Kakadu National Park, Day 1

The main reason that I wanted to stop in Darwin for a few days was that I didn't have the opportunity during my first visit to Australia. I had heard about the Kakadu National Park and had thought it sounded interesting. Since I was going through Darwin to get out to the Solomon Islands, I decided that a visit would be in order. The price made me jump a bit at 450 dollars. Australia is getting very expensive. It used to be only a little bit expensive, but the Australian dollar has now gone above the value of the US dollar. So now what were high prices before are now backed by a high value dollar and it is a bit ridiculous. They have 3 dollar bottled water. And that is just a small bottle. Australia is very expensive now. It's so bad that international companies (Subway Sandwiches being one) close on holidays, like Easter, because it is too expensive to pay the employees. So it is possible that Australia is facing a crisis of some sort if something isn't done to change the value of things. Of course, this is just the musings of a guy who has never been trained in economics and doesn't really know how it all works. But it seems to me that if a multi-national company, a company that really knows how to make money, deems it too expensive to operate on a holiday, when it would operate in home countries like the US, then there is a problem. Nevertheless...

I purchased the trip and set off at the bright and early time of 6 am on Wednesday. Our guide was Gander (or maybe Gender, with a hard 'g,' it was a bit difficult to tell for sure) and he is the owner and operator of the tour company. Gander is of Aboriginal descent. His father was a contractor working for the government helping build infrastructure for the Aboriginal communities. He was very interested in the whole culture and was asking questions of his hosts. He asked so many questions that eventually the chief for whom he was working stopped him and told him that he couldn't know all these answers unless he was initiated. So his father asked how to do that. The chief basically adopted him and made him a brother. Then the chief gave his final wife to Gander's father as a gift (they have arranged marriages in the Aboriginal culture, as well men having multiple wives), and the result was Gander and his brothers and sisters. When Gander got to be school age, his father sent him to school in Sydney, where he started to learn western culture and ways. So we had a guide that knew both the western culture as well as the Aboriginal culture. We were very privileged.

He has his own vehicle and can fix it himself. I know this because soon after we started out, there was some smoke coming out from under the hood somewhere and he had to stop to deal with. He ended up needing some tools and so we stopped at his home for a few minutes while got them. We met his wife and son who, in the words of his father, is f***ing gorgeous. He was quite the child, I will say, with huge blue eyes and blonde hair.

Because of the detour, we ended up later than Gander wanted and he rearranged the schedule. We had been scheduled to hit the crocodile cruise as the first thing on our way to the park, but he decided to make it the last thing on our way back instead. So our first stop (other than the pit stop) was to the park office to buy our tickets. It was a ticket office/rest stop/convenience store/restaurant/mini-zoo. There were two crocodiles there, a freshwater crocodile and a saltwater crocodile.

Then it was on to the park. Numerous times during the trip, Gander would point out some creature off the road, or beside the road. Sometimes he would spy something of interest and stop and pick it up to show us. And sometimes I have no idea how he would see these things as we were driving by at 100 km/h as they were sitting in trees 30 or 40 meters off the road, well hidden by their camouflaging. I guess it's just what you are trained to see. Anyway, the first such instance was a turtle that was making its way to someplace and it happened to be moving across the road. So Gander got it for a look.

Our first real stop in the park was in Jabiru, one of the park's towns. We stopped for lunch beside a nice little lake. Nice, that is, for a lake that can have inhabitants like itinerant crocodiles. Apparently one person didn't take note of the warning signs almost everywhere telling people to beware of serene seeming bodies of water where crocodiles might be lurking. There was a plaque to the guy's memory, a life cut short in his twenties. He went swimming in the lake and a saltwater crocodile came along and ruined his day. People are supposed to stay clear of the edges of all water in the park unless specifically told otherwise by our guide. I was going to be heeding that warning, I'll tell you.

After lunch, we headed to Nourlangie Rock. This was a name conferred by the whites who came to the area and confused it with another place called Nawurlandja. Signs now ask that people call it the proper names of Burrunggui (pronounced “boo-roon-goi”), which is the upper part of the rock, and Anbangbang, which is the lower part. Gander took us around to the paintings and started telling us about some of the stories behind the paintings and the culture of the Aborigines. First he started by telling us that there were partitions to the knowledge of the Aborigines. Almost all of it was either women's business or men's business. Women didn't know men's business and vice versa. He was quick to point out that it wasn't a matter of sexism or anything like that. It was the way the culture worked and it worked for thousands of years. There was also the partition of what insiders knew and what outsiders were allowed to know. And there were things we weren't going to be allowed to know. So there would be times when we would see a painting that he wouldn't talk about, and we needn't bother to ask about it because he wasn't going to tell us anything. It wasn't going to be because of rudeness, it was just that we weren't allowed to know whatever it was that it was about.

We began at a little cave, open at both ends. He began by telling us that that there were only a limited number of kinds of subjects in drawings. There were drawings with people (either living or spirits) and there were drawings with animals. People could be men, women, boys, or girls. One could tell by certain features that were included in the drawings. And one could tell if they were alive or spirits by the numbers of fingers or toes the figure had. Five fingers and toes, and the drawing was a human; more or less fingers and toes and it was a spirit. In addition, if the drawing had a figure that was upside down it was a warning. This cave turned out to be a birthing cave. Because it was open at both ends, air passed through and it stayed cool all the time. This was therefore a cave that had drawings that were women's business. The first drawing that he showed us was a picture showing that it was a birthing place. Unfortunately the drawing was too faint to turn out well in the lower light. He also pointed out another drawing nearby that took us a while to figure out. Eventually we worked out, with liberal hints from Gander, that it was a sex education drawing with various sex positions. Randy lot, those Aborigines.

Next we went along to another part of the rock and looked a painting with some animals in it. It's not too clear, but in the yellow blob to the right of what looks like the kangaroo, there is a drawing of a turtle. A long-necked turtle, as it was explained to us. And the turtle is upside down. So we had a warning that involved an animal, the long-necked turtle. Again, it took us a long time to work out the meaning of the painting, and it required hints from Gander that included the admonition that it was old art, and the Aborigines didn't engage in abstract art (so it would be quite literal and simple). Eventually one of our number suggested the very simple, “Don't catch them.” This was the correct answer. Yea!! And then we got the explanation of why there was a painting like that. The paintings were to give information to women and men, and they were also to make laws known. In this case, they had some fairly strong notions of conservation. For instance, the long-necked turtle was a part of the Aboriginal diet, in this area at least. So they would go out and hunt the turtles and eat them. At times, the population of the turtles would go down, and sometimes drastically so. They would be in danger, so the elders would decree that there would be no more hunting of the turtle. The painting was done to make known to all that there was a moratorium on long-necked turtle hunting. The turtle population would recover over a number of seasons and then the moratorium was lifted and hunting of the turtle would resume. The painting was left to remind people to be careful of the turtle population. (If only the rest of the world would learn from that example. We might still have dodos and other species that we have wiped out. And we might keep some of the species that are currently threatened, but that we are probably too short-sighted to stop from annihilating.)

On the other side of that painting was something that looked like a kangaroo. It turned out that it wasn't, although Gander was (mock) disgusted with for our lack of knowledge of how the kangaroo was big and would have trouble jumping around in the woods, so it obviously wasn't a kangaroo. It was actually a wallaroo, having something to with its ears and the shape of its snout. I don't think there was a moral to the painting, not that I remember anyway. It might simply have been a drawing of one of the indigenous species of the area.

We moved on to another rather interesting painting. There is a great deal in this painting. And a lot of the detail of it can't be easily seen in this photo. First, in the top right of the painting, there is a figure that has a ring around him. This is Namarrgon, the lightning god. He brings lightning and storms, and thus the rainy season. The ring is the lightning that he brings with him and throws down at the land. He has stick-like things on his elbows and knees that he bangs together after he throws the lightning, and that makes the thunder afterwards. Under the big figure on the left is a grasshopper-like thing (I think it was a grasshopper, for he talked about grasshopppers at this point and one in particular, Leichhardt's grasshopper. This grasshopper is endemic (only found in one specific spot) to the area below the plateau in Kakadu National Park. And it lives on only one plant, and it is the only animal that feeds on that plant. It hatches and begins to eat the plant and then starts to make mating calls. These calls can be heard for many miles in all directions, and can be heard from the areas near Burrunggui. And it has been found that it can be almost exactly timed (three weeks give or take about a day) from the time that the grasshoppers begin their calls to when the lightning season starts in Kakadu National Park. So, as soon as the Aborigines in the area heard the grasshoppers begin to call, they would know it was time to take shelter at Burrunggui, as lightning would strike and cause fires in the dry grasses of the park.

At the bottom of the painting is line of women who were dancing and in ceremonial dress. I forget the ceremony involved, it might simply have been something to do with the coming of the lightning, but above the women are a number of fish. One of the women is pregnant and above her is a fish that is upside down. Uh oh, one of us said. It was some kind of warning. Gander told us that the fish in question was forbidden to women who were pregnant. If pregnant women ate the fish, their babies came out sick. It has recently been found that that fish (I forget the name of the fish) in that particular area contains high levels of mercury. They Aborigines didn't know why there was a problem, but they did know there was a problem. Similarly, in another painting there was a warning sign about going to a particular place nearby, for anybody that did go there got sick. And in recent times there has been a lot of mining in that area for uranium. Again the Aborigines didn't know the reason, but they knew what happened and made a law to prevent people from getting sick.

It was somewhere around this point that Gander told us that the paintings only had a local meaning. A painting here at Burrungui had figures that might have been found in other tribes' paintings, but would only have a particular meaning to the Warrimal (the people who used to live at Burrunggui), but would have no meaning to the people of another area. Those peoples would have different paintings with different meanings.

The final part of the painting was the big figure on the top left. This was a part of a story about the laws against incest. Gander first told us that in every tribe, they had strong laws against incest, and in this case, incest was not just with usual meaning that we all know. Every person in the tribe had a connection to every other person in the tribe. There were two designations and everyone in the tribe was either one or the other. I forget the designations; they were rather complicated sounding. But if two people had the same designation, they were considered anathema to each other under the incest laws. This begins with the obvious sorts of connections, like brother and sister, mother and son, father and daughter, but ran to harder to discern connections with aunts and uncles and even mothers-in-law and such, to completely differently families. (If I had paid more attention in biology class, I might make a better explanation of this. Sorry. :) ) Suffice it to say that, as a tribe, they had a very strong knowledge of who was related, genetically, to whom and how closely. They used that knowledge to give each tribe member their designations and to make sure everyone knew who was anathema. And then they were forbidden to have anything to do with each other. This was not just a proscription against marriage and having children, but to complete severance of connections. As children, a brother and sister could play, work, even fight together as children will do, but as soon as they came of age, they could no longer have anything to do with each other. They couldn't talk; they couldn't be around each other; they couldn't even look at each other. Now it is, practically speaking, all but impossible in a relatively small tribe of people, to never be around each other, but it meant that all tribe members would participate in keeping the two apart. When two people who couldn't be around each other were coming close, but didn't know it, another member of the tribe would signal one or the other and they would change directions. If they did happen, for whatever reason to end up in each other's immediate vicinity, other tribe members would stand between them to mitigate it. I suppose this must have made it so that most of the time the tribe was segregated into groups of men and groups of women.

The story in the painting was of one such brother-sister pair. (Again, the names were difficult and I don't remember them.) One season the tribe was out in the bush and they heard the Leichhardt's grasshopper begin its call. The tribe began to move to Burrunggui. The brother and sister were behind and struggling to catch up. The brother had a temper and at one point grabbed his sister and dragged her off into the bush. They made their way up the escarpment and took the high road back to the camp at Burrunggui. The sister was mortified because she knew they were breaking the incest law, but she couldn't get away. The tribe couldn't figure out what had happened to the pair, but figured they would eventually find they way to Burrunggui, and wouldn't be breaking the incest law. But time passed and the tribe began to forget about them. It was months later that the brother and sister arrived at the top of the rock at Burrunggui. The brother went to sleep. The sister went out to the edge and looked down. Some children in the tribe came along, looked up and saw her and began to shout with joy for the return of the sister to the tribe. The sister was still mortified about breaking the incest law, and made a decision. She went in to her sleeping brother and took a feather from his headdress. She took it out to the cliff and arrived as other members of the tribe came to see what the fuss was about. They saw her take the feather and drive it into the stone of the cliff, whereupon a stone appeared, out of thin air. Everyone was mystified. She was calling the punishment spirits to mete her punishment for breaking the law. The brother, roused from sleep, came out on the cliff edge. Everyone now knew what had happened, and the brother knew he was caught. In a rage, he grabbed his sister and threw her from the cliff. She fell, but the punishment spirits grabbed her and spun her around and around. She stretched out and became the Rainbow Serpent, who slithered away and made the nearby Anbangbang billabong, then slithered to the base of a waterfall and sank into the pool at the bottom where she rests today, unable to go to the final resting place near the morning star (Venus) because of her transgression. The brother fled, knowing he was in deep do-do. The elders called a meeting and decided that he had to caught to face justice. A search party went out and eventually found him. He was brought back, tied to a tree, and had a fire set underneath him. His skin on his back scorched and became lumpy, and when the bindings on his hands and feet finally burned away, his stomach was smooth. He ran into a river or billabong and cooled off and became the crocodile. So ran the story anyway.

Gander also told us that this story, painted on the rock, was the last time it would ever be painted. The Warrimal Aborigines, the ones who had been in and used the area, are now an “extinct” group. Many chose to join the more western culture, with its trappings and technology, and lures. So many did this that the genetic integrity of the tribe was compromised and couldn't be maintained. There are still members of the tribe out there in the community at large, but the tribe is gone. So is the learning that was in the tribe. The stories and the paintings have, for want of a better term, a copyright on them. The people who paint them have gone through various levels of learning and initiation with the stories, until they reach a point of mastery, and ownership, over the story. It is then that they are allowed to paint the story. Nobody who has not reached that level is allowed to paint a story. The man who painted the story of the Lightning Man and the other parts that are in the painting was unable to pass on the knowledge of the story to anyone else. He painted the story in 1964, and is the last person to have the ownership of the story. It is now a dead story. I found that kind of sad.

It was about this time that we started running into other groups. But they were going the other way. I thought that was rather odd. And Gander said something about there being a particular order to the way the paintings needed to be presented. We would run into the groups, the guides would chat for a moment, then we would move off and wait for the other guides to finish their spiel and then Gander would continue with his explanations. And they weren't the same. This is not surprising as we had an Aboriginal guide and the other groups didn't. What did kind of surprise me was that all the signs for following the trail pointed the opposite way to the direction we were going and Gander didn't do anything to correct them. It seemed somewhat apparent that the National Parks Service didn't have much input from the Aboriginal keepers of the area and that, in all likelihood, the Aboriginal keepers of the area didn't offer much in the way of assistance to the Parks Service as they prepared the area for visitors. And it seemed somewhat sad to me, in this day and age that is supposedly about making reparations for what has happened in the past, the words of cooperation and such (not just here in Australia, but in other countries that have had a history of trying to obliterate the native populations), it's all just so much lip service when it comes right down to it. They are not cooperating. The Aborigines may have provided some of the stories, but didn't help develop any of the approach to the area. The Parks Service bulled on ahead with their interpretative trail for the paintings, but assumed they did it right even without Aboriginal input. They didn't put any caveats on the trail or their explanation plaques saying this was their understanding of what had been offered by the Aboriginal community. In a way, it seems to me to be just another subtle example of the same old story of distrust and separation. I found that kind of sad, too.

We passed further up the interpretive trail and saw, after Gander pointed it out to us, the Rainbow Serpent. It had to painted away from the main story because, even in the paintings, the incest law had to be obeyed. If the serpent, the sister, had been painted in the same painting as her brother, it would have been violating that law. And, said Gander (but I am not sure if he was serious or not), the painter would have been speared in the leg.

We passed more paintings with more explanations, most of which were by now becoming a big jumble in my head, but they all had a purpose and they all came from the lore of the people who used to use the area.

This one had something to do with rites of passage for boys as they pass into manhood.

From nearby we had a view of the escarpment that stands above the parklands, and is known as Arnhemland. Most of it is inaccessible to outsiders.

As we were driving away, we stopped and had a view of the rock that appeared when the sister of the incest story drove her brother's feather into the rock of the cliff.

After hearing about the stories behind the paintings at Burrunggui, we headed down the park to our camping area. This was a nice little place with a permanent shelter with nice little sleeping cots and a fire area. We settled back, as the sun set, and were treated to a fire, the first one for many weeks because of the rains, and a dinner kangaroo-meat burritos. Mmmmm... Tasty. And then, the coming up almost full, there was a very nice tree, that was useful in setting a nice photo.