The Bindibu Expedition: Exploration among the Desert Aborigines of Western Australia: I. The Approach

Abstract

The year 1957 will always stand out in my memory as a landmark, as one of the most important in my life, for in that year I was able to achieve, long after I had abandoned it, and in a way that I had not believed possible, one of my most cherished ambitions. This was to find, and to live and hunt with, a group of desert-dwelling aborigines who still followed the life of their ancestors in the arid wastes of Central Australia, to establish friendly relations with them and to accompany them on their nomadic wanderings. As a result of my experience with aborigines living a fully organized tribal life in the well-watered tropical areas of Cape York Peninsula and Arnhem Land, where there was a well-defined seasonal cycle with related food harvests, I had always wanted to study the way of life of aborigines who lived in the desert. I wanted to learn how they were able to adapt themselves to living in this harsh environment and to getting their food supply from a terrain that appears to be completely barren, which supports few mammals and has few plants of known economic value?a country that has proved too inhospitable for the white man. I was interested particu? larly in the adaptation of these people to extremes of heat and cold in the desert, to their method of finding water and to the relation of their food-gathering cycles to the sporadic rains that often fall in a deluge in quite local areas. The references to the aborigines who were living in the desert, which occur in the journals of Giles (1875-6), Warburton (1875) an<^ Carnegie (1898), all suggest that, in spite of the severity of the desert as the explorers knew it, there could be another side to the picture. For two or three years prior to the organization ofthe expedition of 1957 which is described in the present paper?especially in 1955 and 1956?reports had been com? ing in from Alice Springs of the existence of natives in the arid country across the border of Western Australia beyond Lake Mackay. Because I had long ago given up any hope of finding desert-dwelling aborigines who still retained their own culture, I was inclined to discount these reports and to rank them with another rumour that had come through at the same time of a 'Hidden Valley' said to lie below the level of the surrounding country?a kind of Shangri-la out among the spinifex wastes. But the rumours persisted, and the arrival, which was reported towards the end of 1956 at Mt. Doreen, a cattle station 225 miles west of Alice Springs, of a few nomadic aborigines from the desert around Lake Mackay, where they had been living a tribal life, gave some credence to the reports. But there was still no means of checking