A camp guide for World Expeditions fills hikers with knowledge. Photo / Anna Sarjeant
You’ll cover 25,000 steps a day while walking the Larapinta Trail, but it’s encounters with the Aboriginal Arrernte People that will take you a step closer to understanding the land, writes Anna Sarjeant
In Australia, British folk tend to wear their “Pommy” pet name with pride, as we do most things, even if we’re labelled “hooligans” having destroyed the entire isle of Lanzarote in a week.
Laughing things off, especially if the mood is uncomfortable or embarrassing, is a default most people can probably relate to, but sometimes, as I found out recently, you have to wipe the smile off your face and find peace with discomfort.
It’s June and I’m standing in the Australian Outback listening to Kumalie Riley, an Aboriginal elder, conducting a Welcome to Country. And I have the overwhelming urge – not for the first time in the 10 years since I relocated to New Zealand – to do a runner. The truth can be a hard pill to swallow.
We’re at Simpson’s Gap, a 20-minute drive from Alice Springs, on the afternoon before we embark on the Larapinta Trail - one of Australia’s Great Walks - with World Expeditions. As we’ll be traversing sacred First Peoples’ land, it’s important that we have this welcome and introduction.
The Arrernte (pronounced Arrunda) people are the traditional custodians of Alice Springs and the land we now stand. While the welcome is, for the most part, a fascinating insight into the Arrernte way of life, there’s no avoiding the circumstances, both past and present, in which the natives have been failed by outsiders. I appreciate not every ancestor was a barbarian; not every English 18-year-old trashes the holiday resort, but there’s always unease by association.
The discomfort is self-inflicted of course; Riley doesn’t chastise or impart blame. She’s simply recounting history, but it’s her resignation to the facts that is particularly confronting.
Visiting the Northern Territory from New Zealand, I am the only member of our contingent who isn’t Australian-based and I have no doubt the others have all heard similarly harrowing details before. Unfortunately, my ignorance is palpable. These accounts seem to have been left out of my 1990s British curriculum schooling. In the 1990s at least. Hence my fast-tracked Aboriginal history lesson feels so shocking.
More than 4000km away from my 1-year-old son, hearing about the Stolen Generations has me wiping my jaw off the floor. For the uninitiated like me, this was a period from 1910 to as late as the 1970s, when government policy allowed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children to be forcibly removed from their families. We are shown black and white photos of Aboriginal children, with a handwritten note beneath requesting which child they’d like to have. And by have, I mean kidnapped on their behalf.
“...If taken, I’ll have the second from the top.”
The request wouldn’t look amiss when picking buns from a bakery.
I attempt to remain stoic: indignation, shock or even tears feel wildly self-indulgent under the circumstances, but as the sun begins its descent, a quote from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol springs - albeit melodramatically - to mind. Ebenezer Scrooge, already scarred, pleads for respite, “Spirit. Show me no more”.
I’m told that back at camp there will be an introduction to Arrernte bush foods and I’m fearful the revelations will haunt me further.
As it turns out, I can relax. Rayleen Brown’s arch-nemeses are big food corporations and she’s taking them on, one bush tomato at a time.
Founder and owner of Kungkas Can Cook bushfoods, Brown is a grandmother, a chef, an activist, an entrepreneur and a revolutionist. She will leave a legacy. As we tuck into a smorgasbord of bush-made cuisine, Brown explains how the land – as barren as it looks – is a natural food bowl; a resource she uses at her own Kungkas Cafe.
I try a tiny “bush tomato”, not much bigger than a pea and it packs a formidable punch. Not unlike Brown herself, who is barely five foot three and actively taking on the conglomerates to get more bushfood on to supermarket shelves. Most impressively, she’s championing the Aboriginal land where it grows and specifically, the Aboriginal women who harvest it.
Increasingly featured on TV shows such as Masterchef, and steadily making its way to high-end Sydney restaurants, Brown is well aware that bushfood is on the cusp of trending. As savvy as she is enthusiastic, she is already putting an initiative in place to prevent large companies from mass harvesting the crops themselves. Much like the six-star energy-rating sticker on your fridge, Brown’s proposed flower logo will indicate how much of the bush ingredient was sourced directly from Aboriginal gatherers.
I’m both heartened by Brown’s passion and anxious that history might repeat itself. The perceived richer, stronger, mightier have a habit of taking things that aren’t rightfully theirs. Accounts of the stolen children wounded me, and I now find myself fiercely protective of the bush tomato.
That night, however, I sleep soundly. There are no nightmares warning me to put right centuries of wrong. I feel privileged to be hiking in Arrernte country. You can’t rewrite history, or run from it, but you can acknowledge it - and admire the ways in which it’s shaped the land and the people we see and meet today.
GETTING THERE
Air NZ, Qantas, Jetstar and LATAM fly direct from Auckland to Sydney International Airport. Transfer to Sydney’s Domestic Airport and fly with Qantas to Alice Springs in just over three hours.
DETAILS
World Expeditions offer various multi-day treks along the Larapinta Trail. worldexpeditions.com
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