Chapter 11

Mudjon fears the worst

Mudjon remained on the hill, silhouetted against the sky of late afternoon, watching for some sign that his old friend was still alive out there in the desert. It was almost dark before he could bring himself to abandon his post. He came down the northern face of Kata Kata, igniting the grass as he moved, and as we sat around our camp fire that night the heights above us were dotted with dozens of small fires as though scores of Aboriginal families were camped on the hillside, as though the country had come alive again and the Mandildjara people had returned home.

Mudjon was very depressed. The signals we had sent up on three occasions that day had gone unanswered, signals that would have been visible for a hundred and sixty kilometres in every direction. Warri and Yatungka must have seen them — if they were alive. They had not replied and the conclusion to be drawn was that they had not survived, that their search for water after leaving Baabool had been unsuccessful.

I thought it would be ironical if, after many thousand years of roaming the Western Gibson Desert, the last of the nomadic Aborigines there had succumbed, not from old age or disease but from their inability to find sufficient water to survive. For several millenia the country had satisfied the needs of the desert people and it seemed that the last of them, the couple who had chosen to remain there, had perished because there was not enough water to keep just two people alive. The land too, was dead, the result of the greatest drought this century, and possibly for centuries. We had arrived too late, said Mudjon, perhaps two or three weeks too late.

Back to Extracts