Andy's Aboriginal Story

My mom and I spent our last day in Australia at Uluru, the massive 500-million-year-old rock that juts diagonally out of the red sand of central Northern Territory.

The national park is an oasis of waterfalls and shade within a desert similar to eastern Oregon or southern Idaho.

Pictographs illustrate how aboriginal people warmed themselves with fire in the caves, gathered seeds and roots, and hunted kangaroos around that rock for at least 60,000 years.

We were lucky enough to spend the afternoon with Andy, an aboriginal range manager and father of four who overcame his shyness to share some of his culture with us.

Andy spends most of his time choosing where and when to light small fires to encourage new growth and reduce the risk of huge fires, a common practice across the Northern Territory that requires finesse and knowledgeable reading of the landscape.

But that day, Andy shared aboriginal traditions with nine tourists.

He showed us which trees make the best spear shafts and women’s digging sticks and which are best for spear points.

Wrapped kangaroo tendons and sticky tree pitch hold the spear point on the shaft.

One audience member asked Andy if he hunts kangaroos with a spear.

His smile spread slowly with his words:

“No, I use a gun.”

But kangaroos are harder to find because of all of the wild camels roaming the desert.

Like wild horses in the U.S., imported camels have overtaken the desert with too much of a good thing, overgrazing the range.

Like many traditional cultures, women’s business was separate from men’s business.

It’s hard to hunt with a crying baby on your back so women gathered food according to the season of plenty.

It’s hard to grind tiny seeds into edible paste, too.

Just when Andy showed which seeds were plentiful in this season, a breeze scattered them out of his hand.

My frustration with that breeze even though I didn’t need to eat belied my lack of skill and patience for turning grains into food whether I use a mortar and pestle or a combine.

At one stop on our tour, we sat in a circle while Andy told the story of his great-grandfather, sometimes drawing in the sand, sometimes passing photos around.

Andy spoke softly and slowly.

He built the story piece by piece, repeating phrases and adding a little more, then pausing.

He told of his great-grandfather, Paddy Uluru, on a hunting trip in 1938 when he discovered Europeans at a watering hole.

Paddy and his friends were shackled and taken almost 300 miles to prison in Alice Springs.

They managed to escape, but a friend was shot.

Andy’s great-grandfather hid 200 miles away from Uluru for 30 years before finally coming back to his boyhood home and leading the campaign to return aboriginal lands to the traditional caretakers.

With every pause in Andy’s story, he waited for one of us to repeat his phrase, quickly correcting us if we said it differently.

He was modeling how his family passed stories, traditions and life lessons to the next generation.

Once the elders decided a young person was ready, the child would learn more stories and more complicated lessons.

The child had to earn the privilege of understanding how and why his family lived the way they did.

Non-aboriginal people are considered children so none of us has access to that information.

I asked Andy about some history of white people on this land.

His curt response told me I had accidentally crossed a cultural line.

“That’s not my story to tell,” he said.

Fair enough.

I said Andy would be welcome in my home if he ever came to the U.S.

He said he is too afraid to travel to the U.S.

Too many guns.

His response surprised me, but maybe it should not have.

Andy and I both learned a bit about how outsiders see us that day.