Written in stone

IN a makeshift court, before politicians, lawyers, a famous novelist and 300 locals, a judge grants native title to the Jangga people. For Col McLennan, it's been a long journey.

Col McLennan

FLECKS of white scarring mark the backs of his hands like bonfire sparks against skin he calls the colour of copper. The working hands of a ringer. Two pendants hang from his necklace: an acoustic guitar and the head of a horse. He wears two leather belts, one to hold up his jeans, one to hold his knife. The clock in his Pajero is out by an hour and 12 minutes.

Time is a loose concept for a man whose connection to earth stretches 60,000 years. His two smartphones rattle at the base of the handbrake as the car reaches 110km/h and Colin McLennan - 60-year-old tribal patriarch to the 3000 members of the Jangga people of Central Queensland - speeds south toward his destiny.

Past Nebo, an hour southwest of Mackay; past Fort Cooper, where white settlers shot at his people through gun slots built into walls of stone houses. Col shifts his gaze a little to his left and speaks softly about his dreams. "I have dreams about fighting bulls," he says. "Big old wild scrub bulls. You're trying to get out of their road and they're coming straight towards you. You're trying to step around them and you just can't step around them." He shakes his head, clears his throat. "But they don't get me. In the end, I find that little spring, where I spring away from them. And then I spring so high that I can't come down." He pauses. "As days go on you generally have these things come to you in real life," he adds, nodding his head.

He drives on to the stone country, the Jangga "playgrounds", a mystical corroboree site and heartland of his people deep in the bush, a place of stone and story that he first saw as a boy after walking through dense bendy scrub on foot for a week with his Granny Lorna. He ate blue-tongue lizard on the way, and echidna fat spread on ashes damper; finger-pulled grubs from holes in trees; learnt to knock birds from tree limbs with thrown rocks. Granny Lorna rarely spoke. She sipped water from two kangaroo skin bags and simply pointed at things her grandson did well to note: a marching line of sugarbag ants; a daylight moonrise; the flight paths of bees. Granny Lorna did not tell him where they were going and if he asked she would promptly slap him hard behind his head. It was a foolish boy who focused on the destination at the cost of the journey.

Today he journeys for a Sydney judge. Tomorrow morning in the community hall of Glenden, a small town an hour outside of Nebo, Justice Steven Rares from the Federal Court of Australia - fresh from the matter of Peter Slipper and James Ashby - will give his Native Title Determination on a claim that has consumed the past two decades of Col's life, through drink and darkness and death, thrusting him from the roaming life of a ringer and champion rodeo rider into the national spotlight of indigenous leadership. Before finalising a native title claim Col submitted in 1998, Justice Rares wants to see the land Col speaks of, land and waters spanning 20,350sq km from the Leichhardt Range across the Suttor River and towards the Great Dividing Range. In four hours, Justice Rares will arrive in Glenden to make his own journey to the stone country. In 24 hours, Col McLennan will finally realise why Granny Lorna walked him into the scrub all those years ago.

A ute approaches from the south with a "wide load" sign. Col pulls over to the side of the highway, watches a giant yellow earthmover being hauled out to one of 11 coal mines in the Nebo district. Granny Lorna died when Col was 10 years old. She didn't live to see the mining companies charge into Jangga country like the wild bulls of Col's dreams. "Those big things coming here now," he says. "Forty years ago I didn't even know these machines existed. All I knew was how to saddle a horse and ride it.

"Then I saw all these people flying in from all over the place: Townsville, Cairns, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth. I thought to myself, 'Well, this is not right, these people coming in and telling us what's what.' Then I heard people talking about land rights. I didn't understand what they were talking about but I thought there must be something I can do."

Col grew up with 12 brothers and sisters on Glen Eva, a cattle station 20km southwest of Mt Coolon, in the heart of what would become the Drummond Basin mineral province. His parents, George and Doris McLennan, were gifted horse people but were often unfaithful to the virtues of steadiness. Each Christmas the McLennan children would be given coins from white cattlemen passing through Mt Coolon. The children would bury the coins in the ground for fun, let them be washed away by flood. They'd throw the coins into freshwater creeks, use them as swimming search toys.

The Pajero passes a vast clearing to the east, backgrounded by a brown rock mountain range. Col had covered these lands by horseback his whole life, from a wide-eyed boy to a hard-bitten cattleman like his dad. He saw more important deposits than minerals in the soil of Jangga Country. He saw his people. He saw Granny Lorna.

He started knocking gently on the doors of the mining companies. He wanted a chance to survey the land for valuable artefacts before the miners charged through. With every shut door, the knocking grew louder. "We didn't have any native title claim then," he says. "We fought mines week in, week out. BHP, Xstrata, Rio Tinto, Pacific Coal, all the big ones, we fought'em all. They knocked us down. And I said, 'They ain't gonna keep me down.' So I kept coming back. Back and back and back and I wore'em down. And they said, 'Look, we're sick of this, what do you want?' And I said, 'We want us to work together. We want to do these surveys' and we'd negotiate prices and stuff. And they said, 'Righto.' And we started to get money. And it was good money. We created all these jobs for all these young fellers and we started regenerating money, and the money went back into the community. And it's a good thing."

It's a good thing. That's Col's favourite way to end a passage of conversation. He's seen so many bad things in his time he feels it's necessary to note the good. He creates a cultural heritage consultancy group to survey the Jangga lands flagged for mining. It's a good thing. He creates employment training programs with the local mines, giving young Jangga men and women lacking entry-level skills the chance to earn good money. It's a good thing. Don't touch the whitefella's gold. Just redirect it. No more spoiling them kids. No more silly handouts. Build an education fund to send Jangga kids off to be educated in important whitefella schools in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. The Jangga kids return as leaders, lawyers and politicians. Some day, they run the towns. Some day, they tell the mining companies what's what. It could be a very good thing. "It's a competition," Col says. "I like competition. But, before, we weren't even in the game."

Col pulls up at Lake Elphinstone. Ducks play about in the shady waters. As a boy, Col would swim up underneath them and snatch a feed. It was here that he saw an eagle swoop down on a dinner gathering and briefly fly off with a baby cousin. "This is a very significant place," he says. "All the Murri clans would come through the Jangga country and meet here and do all their business. They'd stay for a month."

Col looks up to cloudless blue sky. "There are three stars up there," he says. There's nothing but blue sky. "You need to really look right through the sky. You can pick up those three stars. You'll see them. Three stars if you look hard enough." Look up. Stare for two full minutes. Nothing but blue.

The sound of a loud engine shatters the quiet. A father and son tear across the lake on a jet ski the size of a fridge. The ducks flap away to safety. Col furrows his brow. "Mmmm," he says.

He drives on, closer and closer to the stone country. He cuts the Pajero's engine when he sees a gap in the thick scrub and walks 50m through the bush and comes to a spot by a tree where the full spine-tingling panorama of his people's land comes into view. He doesn't study the land. He feels it. Grips tree branches. Smells leaves. Runs his fingers along grass.

A warm wind moves through the trees. He breathes in deep. Granny Lorna always told Col to listen to the wind. She said it carried the past and the future. She said it carried solutions. Lately, the wind has been carrying a name. Amanda.

There are ways to wrestle a charging wild scrub bull. First, you get out of its way. Then you get it near a tree or a large ant hill, something you can put between you and those deadly horns. Then, if you're quick enough, you can dart around the tree and get behind him. Get behind his ears where he can't see you. He'll charge right and that's when you drive your shoulder into him hard from the left. Boom. He'll charge left and that's when you drive your shoulder in hard from the right. Boom. Every time he moves you're there. Then you get in close, so close he's like your friend, and you take hold of those horns and you hang on for your life. He'll spin around six or seven times, make you dizzy, make you so head-crazed you'll start to feel ill. Soon, the bull will build such a head of steam he won't even notice that you've slid back to take a hold of his tail. And then you wait, wait for a misstep, that single moment when all four of the wild bull's legs aren't planted firmly in the dirt. When that moment comes, only one thing will pull that raging beast to the dust: your will.

Col pulls the Pajero into a campsite, a short walk from the Jangga playgrounds. About 20 of his friends and family have set up camp, all waiting to greet the all-important judge from Sydney. The man fixing teas from a fire-boiled billy is novelist Alex Miller. Col's dear friend. He was born in London with, inexplicably, the Australian outback in his blood. He learnt horsemanship as a boy. When he saw a picture of the vast emptiness of the Australian bush, his blood told him that's where he had to be. From the age of 17 to 21, he worked as an itinerant stockman on cattle stations in Central Queensland and the Gulf Country, revelling in a landscape where a ringer could ride horseback for a week and not see a single fence. He went south after that, found himself on the carnival circuit towing Ferris wheels to hilltop communities; found himself sleeping on city benches or anywhere else the wind blew him. He eventually enrolled at Melbourne University, studying history and English. Became a teacher. He was 50 when he published his first book. The London-born ringer was, it turned out, quite brilliant with words. His third novel, The Ancestor Game, won the 1993 Miles Franklin Award. Ten years later he would win the Miles Franklin again with a book about Col McLennan and the Jangga people. He called it Journey to the Stone Country.

It was in Melbourne that Miller met Elizabeth Hatte, the woman setting up lunchtime salads on the back tray of a truck. Liz is an archaeology consultant. It was her journey to the stone country that Miller loosely retold so beautifully in his book. It was a journey into Jangga country, into sacred land, into love.

"It was the beginning of'94," Liz says. "I'd been teaching archaeology in Melbourne; I had a relationship breakup. I went to Townsville to do a PhD and we started doing consultancy archaeology, doing cultural heritage. Then we had a job out past Moranbah [a coal mining town between Mackay and Clermont]. We rolled up and here was this bloke standing there with his small bag and his cowboy hat. His name was McLennan and we had actually lived as little kids on neighbouring stations. I sort of knew that something big had happened in my meeting him. It was this meeting that would change both of our lives. I knew nothing was going to be the same again."

The Old People had spoken to Col about love. They told him he would fall for a white woman. But he was 18 years from the man he is today, the kind of man who last night bought a $95 bottle of wine for his dinner guests and didn't enjoy a drop himself.

"Col was going through a really bad patch," Liz says. "He did things then that he doesn't do now, drink and smoke. He'd been unemployed, lost in hopeless situations, all the stuff that people do. He was really hopeless. I think he almost died. He'd been really sick. Really bad stuff."

Liz believes it was the native title claim in 1998 that saved him. "He sort of picked himself up," she says. "I think he decided he wanted to do something and for some reason he thought that he could do it." Almost five years ago, Col handed Justice Rares a copy of Alex Miller's Journey to the Stone Country. "Read it," Col said. And the judge did.

The Pajero is overheated from the drive out. Col planned on driving back to Glenden to pick up Justice Rares himself, but sends a driver in his place, while he leads the camp into the Jangga playgrounds. Circles and semi-circles of stones in a clearing the size of two football fields. Patterns in the rocks. Col estimates the stones in the corroboree site were placed there 1000 years ago. This is a sacred site where Col's ancestors were married, initiated, educated.

Col stands in quiet contemplation. Two years ago, his native title application was dangerously close to being dismissed by the Federal Court. The claim was threatening to collapse under the weight of bureaucracy, clan differences and an ever-widening gap between application and determination. Col fathered four girls and two boys in a relationship prior to Liz. It was when the claim was at breaking point that he was helping his 25-year-old daughter, Amanda Sauney, through a troubled relationship. "I said, 'Why don't you come with me. Straighten up your life. Get a better life.' " On the afternoon of December 17, 2010, Col was in Townsville when he saw a willie wagtail bird lying with its back to the ground. He was immediately struck by an urge to be with Amanda, who was living in Mackay. "The willie wagtail was sort of rolled over and kicking on the ground," he says. "I knew there was something wrong."

That next morning Amanda was found stabbed to death. (Her partner is awaiting trial on a charge of murder.) It was a week before Christmas. Col thinks about playing guitar to a much younger Amanda at Christmas and the thought brings tears to his eyes. She'd curl around his leg like a puppy dog, fall asleep to the sound of his strumming. He'd carry her to bed. Tuck her in. Land is sacred. And so is memory.

"All this," he says. "This claim. I want this for her. It's something for her." An hour later, at 5pm, the car that was supposed to pick up Justice Rares returns to the playgrounds, long after the judge's planned arrival time. "I waited three hours," says the driver, puzzled. "No sign of him." Col rubs his forehead. "Mmmmm," he says.

At 4pm the following day, Alex Miller rises in a marquee erected outside the Glenden community hall. He talks through a microphone to 300 members and friends of the Jangga people. He typed a five-page speech for this moment, but he chooses to keep things brief and off the cuff. This is no time for grandiose whitefella musings. He clutches a small stick in his right fist as he speaks. "There was an official history of Nebo published in 1991 and in that history there was one shot of an Aborigine. One photograph amongst 200 photographs. And underneath that photograph it said, 'One of the last Aborigines of the district.'

"The Murris of the Nebo district are writing a new chapter today into the history of Australia, with visionary leaders like Col McLennan. Not somebody who sought leadership for its own sake but somebody who became a leader through the quality of his thinking and his determination. Twenty years ago he was talking about this." Miller looks out over the crowd of Jangga people. "I believe the next generation of you will run the country up here. I hope you treat us with more respect than we treated you."

Col smiles, tips his hat to his friend in thanks. Everything falls as it should. Granny Lorna couldn't have seen the finer details. That Justice Rares did arrive on time yesterday but there was a miscommunication in the pick-up point that saw the judge wait three hours in vain. That the miscommunication meant Col would take the judge out to the playgrounds at dawn this morning where he could appreciate the site in solitude, where he was afforded the time and the space to be so moved by the place that Col could tell he didn't just see it, he felt it. That Col would joke about the judge's new Calvin Klein outback jeans that would make him slide off the back of a horse the second he mounted it. That inside the Glenden community hall Justice Rares would speed-read through 12 pages of "Reasons for Judgement", then remove his glasses and utter one clear, irreversible word: "Congratulations". That some 300 Jangga people would stand and clap and Col McLennan would sit quietly in his chair, his right fist propped on his thigh, a half-smile on his face.

Granny Lorna could only have seen the bigger story. The boy who watched and listened and learned. The boy who would one day take his land back for his people. The nobody Jangga boy who became somebody.

Behind Col are small clusters of people, white and black. Politicians and lawyers. Native title officials. Quiet chats are had about the merits of native title law. That determinations like this are high on meaning but low on real power. That determinations drag on too long, so long that elder claimants often die before they see a result. That native title law is a minefield populated by lawyers with good intentions but not the talent to navigate its always underestimated complexities. But they're not Jangga people saying those things. The Jangga know what this day represents. This is the day Col McLennan dealt them into the game. They will have the right to access 218 parcels of land comprising reserves, national park, pastoral holdings and lease land, to hunt and fish according to traditional practices.

At sunset, Col and Liz drive back home along the Peak Downs Highway. He stops the car at a clearing of Jangga country, backgrounded by a striking range called Red Cliff Tableland. He leans on a fence post and talks about those wild scrub bulls. You've got to wait for that misstep, he says. And when it comes you grip that tail and you pull that thing with all you've got. And if you have enough strength in you, and enough belief in its existence, you'll slam that beast into the dust. And you'll stand above it, marvelling at what you can achieve with two scarred, copper-coloured hands.