On the edge of the Tanami Desert, not far from the hills where the emu and the goanna lizard are said to have fought their prehistoric battles, the white man has promised that space-age technology will help preserve the Stone Age past of Australia`s aborigines.
In this settlement of the Warlpiri tribe almost 190 miles northwest of Alice Springs, heart of the Aborigine Outback, old men today still paint what they call the dreamtime, or prehistoric, stories of their ancestors in wriggles, dots and tubular lines. But in the months to come, the paintings will be shown and perhaps sold to gallery owners in Paris, New York and Chicago via a $2 million video-telephone system that sends pictures from the desert to the Aussat satellite above the Outback. The hookup would also be used to improve education and health care in the aborigines` far-flung communities.
The system, known as the Tanami Network, is the latest brainchild of white Australian consultants who have been advising aborigine communities on how to spend and invest their royalties from mining rights, how to administer the Outback towns and large tracts of land the government has set aside for them-and how to live with a society that ignored their rights for nearly 200 years.
This task may not seem difficult. The aborigine has changed in those two centuries. The natives move about in four-wheel-drive vehicles. They use rifles, not spears or boomerangs, to hunt kangaroo.
But aboriginal culture can still pull the rug from under the best-laid plans.
The deserted Outback station at Mt. Barkly, 93 miles north of Yuendumu, is a perfect example. These stations, or housing developments, were the government`s idea of a good deed to satisfy the rural aborigine`s wanderlust- an occasional bush getaway from community centers. The development boasted brick homes, solar panels and telephones.
But the planners of this nomadic heaven apparently forgot that when someone dies, a tribe must leave the site of death for good. That was easy in days when tribes had camps. But today entire families must vacate their brand- new government homes after the ”sorry business” (funeral) is over. The deceased may never be called by name, and all those with the same name must change it.
”A few weeks after the (Mt. Barkly) out-station was finished, an old man died there,” said Nick Savaidas, the Tanami Network`s operation manager.
”Now the whole place is deserted and derelict.”
To the relief of the operators, the satellite project in Yuendumu has run into no cultural glitches-so far.
The road to Yuendumu begins at Alice Springs. The aborigine boy in sandals will point you north on the Stuart Highway and explain with a smile:
”Turn left at the fourth gum tree after the gap. If you miss the turnoff, mate, the next petrol station is 1,000 miles into the bush. . . .”
The settlement of 800 people is a dusty place on the open plain allotted to the tribe as its homeland in 1948. (The government claims it has handed over 28 percent of the Northern Territory to aborigine tribes.) Whirlie-whirlies (mini-tornados) dance through town nearly every day.
At night, the buzz of a ”flying doctor” breaks through the bush silence. Physicians on average fly one mercy mission a day to most aborigine communities at a cost of $3,000 a flight.
Also at night, the women`s patrol is out in the streets with its thick war clubs; the search is on for ”grog-smugglers,” white or black, who sneak alcohol into the community. Alcoholism is a deep-rooted problem among the aborigines, and possessing liquor in Yuendumu carries a $20,000 fine. The women do a lot of screeching and clubbing if an offender is located. The white police officer in his brick home on the outskirts of town seldom interferes.
Easing the guilt
Along Yuendumu`s now-paved roads rest the historical reminders of Australia`s efforts to house the natives. In the back row are the 1948
”humpies,” corrugated iron igloos that unfortunately became ovens in the daily heat.
A decade later came the ”donkey houses,” enlongated huts that were a little bigger than humpies but were still considered better suited to farm animals. Next were aluminum sheds at a time when aluminium was cheap and in surplus.
Australia periodically exorcises the guilt of historical exterminations and subsequent neglect with expensive government-funded development projects for the 250,000 aborigines, who make up 1.5 percent of the population. But it was only four years ago that the government decided to give the natives $120,000 air-conditioned brick houses, a telephone system and a power grid to supply electricity. It was the way well-to-do Australia had lived in the Outback for years.
Now comes the Tanami Network. Its two satellite dishes rise above the new media hut in the center of Yuendumu.
The hut is dominated by a bare-chested young white man named Bentley James who gives visitors a lengthy pep talk about what they must and must not photograph and what preconceptions they must leave behind. Filming garbage is out. Filming runny-nosed children is also out. Old humpies are out too. Discussion about impoverished natives is banned. Filming wrecked cars is out. Visitors must sign an agreement to abide by all the rules after submitting applications to visit the community. Few applications are accepted. James sees to that.
Francis Jupurrula Kelly, the black chairman of the Tanami Network on paper, is technically James` boss. But when James talks, he listens. Kelly inaugurated the network last month when he talked face-to-face from the hut with education authorities in Darwin, almost 700 miles north. The circuit eventually will link 14 aboriginal communities spread over 1,860 square miles of yellow spinifex grass, white gum trees and pyramid-shaped termite mounds.
Not a panacea
The network`s transmissions will include just four hours of secondary education each week for communities in which education now ends when a child reaches 12. Each classroom will be equipped with a remote-control camera, run by the teacher in Darwin. Classes will be able to watch, say, a student in a distant classroom asking a question, then the teacher replying, then perhaps a student in their own class being beamed across the Tanami Desert.
Those flying doctors will be able to examine a prospective patient first on the Tanami Network`s screen before deciding whether to make the distant, expensive house call.
Art gallery owners from abroad can view paintings on the network, and parole officers in Darwin and Alice Springs can see and talk to parolees. This will save art dealers and parole officers a lot of traveling to the remote communities. It also will allow a lot of incarcerated aborigines to go home on bail to their communities.
The network is not expected to be the salvation of Yuendumu, where 80 percent of all adults are on permanent unemployment benefits. The dole in Yuendumu may soon be small change for the locals: White consultants believe the Warlpiri are sitting on a fortune in uranium.
If the government extends exploitation of uranium mines from the current three authorized companies, the tribe`s own prospecting company, run by a Dutchman, could generate enough royalties to make each adult a millionaire and able to afford his own Tanami Network at home. The company has already found large deposits.
Mining rights have become the white man`s nightmare in the mineral-rich Northern Territory since the 1976 Land Reform Act gave 590 square miles of land, then considered useless, to the aborigines.
Much of that land later turned out to be rich in minerals. But according to the Department of Energy and Mines, only 36 of the 494 applications for exploration licenses on aborigine land have been granted by tribal councils who jealously guard the sacred sites of their ancestors, sites left in permanent legacy to successive generations.
The scent of such money already has wafted to Yuendumu.
Kelly`s wife won $21,000 at blackjack the other night. The money circulated after everyone had been paid their royalties from a gold mine under concession to a mining company on Warlpiri land nearly 250 miles to the west. Kelly`s wife drove four hours through the desert to the casino in Alice Springs and won $10,000 more.
The next day Kelly bought a new four-wheel-drive Toyota. (The name of all cars in Warlpiri language is Toyota.)
From skin to canvas
There is also the Warlpiri slice of the take from aborigine art, which at last count brought in $30 million in tourist revenue.
In the back yard of the Yuendumu Arts Association, Jupururrla Nelson was painting his totem, the yala (bush potato), with acrylic paint on imported Belgian canvas. Beside him Japaljarri Sims painted his totem, the njaru (bush tomato). Neither man may paint anyone else`s totem. That is taboo. Both have paintings in national and international galleries.
The aborigine art sometimes sells for upward of $10,000. The artists, both in their 70s, get one-fourth of the price of their work. The rest goes to the agent (50 percent) and the Arts Association (25 percent).
Both sit on the ground as their fathers did when they used emu feathers and ocher in the dirt to chronicle the stories of animal and plant ancestors, or painted the heritage of land and totems onto the naked bodies of the young men who were undergoing and still must undergo the painful initiation ceremony of circumcision.
”All that art was just wiped off afterwards,” said Christine Lennerd, the white art teacher who runs the Arts Association for the Warlpiri tribe at Yuendumu. ”So we taught them how to use acrylic paint and canvas.”
Both men are tribal elders. Each of their paintings tells a story in which all wriggles, lines and dots convey an act or someone`s presence. A simple U is the ancestral totem. Each painter may paint only his inherited land and totem.
”Hey! You fill him good yellow for me,” Nelson called out to Lennerd, who mixed the paints and encouraged the painters to keep working. They were surrounded by swarms of flies and chattering friends who sometimes picked up a twig and helped fill the canvas.
Up the road near the power grid, the elder of the community, Murray Juppanardi, was doing what he does most of the day, snoozing on a mattress under a gum tree.
”The mob (tribe) won`t have to travel so much anymore, what with the network,” he commented, pulling his hat deeper over his face. The network was a good idea, he said, adding that he had been told he could talk to and see his sick brother at the same time on the other side of the desert. ”It`s a bloody marvel,” he added, before dozing off.
