and added a little gas stove for numerous kuppatees and cooking. I fancy myself as a bit of a cook whether it's the simple corned beef and potatoes we had with tomatoes last night or a pot of my legendary 'Greek Stew'. if we are camping in the bush or on the sand hills or perhaps at Mulga Bore, Witjiiti's homeland that I told you about last time and have waru (firewood, fire) at hand I like to use the camp oven for damper or anything really. Let me know below if you want a copy of my Greek stew recipe. It's as much a method as a recipe and can be used to cook what ever you have on hand.

I usually wake up a couple of times through the night when camping. If you don't you miss a lot, maybe a donkey, or what sounds like a donkey stampede, dingoes coming in looking for any meat scraps and bones and stuff like that. Sometimes it gets pretty busy when the humans are sleeping. It also means you can stoke the fire up a bit through cold night's, though I don't usually bother because my swag has a canopy zipped on. It's like a cocoon and one of the warmest beds I've ever slept in. One time, I gotta laugh, we were camping at Mulga Bore, it was freezing, the waru had gone out, and when I got up to make the early morning cuppa, I looked over to Murray and saw frost formed in his hair over night and his hair had turned into mini icicles. He prefers to sleep on a mattress roll with a couple of blankets.

Me, I like creature comforts and I want to take the opportunity to share one of my biggest tips for campers. It really simple, and people who have adopted this initiative agree. And it more for older people who don't do yoga and don't mind taking a bit of trouble for some extra comfort, It is this; a small mat beside your swag means you can take your boots of at bed time and keep your bed and the sand separate - take you boots off while your standing on your mat and step into you swag with clean feet. It might sound like a simple thing, but people who eat in bed, I don't understand the practise myself, can testify that crumbs in the bed and sand even more so, is the enemy of a good night's rest. If you implement the mat beside the sway initiative you'll never stop singing it's praises. People will immediate know that you are a practical person who lives by experience and not by other peoples theories and, AND you will have a ready subject for small talk with strangers who enquire. I've seen people leave that conversation with a sense of purpose that I hadn't noticed in them before. As for crumbs in the bed, my advice is don't do it. The mat method can help you there.

But I digress. It's about 1.15 am and hearing a noise, I look out of the swag to see that a donkey has wondered into the yard looking for feed. If you saw all the tussocks of bufflelgrass in the back yards you could be forgiven for thinking they come in for that. But no, there is negligible nutritional value in dry Buffelgrass. But that's not the end of it. Buffelgrass burns at a higher temperature than native grasses (that are nutritious) and bring burning temperatures onto the landscape higher than native grasses can't tolerate. It out competes native grasses, provides less nutrition and spreads very quickly. Being brought in from outside means it has no natural predators to keep it in balance and is a serious threat.

So the donkeys eat what they can find and depart. I'm surprised that the numerous dogs don't move them on earlier. I guess the more rambunctious ones have received the donkey's back hooves at speed and thought better of it. Later on a brumby came in which is quite unusual, so unusual in fact that when I reported it later some wondered if this city slicker could tell the difference between a horse and a donkey.

I went back to sleep, only to be woken a short while later, as it happened by a bad small. I say bad smell but that doesn't cover the half of it. PWAAAH! That was a first - being woken by a bad smell. It took some time to orient myself. It reminds me of when as a kid you wake up in the middle of the night upside down in bed with your head at the feet end and visa versa. You feel around in the dark and discover that the wall that you bed is up against had moved over to the other side. When you get up to turn on the light to find out what is going on, you can't find the switch because the door is at the opposite corner of the room to normal. The experience has been known to induce quite a panic until you work your way round to find the door, turn the light on and you see that everything is in its proper place and you wonder, what was that all about? I still do, so if you have any theories I would like to hear them.

So this smell has woken me up. It's like someone has dumped a kangaroo carcass under my nose. It is so strong that even now, days later, I have to hold my breath as I write about it so as to not wake the memory of that smell. Then I realise there's most likely a dog curled up on the other side of the canvass only centimetres away. The next thing that happens is like turning on that light at the wrong end of the room and It all comes home to me in an instant as I realise the true purpose of the special stick Murray said we should make and that I should bring to the APY Lands every time I come. I now think and you'll soon see why it rivals the mat as a most useful camping innovation, though it's utility is restricted to a short, intense time frame, while the mat provides a degree of comfort that lasts the whole night.

The stick has to be long enough to discourage dogs out of the smell zone from your swag without you having to get up. If you have to get up for other reasons that's OK, but it is pointless to get up in the middle of the cold night to chase a dog away from your nice warm swag. It just won't work. He'll wait a few minutes till you've gone back to sleep and sneak in silently again and once you realise it will be too late.

If they see the stick there where they want to lay, you wont even have to use it. They are clever animals and will work out the safe distance from the length of the stick themselves, though some of the younger ones resort to trial and error before they get the hang of judging distance.

I lay there contemplating how I wished the dogs would eat their meat in a fresher state before coming in for a comfortable nap smelling like rank carrion. Then I remembered I left my coat next to the sway last night, to make it more comfortable if I had to get up though the night that happens sometimes after too many cups of tea or ready for the morning. But now the dog had my attention quicker than finding the wall on the wrong side of the bed and in a greater panic, worried that the coat I would have to wear if it was cold when we arrive back in Adelaide around midnight tonight was polluted with the smell of carrion. I would rather that Carol was glad to see me when I got home.

I moved as fast as I could, as if it wasn't already too late. I reached out and yes, there was a dog there and he didn't want to be moved. A short altercation ensued and I was relieved to see that my coat had been spared and that he had curled up, a beautiful sight if the olfactory senses are turned off, on a pillow/blanked my mother made decades ago, bless her. She was handy with a sewing machine and made all her children this simple but ingenious travel rug that folded into twelve and had a pocket that you turned in on itself, thereby folding the blanket inside and turning the blanket into a pillow and at the same time revealing a handy carry strap for your wrist, altogether more useful for carrying stuff to the car for packing especially when you don't want to hold the pillow/blanket with your mouth for obvious reasons that I have just explained.

As well thought out as it was, the object did have one drawback, and that is that if your were using it as a pillow, you didn't have a blanket. I find that if you need a blanket you often need a pillow too though not necessarily the other way around. I would love to know your thoughts or solutions on this. Please let me know below. If you want, I could even provide you with a little sketch with measurements if you are handy with a sewing machine and like the idea. Just ask, because it is something I would probably enjoy doing if anyone was interested and it would save you from having to go through back issues of the Australian Women's Weekly.

You might be tempted to think that today's story is rather trivial and inconsequential compared to some of the previous missives. But if you were to do so, you would be wrong because these simple approaches to life are in fact a doorway into the profoundly creative thinking. Whether it is working out how to attach a cutting stone to the handle of a spear thrower using kiti derived from spinifex or acacia plants or mapping a navigational route with a story, it is all based on simple technologies that are well practised and applied in an inventive and creative way.

It's not like coding software, although now that I think about it...It's not like building in a two-cubit gate for a quantum computer, but is a critical way of thinking that can lead to profound observations. It is a way of thinking that leads to challenges and problems working themselves out by letting them push against their opposite and having a solution arise spontaneously from the tjuni, the gut, we might say, intuitively.

Take, for example the pillow/blanket example; logical, rational thinking brings us to an impasse, you can have one or the other, not pillow and blanket together. The logic about it is certain. When we look at this trivial example in context rather than with logic, my brain gets happy. I hope yours does too. I like to sit with a paradox and wait for a solution. It is a skill you need for using stories and songs as maps and linking things through neural nets rather than logical chain and a critical orientation in thinking necessary to reboot your brain in mythic rather than numerate and classifying processing.

Artists do it all the time and naturally, but most of all it is something that can be learnt. The western world heavily prioritises logical rational over intuitive mythic thinking. We may fall into the trap of thinking that the opposite of rational is irrational. It is not. The opposite is intuitive and something desperately needed in our modern world to find solutions to the complex problems of today. Problems like how to live well and in harmony with nature in a drying and warming landscape as first nations people did millenia ago.

I'm not saying we should go back to hunting with kulata miru (speer and woomera) but that there are ways of thinking developed by first nations peoples that are sorely needed today, ways that even the fastest super computers cannot model and solve but those same complex and paradoxical questions can have solutions in a moment with the right thinking. It's the difference between being clever and being wise.

I had intended to tell you about the trip home but you have already been too generous with your time so I will leave it to next time so that you can make yourself a nice cuppa and have a minute or two to watch your thoughts before you get on with what you have to do.

Tags: APY Lands, Pitjantjatjara