Interval North

Abstract

Interval North Dominique Hecq (bio) Beyond simple genetics, we create our fictitious selves, and there are, at most, two possible plots. Here, the path forks in the dry. The land is subjugated to the ominous shadow of Arnhem Land's escarpment, from which tumble creeks that turn into streams, rivers, and cascades. Click for larger view View full resolution The East Alligator River snakes through high spear grass, open eucalypt woodlands, and paperbark forests to the tidal flats, where pandanus palms dig their roots in the mud. A nomination error: there were and are no alligators, only saltwater crocodiles. They cruise alongside our boat or laze around in the sun on mud flats. A car blasts across the bridge that connects Kakadu National Park to Arnhem Land. Flocks of birds wheel, swivel, and twirl into the trees. A kite swoops down for a catch. An eagle claps its wings astride a dead barramundi. Magpie geese fossick for food on the bank of the river. Strychnine and hibiscus trees swoon in the breeze. This is Gaagudju territory—also spelled "Gagadu," "Gaguju," or "Kakadu." This may be confusing, but Aboriginal place names and words have varying pronunciations between family groups and over time. They are recorded with different spellings by different peoples, too. Here, Aboriginal people are called "Bininj" in the north of the park and "Mungguy" in the south. Their clans comprise at least two family groups sharing ownership of an area of land. Our guide points out that clan boundaries are passed from one generation to the next through the father line. There are nineteen clan groups. Before white settlement, twelve languages were alive here. Today only three are spoken: Gundjeihmi, Kunwinjku, and Jawoyn. I am linguistically challenged, struggling at times to catch the sonorities of Aboriginal English. Across the river grows an isolated pocket of monsoon forest. Our guide lowers his voice: it is a women's sacred site. I explain to the child why it's off-limits to men. And to whites. [End Page 351] A cloud blows over the sky. Blows over. Passes over, or under. Like an invisible bridge. All sorts of tensions implicit in the possibility of bridging. We think of bridges as tensile architectonic matrixes. Not this one. It's built on the river's bed. It is made of solid material. There's no underside. No interplay between motion and stillness. You can only go over it. It's a self-serving bridge. A building up, gathering, hoarding bridge once constructed to facilitate the passage and hunting of water buffaloes. A great metaphor for what some people prudishly call the encounter or contact, that is, colonization. The oldest continent. The child's eyes widen as our guide offers a short history of the Kakadu National Park that I translate into broken French for her, into English for you: Pre-Cambrian sandstone and quartzite have lain here for over two thousand million years. Kakadu's youngest bedrock is over one thousand million years old. Aboriginal settlement extends back to over sixty thousand years, I tell the child in the car. For millennia, Indigenous people have harvested food from plants, trees and waterholes of the escarpment, the billabongs and swamps and rivers of the plain. They have taken care of the land by burning grasslands to improve pastures and enable new plants and trees to germinate. A spooky sight from the road confirms this: will-o'-the-wisps scaling eucalypts. So, what of the encounter? The Chinese, Malays, and Portuguese all allege to have been the first non-Aboriginal visitors of Australia's north coast. The first surviving written account comes from the Dutch, to whom the child and I are related by blood. In 1623, Jan Carstenszoon sailed west across the Gulf of Carpentaria to Groote Eylandt. Abel Tasman then explored part of the coast in 1644 and recorded European contact with Aboriginal people. Almost a century later, in 1802 and 1803, Matthew Flinders surveyed the Gulf of Carpentaria. Phillip Parker King, an English navigator, is responsible for the error of nomination. Parker King named the three Alligator Rivers after the large numbers of crocodiles he mistook for alligators. I glean all this...