Desert stories

The bitumen highway from Broome to Halls Creek affords the traveller some chance to take in the exceptional elements of Kimberley landscape: the distant ranges and the spinifex and pindan up close. Along with that, the variety of patterns and shapes of low shrubs and grasses and grandiose termite mounds is endlessly appealing.

Nothing beats our ranges with their toppings of trees in single file as you drive towards them, parading like a spiky hairdo; and their faces, those raggedly ancient complexions.

Driving through this country I think about how revered the Kimberley is by those from other continents, and how few Australians, still, have travelled through this startling land.

I was on my way to the Mulan community for a week of writing workshops, part of a project supported by the Australia Council for the Arts to capture writings and ideas from Australian deserts.

This will result in a book, to provide an opportunity for that rich seam of stories to be developed for a readership of people who have never been in a desert locale.

We were presenting these workshops in three different deserts: at Tennant Creek and Coober Pedy and Mulan.

At Mulan, writer Kim Mahood - who has a longstanding relationship with the Walmajarri people that started as a child on cattle stations up there - was our workshop leader. We had a day at the school of 40 students: drawing out from the junior, middle and senior children what was most distinctive about their lives in the desert.

The children came back over and over again to Paruku Lake, as did the traditional owners in their workshop, and then the participants over our weekend writing, including 11 people from Balgo who drove across in one vehicle.

We combined Aboriginal people and whitefellas in these activities.

Our sitting down writing activity concluded with a late Sunday afternoon picnic of swimming, fishing and cooking kangaroo tails in the coals out at Kilwa, a spot with a sandbar island that provided a focus for our swimming.

I had seen photographs of Paruku, known as Lake Gregory and before that, the erroneously named Gregory Salt Sea ("discovered" by Augustus Gregory in 1856 when it was largely dry and with high salinity).

Nothing prepared me for seeing it, though; seeing its diversity and hearing the range of sounds it supports.

There are more than 70 species of waterbirds there and at high water times there are up to 600,000 birds.

There is a population of 5000 brolgas, and hundreds of egrets, black swans, pelicans, and numerous birds I don't have names for. Chunky bush turkeys fly overhead in twos or threes.

Paruku is a terminal lake system covering about 4300sqkm on the borders of the Great Sandy and Tanami deserts and was once part of an ancient river that flowed into the Indian Ocean.

It is the only reliable source of fresh water in the region. As the continent became drier, the dune fields created an inland sea and Paruku is a remnant of this process.

These wetlands were declared an Indigenous Protected Area in 2001. There has been a recent discovery of a 50,000 year old flaked core stone, confirming Paruku has been central to local people as a home and an ecological sanctuary.

I saw the sun set from three different vantage points at Paruku.

At Handover Camp the coolibah trees with their smooth white trunks made for a soft and beautiful stillness.

At Kilwa it was a cascade effect: water, then sandbar island, more water, then far shoreline.

At Lirra, at the point where a lagoon feeds into the larger lake, with a crisp white shoreline, cliffs and a sense of vastness; with water all around us, a big sky, a game of swans doing it tough with killer waves making them topsy and rather seedy.

Standing on the point I was drawn back into art: that first half of Andrew Bovell's adaptation of Kate Grenville's The Secret River we saw at the Perth Festival this year.

The still world, captured on stage as barely adorned but teeming with life: from microbial to human. We were being given a look at an ancient land.

Sitting on the shoreline watching the sun set, my sense was that this place, with ancient habits of dry and wet, replenishment in a deep ecosystem, will still be intact well after our continent is degraded from man-made damage.

Pristine is a cliched way to describe land, but in the case of Paruku it describes well how lightly the land and water has been touched.

We yielded up some wonderful writing, and the book will be out with UWA Publishing in late 2014.

When the workshops were over I sat for a full day, getting on with my own work, alongside acclaimed artist Veronica Lulu in the Warruyanta Art Centre.

Watching her fall into a meditation as she applied paint made me think of how we look at country, directly and through art, and how valuable this is for a sense of belonging as human subjects.

More information about Paruku is available from an excellent book Desert Lake: Art, Science and Stories from Paruku (CSIRO Publishing, 2013).