The old man squatted on his haunches near the low fire. A fly crawled solemnly across his wrinkled foot, and when the old man twisted the foot to shoo the fly away, a tiny mist of dust hovered in the air and then filtered back to the red earth. The fly settled back and recommenced its crawl across the foot, but the man took no more notice and stared out into an evening sky made transparent by the last traces of another hot day. There was no horizon where he stared – just a merging between the spirits of dusk below and day above. Even had it been light there would have been no horizon – just an angry interplay between the combatants: red earth, red sun.

A distance into the half-light, the mission homestead blinked at the approaching dark and voices of singing and talking mingled up through the air. Most of the young went there of an evening for the social life. But the elders preferred to stay in the camp and talk quietly, or perhaps sit and contemplate the outback night. It would be different if there was a corroboree; then the young would rather be outside, green saplings eager for their transplant into the trees of the tribal life. A fleeting smile touched his face. Time would come.

Time always comes quickly enough. Too quickly when the lessons are bitter ones...

“I am an old man.
Old not in years
but in the burden of years
and with the weight
of the things they taught me.
Not the things they meant to teach,
but the truths they could not hide...”

Inside the humpy behind the squatting figure a voice coughed; an answering cough came from out in the darkness, with the scrabble of steps in the dusk and a gurgling growl. The steps would have passed by if the old man had not called out:

“Hey boy!”

“Yes?”

The steps approached and half a face appeared in the fire glow; a hand was holding a bridle of rope attached to a saturnine camel’s face.

“You were calling me, father?”

“I wanted to see the camel boy.”

“You are a new arrival not to know the name of the camel boy?”

“I have heard of you in the wind. You are Namatjira, I think.”

“You would not have heard my name in the wind, old man. My mother’s people were of the rocks and the trees in the dreamtime; my name was born in the labour of the red earth which gave birth to these rocks.”

“And such proud ancestry is come to this? Watering camels for the white-fella?”

“In return they have taught me, the good fathers.”

“What name did they give you?”

“Albert...”

“It’s a white-fella’s name. What did they teach you?”

“I can write the name they gave me. They have taught me to earn my own living. And there is perhaps the chance one day to visit their cities.”

“I have been to their cities.”

“You have just come from there?”

“It’s a long walk ... but the city makes you want to go walkabout very soon.”

The boy felt ill at ease with the stranger.

“Will you please excuse me, old man. Tomorrow is a long day, and the camels must be attended to.”

“What is tomorrow?”

“A white-fella is here from the city. He paints pictures and I am to carry his things while he works...”

The voice faded into the night, until there was only the camel’s snorts. Then silence, with an occasional clicking of cicadas. The old man nodded to himself as if agreeing with unheard voices, and the fire winked several times before sulking away from lack of attention.

“I learnt their lessons.
And lesson was
a dry land,
a land that lies
heavy on the mind -
and barren on the soul.
It suited them...

(II)

The day crept in slowly, like a baby learning to crawl; it picked its way across the saltbush tops and wondered at the stillness around; it silvered the moist edges of gum leaves and drew strange shapes on the red dust from the misshapen humpies – strange conglomerations of bits of packing cases, corrugated iron, bark and anything else that may have come from some ancestral rubbish tip to build a home.

Little moved in the thin air, except an even thinner voice singing a plaintive song in the mission kitchen.

An old figure raised his head from the ground and took in the stillness, but only for a moment before he lifted himself to his feet and stared impassively at the dead fire. The freshness of a young day had long since failed to have much significance for the old man; the years weighed too heavily on him for that. The business of existing was sufficient business for the moment.

He shrugged his shoulders, and gathered a few fallen strips of bark. A visit to a nearby fire which had been banked for the night solved the problem of relighting his. He looked up at a shrill group of crows circling overhead, then headed into the dry bush, the black shadows following his progress with interest. All was quiet again.

Shortly, he emerged from the bush with a large stick in one hand and a goanna in the other. The cacophony of crows in the distance proclaimed they had also found their breakfast.

Breakfast was a simple affair, and after it the old man found a shady patch beneath a ti-tree and took up his squatting position. He was facing the track leading to the mission, a track which shimmered its way out on through the plain into nothing. But even at this time of day the occasional mission vehicle melted its way along it. He watched the camp activities without emotion, except for a sense surrounding him that even as he watched this was not what he was watching. A sense that a million beings sighed from beyond the mists of the dreamtime to constitute his real existence. And a sense of waiting...

“Power rests...
Power rests not
in the hot urgency
of an action
but in the placid
who will sit
and wait...
and confound those
who laughed...
outliving their laughter...”

Some time through the day the haze of dust grew thicker at the extremity of the track. It billowed towards the mission and someone gave a warning shout. Eyes stopped in their work, eyes opened from their sleep, eyes hunted out the meaning of the growing cloud, until the cry: “It’s Albert!” brought a hundred running feet. A new car: dust-covered, thick with mud along the running boards, and the windshield spotted with innumerable insects caught unawares – but all the same, a New Car. Horn blaring, covered now in as many young bodies as could find a crevice or toe-hold, and all shouting and talking and laughing and singing, the car circled the homestead and stopped alongside the main verandah.

The driver climbed down and laughed at the eager bodies round him trying to touch the figure of the moment and share in the aura of the successful man. Albert mounted the steps to where the fathers were grouped and greeted them each in turn. Their faces said “welcome”, and their manner said “your people have good cause to be proud of you”, and the building said “allow me to honour you with my simple comforts”, as it enfolded the group in the coolness of the frugal lounge. It gave begrudging entrance also to the Arunda elders.

Outside, the men clustered around the new car and admired the symbols of success, while the women called children back and stood watching in a semi-circle nearby.