Australia is twelve times the size of France, with twenty million inhabitants, and at its centre lies an emptiness that tourists call the outback and those who live there the bush. A handful of men are forced into a life on the move there: a policeman who captures wild camels, shearers who clock up forty thousand kilometres a year, retirees in caravans, truck drivers who see their families only at the end of long weeks. Christophe travels up the Stuart Highway towards them, the road of the first explorers, between immense farms closed off by fences and Aboriginal land. At the end of it, in Arnhem Land, at Bawaka, another way of inhabiting space awaits him: no longer travelling across it, but singing it.
In the outback, the roadhouse is “the place where everything happens: eating, drinking, getting petrol, sleeping, and then drinking some more”.In Yunta, population forty-seven, Don is the only policeman for more than 400 kilometres around; his jurisdiction stretches 200 kilometres to the north, and all you come across there are four sheep farms. The outback, he explains, is the tourists’ word: “We’re bushmen and proud of it.” His passion is camels, which arrived at the end of the 19th century with the explorers Burke and Wills, and were then introduced by Thomas Elder because they coped with the climate better than horses or oxen. They are not bred: a young one would have to be fed for five years before it became an adult, so they are captured wild. At eight in the morning, it is already 35 degrees. Animals are tied up as bait, a plane has spotted the herd, and the stragglers end up lassoed. Christophe helps hold down a camel that is about to be castrated, and Don suggests he play nurse. Is he an Australian Tuareg? He demurs: “I wouldn’t go that far. They certainly know a lot more than me.” The night is spent in a swag, with a bottle of Scotch; in the morning, it is the flies that wake the camp. In less than six months, Don will be retired, with nothing but his camels to think about.
Every year, Don spends forty days in the bush with his camels, “its lack of water, its snakes and its deadly spiders”.
Don caught his first camels fifteen or sixteen years ago, on the west coast, where it was “a bit of a weekend activity”.
For Christophe, Don is a “quiet strength, in love with the outback”: spend time with him and “even the roughest of cowboys turn out to be endearing”.Near Glendambo, some fifteen kilometres from the Stuart Highway along a dirt track, a windmill marks the shearing shed. George is a contractor there: he employs the shearers, who go from farm to farm, and makes sure they always have sheep to hand. This year, eight shearers will shear about 22,000 of them in twenty days, seven kilos of wool per animal, around fifty dollars. The fastest earns 500 dollars a day, the slowest 300, and each one drives some 40,000 kilometres a year, enough to go around the world, Christophe works out. George’s first wife never got used to his absences; the second, he believes, enjoys the peace and quiet. He takes Christophe to see Angus, the owner of the farm: 400,000 hectares, when Christophe’s parents’ farm has 170. The nearest neighbour is an hour away, “just around the corner”, they joke at the table. It is mustering season, when the flock is rounded up. By eight o’clock, Angus has already taken off twice: from above, he pushes the sheep towards the lads on motorbikes, who drive them to the shearers. Between the day they are spotted and the day they reach the shed, a month can go by.
On Angus’s farm, 25,000 sheep: “the modern Australian shepherd is a flying shepherd”.
George’s shearers are almost all local lads from small farms; only one comes from New Zealand, and he has worked for him for several years.
George makes sure “it runs as fast as possible”, but the atmosphere matters just as much: “we have a good laugh”.Further north, Coober Pedy is riddled with holes: people from some forty countries dig there in search of opal. Not far away runs the dingo fence, the longest man-made structure in the world. It was once 9,600 kilometres long and is now only 5,300, and it keeps wild dogs away from the flocks: a single dingo can kill 40 to 50 sheep in one night. In Alice Springs, Christophe returns his hire 4x4. He is on the land of the Aboriginal people and, until now, has seen only their “ghosts”. In a caravan park, Marge and George, grey nomads, retirees who have swapped their house for a caravan, take him north. They print their business cards on their computer and can spend a year on the road between Darwin and South Australia. At Three Ways, more than a hundred road trains pass every day. For thirty years Lloyd has been pulling more than fifty metres of trailers, 250,000 to 290,000 kilometres a year, nearly six million in his lifetime: “My truck is my office, my bedroom, my home, it’s everything.” His wife and children live near Dubbo, some 2,500 kilometres away; he has not seen them for five weeks.
“The Great Wall of China, Australian version”: the keeper patrols the dingo fence for three days every two weeks, sometimes six or seven to repair it.
On this stretch of the Stuart Highway, petrol stations are few and far between, some closed at night: “you really have to aim right”.
“Trucks so long they look like trains”: Lloyd spends his life in them, far from his small ten-hectare farm near Dubbo.After more than 6,000 kilometres, the sea. In Bawaka, the “hidden paradise”, in Arnhem Land, Timmy, a contact Christophe had made from France, opens up his community to him: his parents’ house, his own, his grandmother’s kitchen, facing the beach. These ancestral lands have been returned to them. “We live here because our identity, our lives are here.” The children grow up here to understand their roots and learn from nature. Timmy also has a house in town, and his photo in a school textbook. They set off to gather clams on the rocks, harpoon in hand, just in case: a shark turns up, they kill it, then they open the shellfish with a knife and share them. Further on, huge sharks drive Christophe out of the water; in the evening, by the fire, they assure him it was a joke. The songlines are everywhere, the beach, the water, the rocks: “Even a fish, even a wave is a songline.” A man from the community, a red cap on his head, remembers the last time he sang one, at his little brother’s funeral. “A songline is a link between the person who has died and you.”
For the Bawaka community, fishing remains the best way to provide for itself, and Timmy is keen to preserve its traditions.
“We come every day and sometimes we catch one”: barely have they entered the water to gather clams when a shark appears.
Songlines, the sung pathways, are the invisible routes that mark out Aboriginal space: to travel them is to sing the story of one’s origins.
Timmy wanted the children to grow up here “so they can understand their roots” and “know everything about their land”.“The relationship to the land is crucial for us. It is our knowledge, our culture.”Timmy