Driving Mr Nelson

Breeze rushes in through the open passenger car window and this intensifies the cold as I drive into one of Alice Springs’s most notorious town camps. Driving into a town camp isn’t something most non-Aboriginal people like me do regularly. I have lived in Alice Springs for the last six years, and I read the headlines. From what I have read and heard I simply call this place Murder Camp due to its reputation, and I wonder if my passenger Harry knows what I’m thinking. I try to appear nonchalant.

It’s winter and the temperature is around six degrees. Tonight’s temperature, the announcer on the radio says, will go down to one degree.

Harry is looking for his son. “Drive slow,” he says as I drive past several of the derelict houses. An elderly man with a Hawks beanie and a blue bucket is walking into scrub. Harry puts his head out the car window and calls out to him in Warlpiri; the elderly man hears Harry and slowly walks over to the car. The old man explains to Harry the camp has run out of firewood. No one in the camp has gathered any, nor have any organisations dropped any off. So the old man is looking for wood to burn.

A crowd is congregating around a house nearby. Country music blares from a white car. Old and young huddle together and I recognise a tall, well-built man with a cut under his left eye walking around slapping anyone who comes near him. For a moment I think it is Harry’s son, Adrian, but it isn’t. A cluster of women look at us briefly and wave. It is really a desolate place, but like all town camps it also has beautiful smiles and playing children.

“No, not here,” says Harry as the women call out after him for money and make hand gestures. My mind ticks over … In this setting people ask for things without please or thank you. Perhaps there is no use for these words in a society in which every person’s duties were once clearly defined. They cannot seem to understand why anyone who is entitled to give an order should say please or why thank you is politer than a grunt.

“Nothing,” mouths Harry. “They are mad. That mob is from Hermannsburg!”

For a while we drive and neither of us says a thing. It’s like that with Harry. “I’m what I appear to be,” he says.

Nobody tells Harry what to do. He is the boss. Harry is a proud Warlpiri man and an old land rights campaigner who is well respected amongst whites and his own people. He’s not of the old world or of the new—for Harry it is some uncomfortable place in the middle.

I’ve known Harry for several years and I can see he is getting burnt out despite his clean-shaven, youthful appearance. He often wishes for the younger men in his community to step up and take more responsibility, but this isn’t happening, he tells me. “I’m retired but I can’t stop fighting for what is right!”

Mostly Harry lives out in the community of Yuendumu 293 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs on the Tanami Track, on a community largely made up of Warlpiri people, with a population of around a thousand. Yuendumu, one of the larger remote communities in central Australia, is located within the Yuendumu Aboriginal Lands Trust area, which includes numerous outstations. It was established in 1946 by the Native Affairs Branch of the Australian government to deliver rations and welfare services. In 1947 a Baptist mission was established there. Today, some of the services and facilities available in Yuendumu include three community stores, school, airstrip, swimming pool, church, an old people’s program, women’s centre and safe house. Yuendumu retains links with other Warlpiri communities in the region, including Lajamanu, Willowra and Nyirripi. It’s an incredible place, just as Calcutta or Mars are incredible places. Yet it is hard to believe any of these places would be in Australia, so far from the oppression of the Third World or the unknown of space.

When Harry comes to Alice Springs he stays in any one of the town camps and walks everywhere, stopping here and there for meetings and chats and the odd drink or two. He often drops into my house immaculately dressed in a long-sleeved collared shirt and trousers, and with impeccable English, asks for money or a lift or cigarettes. My wife, who has known Harry for at least ten years, has told me this cannot go on. “We don’t have money to simply give away. Harry can help himself,” she says. Yet I don’t want Harry to stop knocking at my door. I like the fact that we have an interaction, it makes things seem normal. After all we do live in Alice Springs.

I often wonder why Harry asks me for these favours. I have trouble reconciling my code of behaviour to his. All the same, Harry must be near his seventieth year and so occasionally I go out of my way to help him even though it annoys me. Sometimes I refuse.

Today I’m helping him out. We drive further into Murder Camp looking for Harry’s family and in particular his son. A brown dog rushes in front of the car. I slow down. The dog looks at me indignantly and slinks away as someone calls out to it. “This is a nice camp,” insists Harry. I wonder if I look uncomfortable. Did he hear me call this place Murder Camp? Or am I just being paranoid?

Most of the houses we pass are eerily quiet and seem abandoned. The magnificent MacDonnell Ranges look beautiful as always as the sun begins to set behind them. The streets are empty. We drive past a construction site and see some white people are at work. They look as out of place as I feel.

“What’s that?”

“Building,” replies Harry. “One house,” he says. “So much money goes into building one house.”

I drive until Harry sees a yellow house and tells me to stop. “You can pull in here,” he says softly. It is a house full of women, who are sitting outside on a veranda. On corrugated tin is a small fire with tiny coals and dying embers. A woman throws sticks onto the fire to coax it back to life. As Harry and I step out of the car and walk up, the women look at me curiously. Harry introduces me as his friend yet I feel awkward like an intruder. One of the women is his wife and the others are her sisters. The women seem to have summed up the situation. Harry begins to talk in Warlpiri, which I can’t understand.

It is getting dark and I notice that amongst the women is a man in a wheelchair. He seems happy to be there surrounded by family, but for me it’s time to leave. I don’t like being in the town camps, especially at night. Harry is with his family even though he hasn’t found his son.

Just as I am about to leave a pick-up truck arrives with a smashed front window. Immediately, I think the vehicle is perfect for collecting wood. The young driver gets out. It’s one of Harry’s nephews. He has a carton of VB. It is cold and I know the family want to get stuck into the carton. Firewood will have to wait.

“I’ll see you some time, young fella,” Harry says. I leave him as he waves at me. The temperature drops another several degrees and I drive to my warm yellow house, to my family, where my wife has dinner cooked and ready for me. I often lie in bed at night wondering how my friend Harry and others like him are doing.

Christopher Raja was born in Calcutta and lives
 in Alice Springs. His play Drew’s Seizure was performed in 2009 in Alice Springs.