If you drive on the main roads thinking only of where you are going then you probably won’t notice the People In Between. They live in communities of a few hundred or in small family groups at outstations.
They’re not always there. Sometimes they go hunting or travel to other in between places for days or weeks at a time. They go to spend time with a sick family member, for ceremony, sports weekends, royalty and funerals. They go to connect with each other. Sometimes they go to visit their country. If they want to go to someone else’s country they will ask permission.
If you are passing through, the roads that lead to these places might look like dangerous detours to nowhere, a way to get lost in the expanse and head (literally) off the map.
The maps are devoid of detail out here. With few roads and only the occasional hill there is not much of interest to the People At The End Of The Road. They are not aware of the vast network of soakages, the paths the ancestors walk or the great forests of ghost gums that dot the ancient water ways. They don’t mark where the kangaroos gather or the emus run because they do not care about such things. They don’t learn where the desert raisins, bush tomatoes or wild figs can be found. They care about abandoned buildings and old holes in the ground, but they don’t care to know the rest of the story – only the anthropologists who make their own maps then hide them away in their secret places at the end of the road.
The People At The End Of The Road gave their own names to places as if they never meant anything to the People In Between and needed a name. They didn’t spend much time there, so the names generally don’t have much to do with the place at all. They might have named them after a person they knew or about something that happened to them when they were there – like Boggy Hole because they got bogged or Hell’s Kitchen because it was hot and they cooked a feed there. Maybe they thought they could claim a place by giving it their own name, but it usually just demonstrated how little they knew about the in between places.
It was with sadness that he realised he didn’t know the names of many of these places either. His grandfather had tried to teach them to him, but he was too distracted by the end of the road to take the time to learn the stories of in between places, even those of his own country.
It was one of the anthropologists that made him feel shamed about it on a bush trip a few years ago. The Toyota was taking a beating travelling along paths that were best taken on foot, but he listened to his grandfather talking to the anthropologist about the country. He knew the place as Wave Cliff, but the anthropologist knew its real name and the names of all the hills and soakages around it. His grandfather talked about how he had walked through the country as a young boy and the anthropologist said that he must know it like the back of his hand.
He had thought a lot about that since. Sometimes he would stare at the tendons on his hand and imagine them as mountain ranges, the veins as rivers flowing between them, unnamed and unknown.
He had tried to learn some of the names of the in between places, but it was hard to remember them without going there and that didn’t happen much these days.
He tried to draw them in the sand to remember. But it was the songs that held the key to remembering them if he couldn’t go there, couldn’t walk from place to place. He had to learn the songs.
His grandfather would sing them when they were travelling in the Toyota. He remembered hearing him when he was a little boy, but didn’t know that’s what his grandfather was doing.
He’d always thought it strange that maps had north at the top. If it had of been his choice he would have chosen east or west. It’s more important to know where the sun rises or the sun sets. But it’s also important to know where the wind comes from and that was always changing.
If you’re trying to get somewhere it’s important to know how to get to where you are going from where you are. Most printed maps let you do this. But there are lots of different maps. Paper ones with lines on them that force you to place them down on the ground so the top faces north and you have to imagine the vertical parts. Ones you draw in the sand where the distance between places doesn’t matter so much. Other ones for tourists where you draw only the roads they should take so they won’t get lost.
Then there is the map you keep in your head because you know not only the roads and hills and rivers, but individual trees and rocks and boggy places. Because you have been there and had experiences that link you to the land. A broken down car, a big feed of bush banana or a camping spot. Maps that are experiences.
The best map is no map at all but the confidence to begin your journey without even thinking about how to get there. It’s the simple trust you have in your ability to put one foot in front of the other; that if you keep doing that you will eventually get to where you are going, which might not be where you first thought. It’s like telling someone a story that you know, tailoring it just for them. With these maps there are no in between places and no end of the road.
If you know the story, if you’ve experienced the wild flow of a dry river after a week of rain, you don’t need to know where it is going. You don’t need a map to tell you how or why to follow it. You know it when it is dry and when it is running water. It isn’t something that can be written down on a piece of paper, because it isn’t something that is always the same.
Maps don’t tell you what you are doing or why you are doing it. They try to keep you on a road or push you to a place, as if everything in between doesn’t matter. This leaves you dissatisfied when you get there, already thinking about the next place.
Now everyone has maps on their mobile phones. They can see exactly where they are, represented by a little blue dot. These maps can even be different for two people travelling in the same car, depending on their system preferences or if any of their friends have been there before.
He imagined the country rolled out before him like a big virtual map he could walk on. It left him feeling cold, and not wanting to go anywhere.
The People At The End Of The Road make maps so they can detach themselves from the land – so they can treat it as something to buy and sell. They make a map and move on. Someone else comes along and puts up fences, which will be added to the map later and help them work out which square bit of land belongs to which person. They might make some more fences to sell part of the land to someone else who might do the same later… And the map ends up holding the story.
That’s why he didn’t like maps. The People At The End Of The Road make the maps and then they own the land and the in between places are forgotten.
By: Liam Campbell
