Desert Gods Adventure

'BBC Four Collections,

'specially chosen programmes from the BBC archive.

'For this collection, Sir David Attenborough

'has chosen documentaries from the start of his career.

'More programmes on this theme

'and other BBC Four Collections are available on BBC iPlayer.'

DIDGERIDOO PLAYS

ABORIGINAL CHANTING

Midday in the desert of central Australia.

A dust devil, a whirlwind in miniature,

races across the roasting land.

It's so hot that a thermometer in the sun reached 140 degrees

and then burst.

Solid granite boulders blister and crack.

Little moves in the oppressive heat, animal or human.

The only creatures abroad are insects and reptiles.

Cold-blooded creatures that revel in the furnace-like temperatures.

This is the land of the Aborigine, but it was not always his home.

Scientists say that he arrived here some 10,000 years ago.

But exactly where he came from is not certain.

Some believe that he migrated from Java.

Others claim he originated in Europe and is a relative of prehistoric man.

Certainly, he is the most ancient branch of the human race

still surviving.

But if scientists are unsure,

the Aborigine himself is certain of his origins.

The tribesmen that live here know

that they sprang from this mountain, Ayers Rock.

This, you might say, is their Garden of Eden.

The rock is vast. Over two miles long and 1,000 feet high.

And every crack, every scar on the rock,

has a meaning to the people of this land,

for they believe that here during the Dreamtime,

the Creation period, when the world was flat and lifeless,

giant half-human spirits rose from the ground

to populate the earth.

These pockmarks were once the camp of the ancestral rat people.

Nearby, a gigantic detached pillar of rock

represents the totem pole around which they danced.

These deep pits were made by spears

thrown in a titanic battle among the snake people.

And this cave was once the home of the ancestral moles.

The tribesmen decorated many of the rock walls

with sacred ritual paintings,

for the mountain, in fact, is a gigantic shrine,

brooding over the desert which starts at its feet

and stretches for hundreds of miles in all directions,

waterless, barren and empty.

Many white people have died out there in the desert from heat,

from thirst, from hunger.

Only the Aboriginal knew how to survive alone,

unaided, year after year.

But now the desert is almost entirely deserted.

The paintings that made the caves

around the base of the rock glow with colour have long since faded.

The Aboriginal has gone elsewhere.

A windmill, sucking water from 1,000 feet below ground

to produce an unfailing oasis in the middle of the desert.

This is the magnet that has drawn the Aboriginal

away from his tribal grounds to congregate at missions,

government settlements and cattle stations.

Here, families that were once nomadic build their flimsy shelters

from bushes and branches,

augmenting them with cloth and sheets of corrugated iron,

if they can find them.

But the huts, created and approved by custom

as suitable for a wandering way of life,

are now sadly inadequate as permanent habitations.

Many people seem lost in this new existence,

but at this government station,

there is work available to the men, if they want it.

Although the Aboriginal had never seen a horse

until it was introduced by the white man,

most are superb natural riders,

and throughout the Northern Territory,

their services as cattlemen are highly valued.

Many of them are trained on government settlements like this one.

CHIMING

In return for the work the men do, the government not only pays wages

but supplies free food and clothing for all,

as every employer of Aboriginal labour is called upon to do by law.

Rations of tea and sugar and flour are handed out every week.

There's powdered milk for the children

and fruit when it's obtainable.

But though much is done

to provide for the Aborigines' material leads, this is not enough.

Many people would say that their roots lie in the land,

but there can be few people to whom their native land means as much

as it does to the Aboriginal.

Even when they're on stations and settlements

provided with abundant water and free food and clothing,

the pull of the desert persists and, sometimes, it becomes irresistible.

Sometimes, without warning,

whole families will just disappear from the station.

They've gone walkabout, as they say in pidgin.

They've gone to live as their fathers and ancestors did,

wandering naked in the desert.

To the stranger, the desert looks sterile, empty and hostile.

To the Aboriginal, everything has its meaning and its use.

The hot stones that litter the ground, cracking in the sun,

are not all the same.

If you know where to look, you can find the special rocks

that can be turned into a tool or a weapon.

In this part of Australia, flint knives are hardly shaped at all.

They're simply flakes struck from a larger boulder,

but they can be as sharp as a razor.

Spinifex grass - dusty, prickly and seemingly valueless.

But the Aboriginal knows

that its stems are beaded with tiny particles of resin.

If you beat the grass,

the resin falls off onto the ground as a fine dust,

and this is valuable.

Under the heat of the boulder, the resin melts.

Within ten minutes, you can produce a plastic, sticky mass,

easily moulded while it's hot, but concrete hard as soon as it cools.

With this, you can produce a neat,

very effective handle for the flint chip.

And so, from a boulder and a pile of grass,

the Aborigine produces a very effective dagger.

Many of the bushes that sparsely clothe the desert

seem equally to be without value.

Few of them bear edible berries or fruit,

but the roots of one particular kind conceal a different sort of delicacy.

Witchetty grubs, the fat white larvae of a wood-boring beetle.

They can be eaten roasted or simply as they are, alive.

To the ignorant, these are just ants, a nuisance.

But the Aboriginal knows from the tiny yellow spot on the ants' heads

that these are a special sort of ant

and one whose nests are well worth digging out.

Down in the subterranean galleries

hang shining brown globules the size of marbles.

They're alive.

Each is a worker ant

that has been injected with honey collected by other workers

until it is so bloated that it is little more than an animated jar

from which the colony will suck the honey during a bad season.

To the Aboriginal, each ant is a mouthful of warm, liquid honey,

the sweetest thing in the desert,

even sweeter than the combs of the wild bees.

But the desert can provide more substantial food than ants or grubs.

Empty though it may seem during the heat of the day,

there are still kangaroos and lizards, snakes and birds

that can provide good meat

to those skilful enough to hunt them successfully.

On their walkabouts, the men may travel many miles almost naked

and with nothing but their spears and spear throwers.

Most strangers would die within a few days of hunger and thirst,

but these hunters are travelling over their tribal ground

and they know the particular fold in the rock

which conceals the only source of water for 20 miles in any direction.

The water may be green and tepid,

but it may also be the difference between life and death.

The men understand the seasons as well as they know the country

and they vary their route in order to visit a well-remembered tree,

which they knew would be in blossom at this precise time,

so that they might eat the soft, fleshy petals, sweet with nectar.

In order that they can communicate silently over long distances

during a hunt, they have their own sign language.

I asked one of them, Jebel Jaray, to explain some of the gestures to me.

What is the sign for kangaroo?

- Marlu. - Marlu. And for...

Kanyarla.

- That's the woolly kangaroo? - Yeah, kanyarla.

Kanyarla? And what's rock wallaby?

Like that? And...like him, yes?

And what's goanna?

- Is that goanna? - Goanna, yeah.

- Like that? - Yeah, goanna.

And honey - shugabeg - bees?

Go like this...

And what's anteater, hedgehog?

- Porcupine? - Yeah, porcupine.

You call him porcupine, with all the prickles on it?

Yeah. Jilka.

Well, I hope you have a good hunting.

- Yowai gudwan. - Good.

The Aboriginal has extraordinary keen sight

and a fine appreciation of minute details

which few white men could rival.

The ground to him is a book inscribed with precise information

about all the creatures that have passed over it.

The trails tell him not only what kind of animal made them,

but often the animal's age and sex.

One old man once recognised a footprint as that of his sister

who had passed that way two days before,

but whom he had not seen for 20 years.

He followed it for three days before at last he met her,

never once doubting the message he had seen on the ground.

Jebel Jaray has seen a kanyarla, a woolly kangaroo.

It's a big and valuable prize, if only they can get it.

They approach in Indian file

so that only one of them is visible to the kangaroo.

And as only Jebel Jaray, the leader, can therefore see the animal,

he signals instructions to those behind.

The kangaroo is sleeping,

almost hidden in the shade of the big fig tree.

They move very slowly with extreme caution.

If the animal so much as opens its eyes,

the hunters will freeze motionless until it settles down again.

Jebel Jaray is going to use his woomera, the spear thrower,

which enables him to hurl his spear with greater leverage and force.

Beneath the fig tree,

the kangaroo is finally dispatched by a blow on the head with a boulder.

Although it's not full-grown,

it will provide a good meal of tender meat for the hunters

and there will still be enough to take back some joints

to the women and children in camp.

THEY SPEAK IN WARLPIRI

The Aborigines' method of cooking could scarcely be more simple.

Only one thing must be done to the carcass -

its skin must be cut open and its viscera removed,

taking great care that the gall bladder is not cut or punctured,

for that would ruin the meat.

But before you can cook, you must have fire.

The edge of the woomera is pulled to and fro over an old log.

The log itself has not caught fire,

but the friction of the hard woomera

has produced a hot, black powder

which has collected in a crack in the log.

This powder serves as tinder

and is emptied onto a handful of dried grass.

Flames - the whole operation has taken less than a couple of minutes.

In a country where rain may not fall for months on end,

it's usually easy to find an abundant supply of dry wood

with which to make a big fire.

As the fire burns, the ashes are heaped round the kangaroo's carcass

and in a few hours, it's cooked.

THEY CONVERSE IN WARLPIRI

And so the land provides the Aboriginal with everything he needs

with a minimum of exploitation.

He grows nothing.

He domesticates no animal, except the dingo dog,

which he brought with him when he first came into this country.

The land provides all

to those who understand its secrets and its mysteries,

and so it's scarcely surprising that it's in the land itself

that the Aboriginal sees his gods

and his walkabouts become his pilgrimages,

for on them he revisits the ancient sites

that mark the places where the ancestral spirits

first emerged onto the earth in the Dreamtime.

Ayers Rock is one of them, but it's now deserted.

But still, in remote parts of the country,

there are sites where the old rituals continue,

and I was taken to such a secret place by a man of the Warlpiri tribe.

His name was Tim.

He had learned English when he was in the army during the war,

so we were able to talk easily.

Together, we went to a rock many miles from the settlement.

A rock sacred to the great ancestral python, Yarripiri,

which emerged here during the Creation, the Dreamtime.

Tim, tell me about these paintings. What's this one?

- They're snakes. - Snakes?

- A snake, Yarripiri. - Yarripiri?

- Dreaming. - From the dreaming time?

From the dreaming, that's what they call Yarripiri, snake.

Yeah. Is he like an ordinary snake?

No, he's really the snake of dreaming.

- A spirit snake? - A spirit snake.

- And where does he live? - Oh, he live in there.

- Where, down here? - Under the hole here.

- There's that hole down there. - Yeah.

His spirit in there, really. Nobody can see it.

You've never seen him?

No. The hole has come out here, to make all the tracks,

- so you see of his track. - So you see his tracks?

Yes, the spirit of the Yarripiri snake, in there.

And this place, why have you put this painting of it on this place?

TIM: Well, the Yarripiri made the law to have the painting on this rock.

DAVID: The snake made the law that you had to?

TIM: It's the first snake in the world, the Yarripiri.

It made the whole world.

- He made the whole world? - Yes.

DAVID: And what are these things alongside there?

- The men, we, blekbala. - Those are blekbala?

TIM: The blekbala, he said...have to do a drawing on his spirit rocks.

DAVID: The snake said that you must put these drawings

- on the spirit rock, is that right? - Yes.

And what's in here?

That's a tjurunga of Yarripiri dreaming.

Can I see him?

Yes.

- And this is what? - Meanings.

What's this meaning - Warlpiri country.

- The snake country. - Yeah.

- And what's this? - The blekbala, we.

- That's the blekbala, you? - Yeah.

- And this? - Spear.

- A spear. By law. - A spear.

- Yes, and this? - That's the little carpet snake.

- The carpet snake? - Yeah. Yarripiri's son.

DAVID: Yarripiri's son. Uh-huh. And what's this?

TIM: Rib bone. Yarripiri's rib bone.

DAVID: Yarripiri's rib bone? Yeah.

So, this tells the people who now come, the younger men,

it shows them the way they must paint their bodies?

- Yes. - Is that right?

Yes. Really, it's right.

DAVID: And so in many years to come,

the tjurunga will show to the young men the way of custom?

- Yes, we have a school. - It's like a school?

School, we tell every story on this meaning here.

- Yes. - Die now... It tells me now.

When we die, they'll come read all about it on this cave wall.

That's what they had, all people had this meaning and stories,

and will have ceremony same way.

And they'll have the ceremony the same way?

- Same way, yeah. - And so this is a book?

- It's a book. - And it's a law?

- Yes. - It's Yarripiri's law?

Yarripiri's law.

Not all tjurungas are of wood - some are of stone.

The large one here, they say, is the tongue of an ancestral dingo dog.

These stone tablets

have been cherished by these people for generations.

They are very sacred and also extremely secret.

If an uninitiated person should happen to see them,

by tradition, he would be hacked to death with the tjurungas.

THEY CHANT

A ironstone pebble is ground to produce red ochre

so that the men may paint both the tjurungas and their own bodies.

CHANTING CONTINUES

Already the man, his mind filled with thoughts of the snake god,

is moving his body in a snake-like way.

CHANTING CONTINUES

As the men trace the patterns with their fingers,

so the myths and the legends about Yarripiri

that explain the origin of mankind live in the men's minds.

They're preparing for a ceremony

in which the snake itself will come to life in mime.

Ah...!

BULLROARER SHRIEKS

That unearthly sound is produced by this instrument, a bullroarer,

a piece of wood inscribed with the sacred designs.

The screams of the men and the shriek of the bullroarer

are a warning to any women or youths

to keep away from the ritual ground,

for soon Yarripiri, the snake god himself, will appear.

The man who will represent the snake is given a headdress of leaves

bound together with string made from twisted human hair.

THEY CHANT

The snake dancer has his body smeared with ochre and kangaroo fat.

One of the old men cuts a vein in his forearm to draw blood.

THEY CHANT

Slowly, the blood drips into a tin.

Now the body of the snake god is painted with the old man's blood,

which serves as a glue

on which to stick the brown and white downy seeds of a desert grass.

MAN SHOUTS AND BULLROARER SHRIEKS

CHANTING

CHANTING CONTINUES

The preparations take all morning, but at last everything is ready.

The ritual itself can begin.

BULLROARER SHRIEKS

THEY CHANT

Du du du du du!

CHANTING CONTINUES

With each movement of his body,

the dancer imitates the actions of a stake

shrinking from the touch of a stick.

The ceremony itself is only one in a long series

which may last for several months,

during which the young men of the tribe

are instructed in the mysteries of the Creation,

into the stories and the myths of Yarripiri.

CHANTING CONTINUES

Ya la la la la la!

CHANTING RECOMMENCES

It lasts a few minutes only.

A touch, and the spell is broken.

Once more, the sacred rock is decorated with the magical designs,

paying homage to the ancestral snake.

These ceremonials are an expression

of the Aborigine's attitude to work the world in which he lives,

the world which has provided him with weapons and food and drink.

By practising the cults,

he enters into communion with the incarnate spirits of the land

which give a meaning to his life

and from which he draws strength, solace and confidence.

When his world changes, when he ceases to hunt the kangaroo

but gets his meat in a tin from a store,

when he no longer drinks from a rock pool

but draws water from a borehole tap,

and is handed tea and sugar,

shirts and trousers free from the government,

then the direct bond with nature is broken,

and his religion, and often his life, loses its meaning.

Over most of Australia, this has already happened.

Soon, it will happen here too,

and little will be left except the enigmatic paintings

lonely and fading in the desert.

ABORIGINAL CHANTING

BULLROARER SHRIEKS