This post is titled Position Doubtful and was first published on 4 March 2017
Ngurrju-mayi?
On 12th May 1873 the explorer Peter Warburton camped near a small hill south west of Yuendumu. There was a lunar eclipse that night. Warburton put the hill on his maps as Mount Eclipse…. Pink Floyd- Brain Damage/Eclipse…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM2ZAU95AaU
Warburton described the area as uninhabited. Long before Warburton passed through the region, the non-inhabitants had named the hill Ikipali.
When we first arrived in Yurntumu I was working for Central Pacific Minerals. Japangardi taught me the names of the places near where we were looking for radioactivity in the Carboniferous Mount Eclipse Sandstone. Pikirly, Yirnmaji, Warnajurrpa, Wijinpa, Raparlpa, Palkura, Wanapi (Just south of the Patmungala Syncline) Kunalka, Warlukurlangu, Kanaji, Kirirdi, Yipiri, Mijinparnta, Ramarakujurnu, and indeed Ikipali.
I used air-photos in my job. When some Warlpiri men showed a curious interest in these, I laid them out. Within minutes the men excitedly were reading these photos and naming every little hill and creek. We had no television back then and none of these men had ever been up in an aircraft.
Some of my first friendships forged in Yuendumu were the result of my having bothered to learn these place names.
Kim Mahood’s father, on writing of a 1962 expedition in search of a stock route wrote: “… didn’t auger too well for the rest of the trip, particularly as the only landmark marked anywhere near our route was marked Position Doubtful…”
As Kim explains in her book of the same name (‘Position Doubtful’), her father was referring to a landmark labelled McFarlanes Peak on an aeronautical (1:1,000,000 scale) map. Printed on the map, under McFarlanes Peak was (‘PD’)
“The term lodged in my mind as a metaphor for the way in which white Australians move through and occupy the country…..it seems to me that our position in relation to the remote parts of the country is more doubtful than it has ever been.
Early during the Intervention, when I still attended meetings under the naïve illusion and vain hope I might be able to make a difference, when it came my turn to introduce myself I said:
“All of us white-fellows need to from time to time stand in front of a mirror and ask ourselves the question ‘What the fuck are we doing here?”
It was my way of expressing us kardiya’s doubtful position. I bow to Kim Mahood’s better choice of words.
As a geologist how could I possibly resist a chapter titled ‘Songlines and Faultlines’?
Having ever so slightly straddled the cultural faultline, both sides of which Kim Mahood so beautifully and eloquently describes, how could I possibly not highly recommend this book?
It isn’t the first time I quote from ‘Teach Me, My God and King’:
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G0MtBLtLrQ
Kim has indeed espied the heaven, and in this book shares her vision with us.
No amount of ‘Closing the Gap’ reports, or politically motivated apologies, or constitutional reform, or ‘Aboriginal Studies” can match Kim’s book which is sub-titled ‘mapping landscapes and memories’
The book has a lot to teach us non-Indigenous Australians, it ought to be part of the national curriculum.
Blackarm Band- Our Home our Land…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd5USIuYOM0
and from the other side of the world: Woodie Guthrie.. This Land is your land , This land is my land…There was a big high wall there, that tried to stop me, sign was painted ‘private property’….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxiMrvDbq3s
Ngaka-na nyarra nyanyi,
Jungarrayi
PS-Suggest you visit Scribe (the publishers) website:
https://www.scribepublications.com.au/explore/insights/position-doubtful-photo-gallery