Australia's Red Heart Wilderness Explored

Out on the wastes of the Never Never...

That's where the dead men lie.

That's where the heat waves dance forever.

That's where the dead men lie.

That's where the earth's loved sons...

The centre of Australia extends for over two million square kilometres

of saltpans, scrubland, deserts,

and stark mountain ranges.

Strangled by thirst and fierce privation

That's how the dead men die. Out on Moncygrub's farthest station...

Many of the centre's prominent geographical features

bear testimony to the dashed hopes of white explorers.

Mount Disappointment, Mount Despair,

Mount Hopeless, Desolation Camp, and Mount Destruction.

There's even an Opthalmia Range to commemorate those

who were blinded by the constant glare of the sun.

There's a great poem by a young suicidal man called Barcroft Boake,

who wrote a poem in which the constant refrain is

that out there in the never, never were out where the dead men lie,

out where the dead men lie.

Now once you start to build a mythology about a country that says

what matters about its centre

is that it's a place which is out where the dead men lie,

you've embarked on a very...

pessimistic...and defeatist notion

of what it means to live in this place and belong to it.

It is in some ways a kind of emotional and spiritual dead-end.

Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely,

under the saltbush sparkling brightly,

out where the wild dogs chorus nightly,

that's where the dead men lie.

Boakes' poem was written at a time when Australia's white settlers

still regarded the centre of their new country as a horrendous blank.

Like all new arrivals into an unknown landscape,

they were to slowly fill in that blank with their own names

and their own stories, often of sacrifice and failure.

It was to take some time for an alternative,

more positive vision of this country to evolve.

A vision that was to recognise the extraordinary diversity

and beauty of the centre

and to finally incorporate the way the land has always been imagined

and seen by its original inhabitants.

This is a country that has developed into a nation of city-dwellers.

Four out of every five Australians live on the edge of the continent,

within 30 miles of the coast.

Many citizens never venture into the interior,

but that does not mean they ignore it.

The desert is definitely part of Australia's identity.

Not only our own structured identity

but the identity that's put on Australia.

If you look at tourist posters for Australia in other countries,

along, right up there with the Opera House,

is going to be the desert and of course it will be the red desert.

And this is extraordinarily ironic

because there's no country in the world that is so urbanised

as Australia.

The population is all concentrated in the fringe,

in the cities of the coast.

And yet, there is this kind of yearning

to acknowledge

and even identify with this great emptiness in the centre.

180 years ago, the new white settlers had no idea

whether the great blank in the centre of their country

was a desert or a water-fed region ripe for agriculture.

The map makers expected it would be the latter.

All other continents in the world had obligingly got themselves

a large inland river system

and very large lakes for water,

so why should Australia not have this?

One man who was in no doubt that the centre of Australia

had plenty of water was Captain Charles Sturt.

Charles Sturt did develop this obsession

that in the middle of Australia there was an inland sea,

and he was an evangelical Anglican.

He believed that he had been ordained by God

to discover this...

almost sacred mystery that lay at the heart of Australia.

Sturt had travelled in Western Victoria,

in the 1820s and he had noted that flights of birds,

quite consistently flew northwest from there,

and he thought, "I'm sure they're flying towards water."

When he subsequently went to Adelaide,

and he noticed birds flying north,

he thought, "They're going for water, so it's a simple matter of geometry.

"If we intersect the flight paths, we have the situation

"where there's an inland sea, that's what they're all flying to."

So I was led to conclude that the country in to which they went

would in great measure resemble that which they'd left,

that birds which delighted in rich valleys

would not go into deserts and into flat country.

Everything tends, I believe,

to prove that a large body of water exists in the interior.

He sets off with great panoply,

but also with...with a whale boat, an enormous thing,

which he kept having re-painted on the way,

so that it would be ready to sail on this inland sea.

So off he goes in the 1840s looking for the inland sea

and he ends up in the Simpson Desert.

1,000 kilometres north of Adelaide,

Sturt and his team blundered into

the world's largest parallel sand dune system.

A desert that stretches over 176,000 square kilometres.

Where he stands on a sand dune in the middle of the desert

and sees that the waves just go on and on forever.

He calls them these land waves,

because the land is taunting him,

it's...it's mocking him,

because where there should be a great ocean, there's just waves of sand.

I really shuddered at the reappearance of those solid waves,

these heart-depressing features existed to damp the spirits

of my men, and irresistibly depress my own.

For Sturt, it was a kind of gothic imprisonment

because he was imprisoned at Depot Glen by thirst,

which was as...as big a prison as any iron bars,

and this was also internalised

as a kind of psychological imprisonment

by the terrors of the landscape.

Hunger, thirst and scurvy

eventually drove the Sturt expedition to a complete standstill.

They returned barely alive.

He really does return to the coast,

to the civilization of the coast, defeated.

And that's...that's a very important moment

in...the shaping of the colonial mind.

Sturt comes back, the man who had believed above all others,

that there was inland sea, and he hasn't found it, he's found desert.

So you get this extraordinary development of an explorer hero,

who is a failed explorer in the terms of the original contract,

but who nevertheless achieves an enormous status, as a hero

who has battled with the land, with the elements,

with thirst and drought, and the difficulty of the terrain

and all of these things,

and who has done this for some noble, selfless reason.

Sturt rescued his reputation and financed his journeys

by writing an account of his struggle against a forbidding enemy,

a remorseless, arid, and lifeless desert.

Just as the British thought of Africa as the dark continent,

they thought of Australia as the silent continent.

It was a continent waiting to be conquered by the sounds of industry.

And they were confident

that they could simply sweep that silence away,

and introduce productivity and optimism and industry

and bring the continent to life.

But what happens is that the explorers cross a kind of frontier

in which they discover that the silence just won't go away.

Once you cross that frontier, you're in an arid zone

where there are no rivers, you're looking every day for water,

and you can feel the silence hanging in the air,

and explorers like Charles Sturt refer to this not just as silence

but death-like silence.

They feel as though they've entered a zone of death.

In creating this forbidding image of their country,

Sturt and his fellow explorers were feeding a public in Europe

with a voracious appetite for stories of discovery.

They're competing for readership against the African explorers

who find great cataracts and great jungles and over every hill

there's a new and exotic people that, you know...

treat you to exotic feasts.

Or scare the daylights out of you with making war on you.

Whereas by and large their encounters

with the Aborigines were far more, erm...unadventurous than that,

and often very hospitable.

The Europeans' first encounter with Australia's indigenous people

occurred when they met the Dutch explorers in the 17th century.

From the beginning,

the relationship was fraught with mutual non-comprehension.

The Aborigines of the centre had been adapting to,

and celebrating their landscape for at least 40,000 years.

Nothing could be more different.

The aboriginal people saw the land as a spiritual entity.

When the Europeans came,

they felt the land had no context, it had no history.

The converse was true for the aboriginal people.

For them, every single rock, every tree, every water hole,

possibly even every flat piece of land

had a history which stretched to the Dreaming.

And they believed that in the Dreaming,

the ancestral powerful spiritual beings emerged

from the land and made great epic journeys

through what had been a flat and featureless country,

lifting up the mountains, making the water holes,

making the country that they saw, literally creating the country.

So, unlike most creation stories,

where the power that creates is located outside the Earth,

in the heavens or somewhere,

for aboriginal people,

the creating power is in the land, and it remains so.

Every water hole, valleys and hills

is associated from the time of creation

as a very sacred part of who you are.

They saw country and everything on it as a family member.

See, and that includes every living thing,

like every plant, every reptile,

every animal, every bird, every insect.

It's all a living entity, and must be treated as such.

As settlement along the coast and the fertile areas proceeded,

the Aborigines were either marginalised

or driven further inland.

New cities developed as entirely white enclaves,

with aspirations to all the amenities and institutions

to be found in Europe and North America.

Melbourne in the 1850s, is an extraordinarily rich city.

Gold, discovered at the beginning of the decade,

had generated fabulous wealth,

and it allows that society to do all kinds of things

which they hadn't been able to do before.

They can build fantastic buildings,

they can create cultural institutions,

like a fabulous library,

like a museum,

and it also allows them

to think of engaging in serious science.

And very soon the city's great and good

formed their very own Royal Society.

Modelled on the illustrious British institution of the same name,

it shared the same objectives,

the pursuit of scientific enquiry.

And it was this institution

which was to launch an expedition which would fill

the apparently lifeless desert with a story of heroism and sacrifice.

And they're thinking, "OK, well,

"here we are, these learned gentlemen,

"in our fine, 19th-century clothes

"with our fine-19th century manners and our clever books.

"We need a jolly good expedition."

After months of prevarication and indecision,

the Society's exploration committee

resolved upon a scientific expedition

that would cross the continent from Melbourne

to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north.

On the way they were to collect scientific specimens,

survey the land, and paint watercolours.

And they have the most extravagant ideas

about what they're going to achieve.

They spend thousands of pounds,

and they get scientists and they have meetings,

and by the time the whole thing is set up,

they have created this... lumbering caravan

of Victorian scientific endeavour

that costs a fortune and which moves at snail pace out of Melbourne

and in fact makes camp that night, well, within easy walking distance

in the nearby suburb of Essenden.

You could walk back into town and have a drink, it was pathetic.

And in command of this whole outfit is this fellow Robert O'Hara Burke.

Now, Mr Burke's a nice fellow,

he's handsome, has a bit of a sort of dashing way about him.

He's been in the cavalry.

But he's famous for not being able to find his way about.

I mean, he is just hopeless as a Bushman.

Burke was also not much of diarist.

It was to be his eventual second-in-command John Wills

whose accounts were to become the stuff of legend.

No expense was to be spared on Melbourne's awfully big adventure.

25 camels were shipped across from India with eight Afghan cameleers.

The expedition which set off from Melbourne, with 15,000 spectators

and with such high ambitions

soon shed its scientists and most of its 20 tons of equipment.

The interior they encountered was to be very different from the one

that previous explorers like Sturt had experienced.

Their paintings and diaries described a landscape

that is often lush and green.

We often think of the centre as being extraordinarily dry,

and clearly at various times, it is.

But Burke and Wills crossed the continent

in one of the wettest of...of years.

There is so much water that the grass is so long.

They make the crossing in one of the best of seasons.

The vagaries of the Australian climate

were not understood at the time.

This might be the driest of continents

but it is also the most unpredictable.

It's only in the last few decades

that we've come to understand how powerful oscillations in the winds

and temperature of the Pacific Ocean

can determine the difference between drought and flood.

Burkes' expedition entered the centre

during what is known as a La Nina year, a wet year.

The climate of Australia as we've now come to appreciate is...

is hugely influenced by both...

the climatic events we now know of as El Nino and la Nina.

In la Nina years we often get big rainfall events

in the centre of Australia.

We often end up with big amounts of water running through

the channel country, we end up with Lake Eyre flooding.

During a La Nina event in the Pacific, millions of birds migrate to temporary lakes in the centre.

For a few months every decade Sturt's vision of the inland sea comes true.

Burke, Wills and two others successfully crossed the centre

and reached the swamps of the Gulf of Carpentaria

on the north coast of Australia.

But it was on their return journey

that they began to run out of food and water.

One member of the expedition died.

The remaining three returned to their base camp in Cooper's Creek

to find that it had been deserted the same day.

Burke and Wills walk in to camp and the camp is empty,

they expected to find horses, men, a big pot of emu stew,

a whole welcoming party.

Instead they walk in to silence, an empty camp and this fateful word,

carved on the tree, "dig".

And they dig at the bottom of the tree and they find provisions,

and a note that says that the party, the support party

has left that morning, that very morning after waiting for months.

And Burke and Wills are...

and King are...pretty devastated.

There were people nearby at Cooper's Creek, people who could have helped.

The Yandruwandha people gave them fish, 'padlu' beans

and a type of bread made from the ground seeds of the ngardu plant.

If not prepared in the right way,

ngardu may cause a form of Beriberi.

Fatally, Burke and Wills were not the kind of explorers

who took advice from the locals.

At one point when the Yandruwandha came to offer them more fish,

Wills fired above their heads and scared them off.

In June 1861, they both died on the banks of Cooper's Creek.

Now, there are lots of theories about how Burke and Wills died,

but the one that really persuades me is the idea that they were poisoned.

That they were grinding up this ngardu,

to make a flour

and they didn't know how to prepare it properly,

and that the ngardu basically poisoned them.

And there are really disturbing descriptions by Wills

of just how appallingly painful the effects were on them

when they went to the toilet.

I mean, it describes passing these gigantic stools, he says,

and he can't help noticing that he appears to be evacuating

a greater bulk than he's actually eating.

Nothing became these two explorers so much

as the manner of their dying.

Some of Robert O'Hara Burke's and John Wills' last written notes

seem as if they're already preparing for the hagiographies and paintings

that were to later venerate them.

I hope you remain with me here till I am quite dead.

It is a comfort for me to know that someone will be here when I die,

that when I am dying

it is my wish that you should place the pistol in my right hand,

that you leave me unburied as I lie.

It soon became part of the legend that their unburied bodies

provided food for the feral dogs of the centre, dingoes.

The last surviving member of the expedition,

John King, was later found almost out of his mind,

but alive, and fed by the Yandruwandha people.

Melbourne struggles with the expedition in its aftermath.

There is huge debate over what it meant,

and there is always a very, very powerful body of opinion

that this has been a disaster and an embarrassment.

But I guess the... But officialdom

do not want to admit that it had been a failure,

and so they very deliberately elevate Burke and Wills into heroes,

and that involves declaring a...a holiday,

and having a massive state funeral

and giving them a great sort of mausoleum in the cemetery,

and then giving them

what in colonial terms was a huge bronze statue

in the centre of the city.

40,000 people attended Burke and Wills' funeral.

Statues were commissioned, granite memorials were constructed,

streets renamed, stories were written and pictures painted.

Burke and Wills became Australia's first martyrs to the arid centre,

that horrendous blank in the middle of the continent.

I bet you if you went out and asked any Australians

what killed Burke and Wills, they'd say they died of thirst.

They didn't die of thirst.

The country they were in was not that dry.

Cooper's Creek itself is a very fertile place.

It's not a silent place.

It's filled with bird life, the river there is teeming with fish.

It's the department store of the outback.

You can't go wrong at Cooper's Creek.

But you see, that doesn't fit the mythology, that doesn't fit the story.

You want Burke and Wills to be claimed by the wilderness.

If they're going to be turned into some story of heroism

then they have to die of thirst in the desert.

Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely,

under the saltbush sparkling brightly,

out where the wild dogs chorus nightly,

that's where the dead men lie.

And that's why Burke and Wills are so important,

because Burke and Wills are an attempt

to make a sense of the silence.

They're an attempt by white Australia to give a story to the emptiness.

For us to hear some version of ourselves in a land

which refuses to speak to us of ourselves.

It's the start of creating a white mythology about Australia.

And it's not risible.

It's not...

er...

finally an act of folly, it's a...

it's a hunger to belong.

The continent's indigenous people have had 40,000 years

of storytelling to justify their presence in the landscape.

This dreaming here, this belonged to my grandmother.

My grandmother's country

is this place called Anunga.

And from Anunga,

we've got this dreaming called "inguta".

And in Anunga there was this...

there's this lizard...

this mountain devil lizard.

The white settlers, they know this lizard as the thorny devil lizard.

This lizard travelled around this country,

and collected all these rocks and put it in his pouch,

which is what this circle here represents.

And this pouch is found on the back of its neck,

and when it walks through the country it deposited...

deposited these ochre colours into sacred areas.

This one belonging to the men,

men with the boomerang spear

and the other one belonging to the women dreaming.

Now, the woman one, they've got sacred place here,

which is a water hole

and I heard this from my grandparents, my grandmother.

This place here, this is called Anunga,

and this is where this lizard come from.

Just as Burke and Wills' bodies were being reburied in Melbourne,

a rival explorer reached the geographical centre

of the continent.

It's notable that John McDouall Stuart's achievement

in reaching the centre and surviving

is far less celebrated than Burke and Wills' failure.

Yet it was the route

that Stuart blazed from Adelaide to the north coast,

which had far more permanent consequences

for the history of Australia,

the Aborigines, and the country's interior.

In the following decade, you've got teams of men, hundreds of men,

living along that route, building the overland telegraph,

and that telegraph

really does transform the centre of Australia.

After the telegraph, it's very hard to get lost out there,

and people still do get lost,

but it's not...it's not a kind of great unknown any more.

There's a kind of highway through the middle.

And there are a series of water holes basically across Australia,

which are the telegraph posts,

and the most famous of these is Alice Springs.

At Darwin the wire was linked to a underwater cable

that connected Australia to London.

On the 22nd of August 1872, the chief engineer Charles Todd

tapped out Australia's first instant message to posterity and the world.

We have this day, within two years,

completed a line of communications 2,000 miles long

through the very centre of Australia,

until a few years ago a terra incognita believed to be a desert.

The desert telegraph bisected the centre, speeding up settlement

and, where there was enough water, these formed the focus

for cattle stations along a line from north to south.

But either side, vast tracts lay undiscovered and undeveloped.

After these great expeditions, really very little was done

about desert exploration for maybe 40 years.

There was no sense that we should be bothered with this any more.

Let's get on with developing the cities,

let's get on with commerce in an urban sense.

Let's get on with certainly pastoral industry,

but pastoral industry in areas where we know it works.

So, the huge cult of the merino sheep, for example,

was something which took people's attention away from the desert,

and said, "This is where Australia's great value lies.

"This is the thing we do, we do sheep, we do merinos."

A desert was a kind of dead letter, nobody wanted to know about it.

40 years after the Burke and Wills expedition, a British geologist John Walter Gregory

was to present the new Australians with even more reason to keep their backs to the centre.

But amazingly, in the hottest time of the year,

professor Gregory gets a group of students

from the University of Melbourne

and takes them on the field trip of a lifetime to Lake Eyre.

Lake Eyre is the great empty salt lake,

that drains central Australia.

It would now, I guess, seem like hubris,

but he details his students into little squads

and some of them survey the plants and some of them look at animals,

and some of them look at the aboriginal culture and so on.

And he comes back and he writes a book,

and he gives that book a fateful title, he calls it the Dead Heart.

That book comes out

shortly after the Australian colonies have federated into a nation.

Australia is now a new nation, and it's still a nation

that's attempting to define what it means to be Australian.

It's still a nation that's trying to learn how to be in this land

and the most powerful book, the best-selling book

that comes out of that period is a book that says

at the heart of this continent lies the dead heart.

It's not an image that he hasn't thought about carefully.

He really means that Lake Eyre is like a heart muscle,

that has stopped beating and that all those rivers

that come out of, or that flow in to Lake Eyre

are like withered veins and arteries, that the heart of the nation is dead.

Now that is perpetuating the whole silence, death-like silence,

Burke and Wills, necro-nationalist thing that we've been talking about,

and that's a debilitating idea for a country that's attempting to come up

with some sense of purpose and self-definition.

Although Gregory meant the Dead Heart to refer to Lake Eyre,

it became a cliche for the pessimistic view of the whole centre of the continent.

But there was a rival, optimistic vision

that came from the cattle men and the hydraulic engineers.

To bring the desert heart to life, just add water.

They also had their influential books.

The centre could be turned green

by drawing water from underground wells, and irrigation schemes.

These optimists encouraged the cattle drovers to move inland towards the interior.

The most dramatic impact was not

that produced by explorers,

but the arrival of the first permanent settlers, the squatters,

the outback pastoralists

who would arrive in the country of an aboriginal nation,

their numbers all quite small, maybe half a dozen men,

but hundreds of sheep and cattle,

hundreds of them.

Now, these animals needed water,

so the European animals immediately

occupied the river frontages or the water holes.

And usually the frontiersmen would take the view

that this was their water.

And that cattle and blacks don't mix.

That if we want to get our cattle, in particular, or our sheep,

to settle on the land, you've got to keep the blacks away.

What were once pristine waterholes

where both Aborigines and wild animals drank at the edge,

were swamped by cattle ill adapted to the relentless heat.

When this new stock arrives especially the horses and cattle,

they walked straight into this water

and would mess it up with urinating and with their droppings,

and stand there, drink it, and do all their terrible things in it.

So it didn't take long

for the water to be contaminated, to be unusable.

You know, and that spoilt the waterways for every single one,

and then this then drove the...our native species

away from those areas,

which our people was quite able to, you know, live off.

And then we started moving towards killing the stock

that had intruded or come into our land.

And being on my land, I'm quite entitled to take anything that's

on it, if I need it for survival,

and that's exactly the attitude we had.

So the men started killing some of the stocks

to feed us, as their children.

And for that of course, you know,

they were really punished badly, they were shot.

And in their many dozens and dozens of lot, you know.

A lot of terrible stories

about the massacres of our people through those early cattle people.

The range wars with the Aborigines were fought across the continent.

As many as 20,000 were killed or massacred.

Many more died from exposure to the diseases

that Europeans brought with them.

The impact was just as devastating for the animal

and plant species of the interior.

Cattle, camels, horses, goats and rabbits

grazed out much of the plant life.

Foxes and cats took a great toll on the reptiles and smaller mammals.

Australia has lost more mammal species than any other country.

You see that's one story that just tells you how it is,

and it was like that with all our people.

And the plant world, and the land itself.

It's a living being to us.

And it hurts the same as we hurt

and we hurt for it the same as it hurts for us.

It is...it is a two-way emotional connection that's a reality,

and when we see country being damaged like that,

OK, we feel the same pain.

Isolated in the vast interior, some Aborigine communities were able to continue,

clinging on to their culture and relationship with nature.

Whereas the Aborigines had 40,000 years to adapt to a climate

that varies between years of drought and then sudden rains,

the animals of their Dreamtime have had millions.

Totemic animals like the kangaroos have flexible breeding cycles

that can take advantage of the sudden blooming of the desert.

Another Dreamtime creature, the thorny devil, has evolved

tiny channels in between its spikes and can convey the morning dew

to its mouth through capillary action.

Far away from the rapidly developing cities around the periphery,

Australia's Dead Heart remained an inaccessible wasteland,

inhabited by primitives and isolated cattle men.

It was a land portrayed in black and white images,

occasionally penetrated by scientific expeditions.

It was from one of these surveys that a new champion was to emerge,

someone who saw the desert in a new light.

Driven by the fear that many species were on the verge of extinction,

even before they were discovered,

Dr Hedley Finlayson set about finding and documenting them.

In 1935 he published The Red Centre,

a book that promoted a radical change

in the perception of the interior.

And he goes actually looking for marsupials,

but what he comes away with

is not so much his zoological finds,

but with a new vision of the desert

which he writes about as the red centre,

and the red centre for him was absolutely mind blowing.

Finlayson is absolutely blown away by the red.

He says, "This fiery cinnabar country."

And of course, he's fixated on this iron oxide soil and rocks,

which is so stunning, particularly when you have the white ghost gums

against the red sand and the sort of cobalt blue sky overhead,

it is amazing.

And what is fascinating is that

when you track back from Finlayson,

you find that almost no-one else has mentioned the colour red,

all those explorers, all the missionaries, all the settlers,

who go into the desert, none of them mentions this word red.

All they're doing is looking for green,

and if they can't find green, it's nothing, it's not red.

But it's an indication of how much we only see what we're looking for,

and if we don't see what we're looking for, then there's nothing.

So Finlayson turned around the idea of the Dead Heart

to being something

which was vivid and beautiful and well worth our attention.

Finlayson went further than advocating

the way the desert should be seen.

He railed against the destructive influence of the white man.

Above all, he took up the cause of the centre's indigenous people.

But the debt we owe them is for the whole white community to discharge.

That it may be done soon, and done with an open hand,

must be the earnest wish of all who set justice above expediency.

It was this more enlightened attitude

that allowed the emergence of a man

who was going to paint in the colours

that Finlayson could only describe.

For Australians,

with their origins in Europe,

the colour of beauty and of nature is green.

And the colour of death is brown.

When you travel in the centre of Australia

the land is brown, the grass is brown

and it required a whole shift of imagination

to come to understand that the colours of this country

can be thought of as the colours of life.

Now one of the people who helped us to see the centre differently,

who transformed the Australian sense of the centre

is the Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira.

Now, Namatjira is working in the '40s and '50s.

He's a traditional tribal man, and he learns watercolour painting.

And he paints

these extraordinarily beautiful paintings of his own country,

and these paintings become a fixture of homes around Australia.

When I was a little boy, you know,

when you went to see Aunty Vi or Uncle Ken,

there would always be an Albert Namatjira on the wall.

There would be a picture of Her Majesty the Queen

as a young and beautiful lady, and there would be an Albert Namatjira.

They became a kind of cliche of the 50s.

The pictures are successful,

partly because they conform so well

to the canons of European picture making.

The ways in which the foreground and the middle ground

and the background are organized

and the ways in which you have trees which frame the view

and which take your eye into the landscape.

They are hugely accessible and easy

for a settler audience

to absorb and to embrace.

And Australians loved them because they showed them an Australia

they didn't know they had, because the central Australia

that urban Australians knew,

they were grainy, grey photographs in magazines.

So, after the Second World War,

we start to see central Australia in colour.

And Namatjira is absolutely fundamental to opening our eyes

to the colour of Australia, so we stop listening and start looking.

Namatjira belonged to the Arrernte people who live in the country around what is now Alice Springs.

Although he painted in a Western manner,

he, like many Aboriginal artists that followed him,

stuck to portraying the landscape of his country, the Arrernte country.

Albert Namatjira's painting was extremely useful,

because he became very popular in the early days

of an Aboriginal artist, presenting the work in a language

the wider community could understand.

Our belief is if he'd presented it in the dot painting system,

then no-one would have known what he was doing.

HE CHUCKLES

But he was painting his country and he was honouring his family,

you know, by doing what he was doing.

This idea of the sensuousness, the vibrancy, the intensity

of the colour of central Australia

is a kind of spiritual awakening that occurs.

So, it's not advertising or politics or rhetoric,

it's an Aboriginal man with a paintbrush,

who really opens the Australian heart to the Australian wilderness.

Other painters were also beginning

to see the potential of the red centre.

Sydney Nolan also became interested in the desert

and he was the first person who painted the desert from a plane.

He went up in an aeroplane around Alice Springs,

and he flew over the McDonald ranges

and he flew even as far as the Tanami, I think.

And he painted what he saw from above.

Now, ironically, of course, this is how traditionally

Aboriginal people painted the land, looking down, into it.

And what he saw then was not a sort of sense of a flat horizon

extending forever, but in fact he saw almost a sense of the bones

of the country pushing up through the land.

You have these bare red ranges sticking up like...

like the skeleton of a dinosaur, coming out, up at you.

And these had an enormous effect on people.

They felt suddenly, there is, a starkness and a beauty

and an excitement about this country.

One place above all would come to represent

this new positive vision of the interior.

Local Aborigines call it Uluru,

but white explorers gave it another name.

'This is the goal. Ayers rock looms up like a giant mound.

'From ten miles away.'

50 years after Federation,

white Australians were redefining their relationship with the centre.

The Dead Heart was becoming the Red Heart.

In a sense, the sense of nationalism

begins to move from the settled pastoral districts into the centre.

And so the centre itself, gradually comes to play a role

in the sense of Australian nationalism,

until by the middle of the 20th century it is the centre

that is seen, in a way, as the heart of Australia.

But this was still very much a white Australian vision.

Climbing Ayers rock became a rite of passage,

ignoring the reservations of the local Anangu people

who see climbing it as an act of disrespect

for a place that they regard as sacred.

'The radio mast goes up to confound the spirits of the primitive men

'who have made the rock for untold ages the focal point

'of their legends and ceremonials.'

Nowadays 400,000 people a year make the long journey

to the giant sandstone monolith in the centre of Australia.

But the focus has changed. This is no longer simply Ayers Rock.

It's now recognised as Uluru,

acknowledging the local Anangu people's rights to the land

and respecting it as a focal point for their beliefs and ceremonials.

It's just the name of it, but that was it given to it from the period

of what we call the "chilcupa", or white people refer to as Dreamtime.

It's...it is the name Uluru.

And that should be there for all of us to continue calling it that.

Many visitors still ignore the wishes of the Anangu

and make the climb to the rock summit,

but each year their numbers decline,

reflecting an increasing respect for the local people.

Uluru has become a national icon for Australia, and its red centre.

The centre is even more distinctive.

The centre is even more uniquely ours.

No-one else has got a centre like we have,

so that if we want to be a distinctive people, a nation,

then the centre becomes important.

Alongside the recognition of Aboriginal rights

and their cultural connection to the centre,

the new Australians have continued to develop their own relationship with it.

I think in Australia, increasingly, there's a real sense

that we need to form those bonds,

spiritual is perhaps too strong a word,

but, certainly, a bond that is more than just physical with the country,

to have a sense of belonging,

so that we're not just the dispossessors of the land,

but that we can actually engage with the land.

This engagement has gone beyond painting and tourism

and into television and cinema.

More recently we have blockbusters like Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert,

which is set in a desert because, or part of it is set in the desert,

because the desert represents freedom.

In the climactic scene where the three travellers

suddenly expand in their incredible costumes on top of Kings Canyon

and there's a feeling that now they know who they are,

now they can go home, because they have found themselves.

We can never be the indigenous people,

but the extraordinarily generous thing is that the Aboriginal people

welcome this involvement, welcome this identification.

They don't say, "You can't have a part of this."

They welcome attempts by non-Aboriginal people

to form these identifying bonds with country.

They speak of this word country,

which is, I think, a whole new concept for us,

but something which we're trying very hard to learn.

It's a great paradox, isn't it, that...that once-despised Aborigines

are producing art about the country in a way

that so many white fellows would have loved to be able to do,

but never could,

because they could only paint the colours,

they could only aesthetically appreciate the landscape.

Whereas the aboriginal appreciation is infinitely greater than that.

So this mountain devil lizard is responsible for collecting

all these ochre stones and they use these...

these ochre colours during ceremony time,

and the most important colour is the red colour.

Cos this red colour is the one we paint our bodies with.

And after we put that on, maybe mix it with emu fat.

After we put that on, we put the other colours

to paint the body design of the Dreaming

we are representing from our country.

So, this colour here, the red dirt, it's important to our people.

It represents the earth, represents our mother.

It's a colour that belongs to all people,

all Aboriginal people in the central region.

It's very powerful.

It's as though...

the Europeans' search...

looking inland for the spirit of Australia,

was answered by the Aborigines...

who said, "Here it is."

But the story doesn't end there.

And even at this very moment,

there is great controversy about the condition of life

in the settlements around Alice Springs and around Uluru.

Many indigenous communities in the interior

present a contrasting image of the centre.

Australia's original inhabitants still suffer from the highest levels

of social deprivation in the country.

Overall, their life expectancy is 17 years less than the national average.

They've been left behind in a New Australia

which has co-opted their vision of the centre.

But among the populations of the towns and cities

around Australia's periphery,

older visions of a more sinister interior still survive.

For some, the centre still holds the same fears

that haunted the early explorers.

Now a very different side of the desert is seen

in the psycho thriller called Wolf Creek.

And this was based on an actual story of hitchhikers

who travelled into the desert

and one of them escaped to tell the tale

of the others being murdered

by a psychopath killer in the desert.

This harks back to the idea of the gothic desert as a place

where, because it's so remote, because it's so vast,

anything can happen,

and all the normal restraints of civilisation are cast aside.

Every year, backpackers and campers still disappear

or die of thirst in Australia's deserts.

There are still unresolved mysteries.

So, that idea of a macabre evil presence lurking in the desert

is still very strong in the culture.

MUTED SCREAMING

In two centuries of nation building, the new Australians have progressed

beyond the original perception of their desert interior

as a horrendous blank, a national embarrassment.

It can now be seen as the red heart,

a place of wild beauty that gives the nation a sense of uniqueness.

But this new vision of life and freedom still competes

with the vestiges of the older vision, of silence and death.

It's a kind of dynamic, and it won't end and it shouldn't end,

because it's all about wrestling

with who we are and how we belong, and how white Australians

and Aboriginal Australians are going to live together in this land

and move forward in a way that's filled with prosperity

and justice and hope and happiness.

It's an important issue to engage with.

It never stops, this is the great contention,

which is carrying on in the Australian conversation.

Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely,

under the saltbush sparkling brightly,

out where the wild dogs chorus nightly,

that's where the dead men lie.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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