The Dealer is the Devil Read online

  My car had been hot-wired by petrol-sniffing teenagers who stole provisions from the Balgo store before going on a wild rampage across the country. A week later it limped into Derby on the northwest coast with the bullbar pushed hard back against the radiator, number plates missing, and every light and lens broken. It had travelled 800 kilometres off-road, ploughing through thickets, side-swiping trees and bashing into rocks. Every single panel was dented, as if hailstones the size of cricket balls had been pounded into the duco. Miraculously, it could still be driven.

  The police had known the car would turn up eventually, and it was soon in custody. All the boys except the driver had scattered amongst the many surrounding Aboriginal encampments.

  It had taken me years to muster the funds for a Toyota Landcruiser, but it was the precious cargo that mattered more than anything. I’d spent my last $60,000 on the contents of the crates inside. The teenagers would have had no idea of their value. Each contained limited edition prints by Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, Jack Britten, Hector Jandanay and children from the Warmun community at Turkey Creek. I was taking them to the artists to be signed. They had been painstakingly numbered, wrapped with layers of tissue, and sealed to keep out the dust that would eat its way into the cabin as I drove along the thousands of kilometres of corrugated road.

  Exhausted after days of endless driving I had parked the car outside the church accommodation block, a rock-and-iron mesh fortress known locally as the ‘Balgo Hilton’. I’d reached under the front seat to grab the crumpled brown paper bag containing $25,000 in cash, but I’d left the five sealed wooden crates in the car, along with swags, camping equipment, provisions, water canisters, spare fuel, art materials, cassettes and musical instruments. I’d slept deeply: so deeply that I woke long after the piercing community alarm sounded the start of the school day.

  By midday, however, the full magnitude of my dilemma had become all too apparent. I was standing forlornly on the verandah of the old art centre, praying for news, when a battered ute pulled up alongside. A large, thickset, dark man alighted. His face was as striking as a prize bull with a large flat nose, and flaring sinuses fanned out across his cheeks.

  ‘G’day,’ he said as he tipped the large brimmed hat from his head. ‘Harold Boxer, Chairman of Karanya Station. Reckon I might have something here that will interest you.’

  Slowly turning, he pointed to the back of the ute. There I could see a number of wooden crates, wrapped in thick plastic. I whipped round to the back and lifted one of the boxes to the ground.

  ‘Oh, you beauty!’ I turned to him with incredulity. ‘Where the hell did you find them?’

  ‘As soon as I saw them names on the boxes,’ said Harold, ‘I knew they belonged to artists. Old Rover and Queenie; I know that mob. Figured I’d better bring them boxes in to the art centre.’

  One, two, three, four … I couldn’t believe my good fortune. But where was the fifth and largest box?

  ‘There seems to be one missing … it was the largest one. You didn’t see it? There was nothing else?’

  Harold paused, as if reconstructing the scene in his mind’s eye.

  ‘Don’t recall,’ he said. ‘Might be stuff scattered around, bits of paper and plastic. Don’t think I missed anything.’

  My heart sank. Of course he didn’t miss anything. Aboriginal trackers are the best in the world. But the largest box contained the most valuable prints by the most important artists – they were worth more than all the rest combined.

  Harold must have seen my consternation. He scratched his head.

  ‘Got a few things to do,’ he said, pausing for what seemed like a long time. ‘But I reckon I can take you back out there if you like. It’s about 30 K up toward the Tanami Road.’

  I was ready to wait as long as it took, but within half an hour we were on the road. Two kilometres out, Harold made a slight indication with two fingers of his left hand perched on top of the steering wheel, and took the left fork onto a sandy, narrow, seldom-used track. We drove along and skirted around the old shortcut that had been used by locals before the big wet washed it out two years earlier. Fifteen minutes later, in the middle of endless scrub, he stopped.

  ‘Look here,’ he said eagerly. ‘See that? Those tracks, that’s your car now. Toyota, right? Them tracks about 30 hours old.’

  I had no idea how he could tell that.

  ‘Look!’ he exclaimed a moment later. ‘See that, see that! See how he put on the brakes there …?’

  I’ve watched Aboriginal trackers at work many times over the years and it always fascinates me. I’ve been with old men with poor hearing and failing eyesight who could ‘see’ camels on the horizon only visible to me through binoculars, or ‘hear’ clap sticks ringing in the distance, while I could hear nothing. Harold had been honing his uncanny ability since he was a little boy, and now he was following the tracks intently.

  As we hit the crest of a dune he pulled up and turned off the engine.

  ‘Here it is, this is the place where I found it,’ he said, matter-of-factly.

  I got out and surveyed the scattered litter which had been pulled out of the back of my car, caught by the wind and stuck on the prickly spinifex barbs. Torn plastic and brochures were run over by the wheels of the departing vehicle. They’d been imprinted with the tread of tyres and red dust. Some art materials, still unpacked, lay on the ground along with a few clothes, but little remained of value.

  ‘Look,’ said Harold. ‘See here …? Five boys in the car threw all the stuff out to make more room.’

  I stared at the incomprehensible scribble of markings, realising there was little hope of recovering anything else. There was nothing more we could do here.

  We spoke little on the return journey. At the art centre I looked in my wallet. I had only $20 on me. Feeling mean, I handed it to him.

  ‘No worry,’ he said. ‘You had a bad time. It okay. You keep it. I’m happy.’

  With this, Harold drove off, leaving me once again in front of the art centre. Freda Napanangka was standing with Dominic Martin and several other painters in the shade of the only tree for 20 metres. Freda was one of the most influential women in the art centre. I’d known her for years and hosted her during a previous visit to Sydney. Dressed in a floral print shift, and carrying an oldfashioned handbag, she was as straight-backed and well spoken as a member of the Country Women’s Association.

  ‘You heard about your car yet?’ she asked, looking very concerned. I shook my head.

  ‘That car been gone over Wangkatjungka side!’ she said, referring to a neighbouring clan. ‘Him somewhere north of Mary River.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I asked, taken slightly aback.

  ‘People been talking. We heard from over that way. You moodiga up that way.’

  Moodiga is creole for motor car.

  ‘He’ll turn up, won’t take long now,’ she said confidently.

  ‘Them families whose kid took you moodiga, they should give you money. It real shame for us artists,’ she said thoughtfully.

  ‘No, no,’ I replied. ‘I don’t want money. But I reckon something should be done.’

  Eager to escape the searing heat, I crossed the 50 metres to the church and accommodation block. As I opened the door, Father Brian, who’d been living in the community for 20 years, greeted me. I told him about Freda’s concern and her suggestion that I be financially compensated by the boys’ parents. His reaction was unexpectedly positive.

  ‘It’s time there was some accountability,’ he said. ‘As long as they get away with it, things will never get better here. I think you should insist on some compensation.’

  The only compensation I was interested in was a painting or two to make up for the art that had been stolen. I was facing ruin. Apart from the $25,000 in cash, my last red cent had been invested in the prints. None of them was insured for goods in transit. The most important artists were waiting at Turkey Creek to sign prints that I didn’t have.

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p; Over the next few days I waited anxiously. Finally the Halls Creek police rang to tell me they’d recovered some items from the missing fifth box – a pile of dog-eared and grubby prints on paper had been found at a familiar camping spot by the Mary River, just five hours’ drive to the northwest. The young vandals, it seemed, had been throwing the contents of the last box out all along the road from Balgo to Derby, where they were eventually arrested.

  I hitched a ride to Halls Creek on the refrigerated truck that delivered supplies to the shop twice a week, and walked over to the police station to see the damaged prints they’d recovered. The police had treated them as if they were just a bunch of posters, not valuable artworks. They’d been chucked in the back of the van, where they sat until I pointed out they needed to be placed carefully in storage. They were not happy to comply. Perhaps they just saw me as some arty cappuccino-swilling city dickhead.

  Despondent, I set off for Derby to collect my car, and spent the next two weeks walking up and down the mud flats, eating hamburgers and drowning my sorrows in the local pub. Derby is not a place for a holiday, and I was stranded, morose and furious at my own stupidity. I spent hours on the phone to Sydney and Perth, project-managing the car repairs. It would have been a write-off in the city, but out here I had to get it back on the road. And the 25 grand in the brown paper bag really was my last chip.

  Nothing could be done about the interior, but eventually the car was roadworthy … just. I left, determined to drive the 3,000 kilometres back to Sydney via Turkey Creek. At least I would return with the prints I’d retrieved, signed by the artists. It was now almost a month after the theft, and I decided to spend my first night on the road camping beside the Mary River.

  By now I’d spent many long hours reconstructing what the teenagers must have done. The car had been easily opened and the steering lock disengaged. It was hot-wired after being rolled 100 metres from the church. They’d raced out of town, half of them hanging off the bullbar and the roof racks. At the crest of the sand dune they stopped to dump half the contents so they could all climb aboard. Then they turned into Billiluna, a fly-speck of a town, to see if a few mates would like to come along for the ride. As one snuck in to rouse them, the driver ploughed into the cyclone wire gate of the garage and shouldered the office door. Within seconds they had two jerry cans of petrol and about $400 in old worn notes. After grabbing cans of food, frozen kangaroo tails and batteries for their Walkman, they made a hasty escape, with a second car full of mates, as the high-pitched ring of the alarm raised the tiny township.

  Just before reaching Halls Creek, they made camp. It was 4 am and they had to wait for the Animal Bar in the Kimberley Hotel at Halls Creek to open. At mid-morning they set off to a dry riverbed where they thoroughly concealed the car. Halls Creek was the only place to get a drink for up to 200 kilometres in any direction. The hotel sprawled across several hectares, surrounded by cyclone wire and a drifting population of Aboriginal people in various stages of inebriation. Inside, the hotel looked more like a fancy resort with its pool and patio where the local businessmen, off-duty police, bureaucrats and tourists relaxed, oblivious to the blackfellas’ entrance tucked around the back of the hotel. Here, out of sight, was the Animal Bar, the only place Aboriginal people from Balgo could buy booze between Halls Creek and Rabbit Flat, 500 kilometres to the southeast. Every morning the nearby caravan park and surrounding streets were littered with bodies and green cans. The promise of a can or two was all that was needed to induce someone old enough to procure several slabs of beer for the boys.

  Loaded up, they headed to a favourite campsite 80 ‘klicks’ away beside the Mary River. Settled far from the main roads, they lit a fire. Tipping petrol into old baked bean tins for easy inhalation, they passed the toxic fumes round, occasionally vomiting up the beer and takeaway food. They used a rock to pound dents across the car’s fender, and my Polaroid camera to take lairy mug shots of each other sitting on the bullbar.

  Now, a month later, I pulled into the camping ground at twilight and began to check all the rubbish bins. I knew it was futile, but I was hardly thinking straight. Drawing nought, I drove around aimlessly, reluctant to join the rows of campervans. I headed for the river, and standing on the bridge, tried to imagine which way the boys would have headed. The dry sandy embankments meandered between small glistening lakes of still water, surrounded by weeping gums, tea tree, lignum and blue bush. Knowing they’d avoid the public campsites and would follow the jumbled tracks to a secret spot by a waterhole, I decided to head north. At a rocky platform overlooking a picturesque billabong, I finally unrolled my swag, lit a fire, and watched the reflections of surrounding trees and tussock grass on the river’s silvery surface. I lit a joint and poured a glass of red wine. After all the stress of the theft I was overcome by a sense of calm. With the moon the finest of slivers settling on its side like the curve of a coolamon, the night was pitch black and the stars so dense they formed clouds of light studded with a million jewels.

  At first light, rock-hopping down through the woodland scrub, I traversed rock platforms and intermittent washes. Below to the left a stretch of water hugged the rocks by a small sandy beach. Skipping the fallen driftwood and grassy verges, I walked down to the water’s edge.

  I stood quite still, and looking down spied a small piece of torn paper on the sand. With the clarity of a kick in the guts, I knew instantly that I had stumbled on the very place where the boys had camped at the beginning of their escapade. I could hardly believe it. Deep below the still, brackish water, I could see unusual white shapes. I waded in until waist deep, before ducking down beneath the surface. It was so murky I could barely see. But there, along the bottom of the billabong, lay dozens of prints scattered across the pebbles and sand.

  I tried to lift a sheet of paper but it tore and disintegrated in an instant. Standing naked and alone in this idyllic bushland setting, I grappled with my perplexing dilemma. I ducked once more beneath the surface, and after several experiments, learned to use the current created by my hand movements to roll each sheet tightly enough to be spooned, and removed by tilting it vertically to release the water as it broke the surface.

  Eventually, dozens of rolled prints by Rover Thomas, Jack Britten and Queenie McKenzie lay drying in the sun. I sat soaking up its warmth, a cup of billy tea in my hand, looking out across the water, marvelling at its beauty, and my fortunate life. As I lay back on my swag with the sun glinting in my eyes, I wondered what the boys were up to now.

  One thing I knew for certain: They weren’t in jail repenting their sins. The report published in The West Australian four weeks earlier had quoted my disgust that in a community of 700 people there was no permanent police presence. It noted that five male juveniles had been charged with car theft and burglary after raiding the Billiluna community store at the start of their rampage, but it failed to report that the boys had been flown back to Balgo, and were up to their old tricks once more, within days of having been arrested. ‘Black deaths in custody’ have been a stain on Australia’s national consciousness for at least a century, yet Aboriginal inmates still continue to die either by their own hand or as a result of injuries, to this day. Because no-one wanted to risk another 14-year-old hanging himself in jail, these boys probably wouldn’t be punished for their crimes until they were much further down the track. By then, redemption would be beyond them.

  Jack Britten print rescued from the bottom of the Mary River, Western Australia.

  Astounded at the river’s edge.

  As Father Brian had said, no-one wanted to take responsibility for their fate.

  Of course there is more to the story than a bunch of delinquents who should have been disciplined. All across Australia, frustrated former nomads now live sedentary lives in communities overburdened with what they call ‘sorry business’. For over 100 years they’ve been trying to adjust to the collapse of an entire way of life. As European settlement pushed across the continent, the fabric of the complex Aboriginal
kinship system and the subtle, ancient interrelationship of landscape and lore disintegrated, leaving young Aboriginal people to confront a world through which traditional wisdom cannot hope to guide them. Sexually transmitted diseases, malnutrition, high infant mortality rates, alcoholism, diabetes and renal failure have all taken an incremental and increasingly terrible toll.

  What has fascinated and even obsessed me during my 35 years working with Aboriginal people has been the way elders in certain communities have responded to this dire situation. Old artists like those who produced my ill-fated prints took to painting using Western mediums, with a very specific goal in mind. Many of them believed that their millennia-old culture was dying with them. If it could not be passed on to younger generations, it had to be preserved in some other way. That was the impetus behind the first portable paintings on bark, brushes dipped in acrylic paint, and the first traditional patterns transposed onto squares of white canvas. It was a last ditch declaration of independence, and it created an invaluable record of a disappearing world.

  But it had done little to assuage the enormous sense of loss and grief eating its way through Aboriginal communities. My car thieves’ crimes were symptomatic of some of the sadder things I have learned about Aboriginal survival. So many Aboriginal communities I’ve visited have padlocks on petrol bowsers and buildings enclosed in cyclone wire: evidence of desperate attempts to keep the community safe from drug-fuelled violence and theft.

  I left the prints to dry overnight and scrambled back to my camp. I pushed a large log across my fire and banked the coals. Lying in my swag while the night closed in, noises in the dark evoked wild imaginings. Was that a camp dog or a dingo howling in the distance? I heard the crack of distant gunshot. Then another. Alone, in the middle of nowhere, I suddenly felt vulnerable. Flukey wind gusts, the rustle of the tarp, faint shadows across the moon … I even thought I saw intoxicated boys dancing crazily, whooping up the night and stoking themselves into a frenzy, charged on toxic fumes and alcohol and dancing like zombies to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ and Coloured Stone’s ‘Koonibba Rock’ (ironically named after the sacred rockhole and corroboree ground). Tearing away the lid, they threw the crate onto the fire. They tore the large wrapped parcels open, exploding the sheets of printed paper onto the sand: Jack Britten’s Bungle Bungle Ranges; Queenie McKenzie’s Old Texas Downs; Rover Thomas’s Punmu – the Universe in white dots on a plain black background. There were dozens of them. Hundreds. All the same. Picking them up in bundles they hurled them onto the fire. Crackles of burnt paper flew into the sky. They cast more into the river where they briefly hovered before sinking. They took dozens of Polaroids, standing on the car bonnet, draped over the bullbar, their faces contorted by the petrol fumes and firelight. The photos would prove they’d had one hell of a time. They’d prove it wasn’t all bullshit. They really did bust the gleaming white Toyota and ride it until it was spent.