‘A country to be heard and danced’: journeying into Australia’s menacing interior spaces

In the four parts that make up Yilkari – “Valentin”, “Dylan”, “Captain” and “Master” – men spend a lot of time engaging in venturesome outback driving and superbly eloquent talking.

Review: Yilkari: a desert suite – Nicolas Rothwell and Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson (Text Publishing)

In three of the four stories (each centred on the character whose name it bears), their journeys are along roads first carved into the dirt of the homelands of western desert Aboriginal people in the 1950s, when Commonwealth surveyor Len Beadell sought to make the region more serviceable as a Cold War weapons-testing range.

Yilkari honours Beadell while questioning our colonising expectation of mastering Australia’s vast dry interior. Not only distance emerges as a formidable tyrant. Yilkari’s central idea is that Australia’s interior spaces are – spiritually – both impenetrable and menacing.

While civilisation’s insecure purchase on Australia’s deserts enables “freedom” to the “drifter” – two important words in this book – these sparsely populated spaces embody the ineffable, powerful and unforgiving spirits of all who have dwelt there over thousands of years.

To experience their presence, Yilkari’s characters find, is to receive intimations of one’s own death. To know and accept the desert’s grim majesty is the basis of a cosmology that, in these four tales, belongs only to Aboriginal people and to misfits who have cleaved to them.

Yikari begins with a note to readers explaining it was written in tandem “by people who had become each other’s authors”: writer Nicolas Rothwell and his wife, artist Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, a Luritja-Pintupi woman.

This book will divide readers. To enjoy it, I had to suspend my belief that humans do not converse with the philosophical ease, wit and dialogical generosity of the narrator and his companions.

As an historian of Central Australia’s colonisation and some time investigator of some of its human problems, I was aware of myself conceding to the authors their preoccupation with questions more transcendental. Is one human life little or big? Meaningfully structured or random? Is truth a place?

These are not my questions, but they may be some readers’. The narrator’s inexhaustibly eloquent negative capability may exert, for such readers, the anti-heroic appeal of the Romantic poets.

Hearing through the silence

Each story is narrated by an “I”, and the narrator’s interlocutors do not address him by name. That the narrator is, in all four stories, the same person is confirmed in the book’s final pages when – for only the second time – a woman speaks.

This time it’s an Aboriginal woman – Narulya, the narrator’s partner. Their conversation – planning a long drive through the western desert – refers to his friendships and travels that have comprised the four stories in Yilkari.

She observes that his stories are “always from somewhere else”, and he agrees, adding “they’re much too true to life, they can’t catch the mind or touch the heart”, unlike the stories she knows and that he cannot know. She consoles him.

But if you listen, out in the desert, I mean really listen, listen hard, sometimes you can almost hear the country singing them. Hear through the silence. And we might hear that music, where we’re going, where the old desert travellers were, those nomads.

Hearing is the most important action performed by Yilkari’s characters. As linguists Nick Evans and David Wilkins pointed out in their 2000 paper In the Mind’s Ear, when Aboriginal languages use a sensory metaphor to refer to our capacity for understanding, they mostly use verbs referring to listening and hearing, not – as in English – verbs referring to “seeing”. (“I see what you mean”.)