The poetics of ignorance in the Central Desert

When I was a kid, Warlpiri people were an idea, a story, a mythology that hung on the walls and in the air around the dinner table when my dad would talk about his childhood at Yuendumu. He was kindergarten age when he ran inside the mission house, forgetting to pull his shoes on at the door as per my grandmother’s rules, and announced, ‘We caught a lizard, mummy, and we ate it. Don’t worry, Charlie picked the poos out.’ Darling anecdotes like this pepper my grandmother’s mission diaries. In one entry, my dad as a toddler narrates an imaginary trip to Alice Springs: ‘T’rific dust … I got bogged … shot a kangaroo with my 303.’

We are delighted by the way children pretend at knowledge. Then we grow up, and we get to thinking that our adult knowledge is no longer pretence. My own intimacies with Warlpiri people have been forged only recently, in the last few years, when I have been travelling up to Yuendumu and Nyirrpi and living in camp with Warlpiri friends. And I’ve come to see that I’m still a kid, a kindergartener, in so many ways. Despite my university degrees and my books and all my poems and essays, the things I know and understand about people and how they ought to be in their world are alarmingly provisional.