Yilkari

Towards the end of my first stint in Australia, I took a group trip from Adelaide to Alice Springs. Seven days through the red centre, past lakes of salt, fields of spinifex and wide, heat-hazed skies. It confirmed how vast Australia is, and how alien from most of the world. It also confirmed it is a land too big for me to know, too different to my points of reference for me to fully comprehend. Reading Yilkari by Nicholas Rothwell and Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, four stories set in furthest reaches of the outback, I was reminded of this feeling, of this simultaneous alienation and wonder.

The same, unnamed narrator helms each story, largely from either the passenger or driver's seat of a variably specced-out or almost clapped-out 4x4. He is joined by fellow travellers, all men, all making their way through the wilderness for elliptical reasons. In story one, his companion is Valentin, a Siberian composer he met in Berlin on the night the wall came down. Valentin has sought him out, drawn to the desert by our narrator's tales "about this other world: the desert. Where the eyes see more clearly. Where the mind's set free to roam”. Story two centres around Dylan, who guides our narrator and another traveller towards an ancient site and an encounter with the spirits that wander and protect the land. Captain, a stockman and rodeo rider, hitches a lift in story three, sharing his history of being taken child protection and eventually finding a home with a cattle man who taught him "...you're the true kings of the land. Its secret rulers". The final travellers to join our narrator are an old friend, Johnson, and Master, an indigenous program co-ordinator, who together head deep into the north-west and encounter three old-timers making a final visit to a deserted air strip they flew out off during the war.

These four stories are not the plot of Yilkari though, if indeed Yilkari has a plot. Rather, they are the starting point for the characters to tell each other their own stories, of travels through the desert, of the experiences that led them there, of the lives that passed through and still linger. Throughout, these stories branch "in several different directions, in themes vanishing and resurfacing, interweaving with each other until it became hard to pick the central thread." The effect is almost hallucinatory, as the book meanders through time and space, through dream and reality, through Western and indigenous eyes.

Having spent all my life in the UK, bar three and a half years in Sydney and the last year in Perth, I come to Yilkari with next-to-no knowledge of indigenous culture and with only a small understanding of colonialisation's effects on it. Therefore, I must trust that Rothwell and Nampitjinpa Anderson are representing both the culture and history respectfully and correctly. It certainly feels this way, with the strengths and flaws of all characters - white Australian, European and Indigenous - equally on display. The conversations may be far-fetched - I've only met a handful of people who talk with as much as philosophical reasoning, poetry and self-awareness as every character who appears in Yilkari seem to - but the sentiments and emotions ring true.

The loss of Indigenous culture and the pain this continues to cause is made clear. Captain, explaining the effect of being cut out of his world and handed to foster carers, tells our narrator "I've lost my language. I don't know my culture. No community would want me, and there's no community where I'd want to be." Rothwell and Nampitjinpa Anderson give voice to the anger but more so, the pride and especially the connection with country. Dylan, taking our narrator to a botanical garden in Alice Springs, points out "[t]hey make a reserve, they put a fence around it, they bring in all the trees and animals they want, and then they call it nature... But that can't make it the true thing." My religious and spiritual beliefs are agnostic at most, but as the indigenous characters within the book talked of the spirits of their ancestors walking the land and of their inherited knowledge, I felt a window open onto their faith. 

Yilkari combines travel narrative, history, fiction, dreamtime stories and possibly memoir - it feels as if the stories being shared are ones the authors have been told themselves. If I had to put a single description on Yilkari though, I would call it a love letter to the desert. The landscapes, the eruptions of life, the endless skies and sunsets that "switched into minor key", are vividly, enchantingly described. Like a journey through the dunes and across the scorched earth, there are periods where nothing seems be happening, but this quiet is the point. Listen carefully to its stories and Yilkari's secrets are revealed.