Pete's Place

by Anna Davies (Australia)

Making a local connection Australia

The rainbow of plastic flowers beg for attention as I gaze upon the silent white cross. Bursts of warm desert air comfort my skin, the only sound that dare pierce the silence. Even the flies refrain from their incessant pestering, uncharacteristically respectful of preserving the stillness. I am not sure how long I have been stood here. In the desert, time is of no value. People eat when they are hungry, sleep when they are tired, talk when they are lonely. It is a refreshing mantra where societal norms are reset- watches are useless. It has been less than a year since my last visit to Pete’s Place. The myriad of long-since graded tracks are still barely passable, the red dirt is still just as red, and Mount Woodroofe still just as sleepy. Mount Woodroofe, or Ngarutjaranya, is South Australia’s highest peak, nestled deep in Anangu country. Looming just shy of fifteen hundred metres and entangled in a web of spinifex, the sandstone slopes protrude awkwardly from an otherwise shallow sunburnt stretch of land. This landscape reads like a story to the Anangu, whispering the secrets of the Creation Ancestors through songlines as old as time itself. It was on this land that I met Pete, an Anangu elder, and custodian of the land. Pete grew up living off the land, spending his childhood learning the traditional knowledge of the ancients. He trekked the desert from Mount Woodroofe through Western Australia, a journey hundreds of kilometres in length. He reached the age of ten before first encountering a white man. In later years, Pete became a man of the cloth, even travelling to the Vatican to meet the Pope. His exact age is unknown but certainly breaches eighty. We had been driving for hours, taking countless turns down unmarked tracks progressively overburdened with red sand. As Mount Woodroofe emerged in the distance, enveloped in a shimmering violet shroud of haze, our driver announced that we were close (that’s as specific as you get in the desert!). What may have been minutes later, our ute juddered to a halt as the driver pointed urgently towards a broken-down Toyota abandoned on the track. Cars litter the desert plains, their discarded rusty carcasses a trusted source of spare parts or fortunate landmarks for navigating the complicated labyrinth of tracks. This car was different. This car belonged to Pete. We hurried over to the driver’s side. The seat was empty. The keys remained in the ignition and all the windows were open. The engine was toast. We hastily hopped back into the ute to find Pete. We arrived at Pete’s Place in a wave of dust, flustered, full of concern and adrenaline. In contrast, Pete sat motionless, shaded by the army of white trunked spotted gums that line the dried-up creek bed. Pete had walked over ten kilometres to get to his place, camping overnight in the bush, surviving off the land as he had as a boy. He had not wanted to miss our visit. Finally calm, I remained in the shade of the gums with Pete, listening to him share chapters from his childhood to his time in the church. In the sand, he drew the songline of Ngintaka, the Perentie lizard that succumbed to the power of greed and desire. He spoke in Pitjantjara interspersed with occasional bursts of English, yet his messages were understood. He talked and talked and talked. We sang to him and he cried. As the sun sank over Mount Woodroofe, my eyes inhaled the aurora of reds, golds and purples that splintered the skyline. As the stars began to speak, Pete announced that he had nothing more to tell us. We received the news of Pete passing two weeks after we returned from the desert, just three weeks since we spent the day and night with Pete. We would have been his final visitors. Less than a year later, I stand among the plastic flowers. I had expected the absence of Pete to be deafening. It isn’t. Pete’s connection to this land is so powerful that his presence is eternal. This is more than Pete’s Place, this Place is Pete.