Astronomy and Mutawintji rock art in outback NSW
On a road trip in NSW’s far west, it’s possible to travel into the future and back again.
In NSW’s far west, I am time-travelling. After lobbing into Broken Hill from Sydney, I synchronise with the central time zone the city shares with South Australia, 50km away. Words from Einstein spring to mind: “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
At Outback Astronomy on the city’s outskirts, I peer through telescopes into space, spying stars light years away and learning about Indigenous interpretations of the night sky. Co-owner Linda Nadge asks me where I’m headed next. Mutawintji? That’s on NSW time, she says, so somewhere along the 130km drive, smooth until bitumen switches to dirt, I tumble into the future.
The ancient Mutawintji Lands encompass a national park, nature reserve and historic site, where tribes from as far as the Flinders Ranges and Tibooburra would meet. Today’s visitors aren’t clockwatching. They’ve camped here, assembling at leisure to look around the historic site with Mutawintji Heritage Tours. Me? Thanks to Nadge’s tip on timing, I scrape in on the dot, red dust billowing in flamboyant Priscilla-style behind my rental wheels.
Guide Keanu Garni Bates offers a lift to the restricted-access site housing galleries of ochre hand stencils and a hill of rock engravings. A convoy of 4WDs, containing 18 visitors, galumphs behind us. Bates’s grandfather, Badger Bates, is a knowledge holder for the Barkindji people. (His sculpture at Broken Hill’s Living Desert Reserve is a standout.) He also is the one clapping a welcome song on boomerangs in the creation story screening at the cultural centre.
We return, blinking, to the sunlit present to climb a slope where story elements were “pecked” into the hard rock with implements. As we descend past emerald waterholes and cross a dry creek, we learn about this leaf and that fruit before reaching the showstopper stencils. It wasn’t easy for traditional owners to be granted a say in managing this country. The cultural centre’s display includes posters from their 1983 blockade of what was then Mootwingee National Park. Fifteen years later the park and associated lands were handed back to Aboriginal owners; today they’re jointly managed with NSW National Parks.
Bates and I reconvene at the visitors centre where zebra finches and mulga parrots flit between tree branches. He has brought wild plums, tough-skinned bush tomatoes, Warrigal greens that “boil up real good” and pungent turpentine bush that repels mosquitoes when thrown on a campfire. For those who know where to look, this semi-arid country is a greengrocer, delicatessen and pharmacy.
“I had heaps of mother and father figures … I’ve got, like, 10 dads and 10 mums,” says Bates. “I was one of the only kids who listened to ’em and took the right path and is still out here. I know exactly where the water is, how far I’ve got to dig, what trees provide water, what roots we can use to roast and eat as well, which is good fibre during the day.” He can knock out a ’roo with a boomerang if it’s close, track down emu eggs and goannas lurking in burrows.
We talk of what’s in plain sight and of more mysterious things. Bates has seen a “blue light come straight down from the sky just over the back of the hills here”, a sign that an elder has passed. “The old fellas say they’ve also heard the sound of old people singing, chanting and talking in their lingo, and clapsticks,” he says.
When the site was archaeologically documented, an uncle was “pinned” to the spot. “He knew straight away; he said take two steps back and two steps to the left …They went up and sure enough a women’s site was there.” The younger Bates is exactly where he’s meant to be. “I’m pretty much doing what the uncles and aunties started when they fought for the place to be handed back,” he tells me. “It’s good to be working out here and be a part of the land as well.”
Katrina Lobley was a guest of Destination NSW.
