There are places on this Earth that still belong to themselves, places where very few people have stood. And some of those places are holy.
It was the summer of 2018 when we packed my old Hilux and a Troopie and set off from Lajamanu to Mina Mina. It had been Aunty Agnes’s idea. Although she’d painted this place for decades, she’d never set foot on Mina Mina, on her grandfather’s Country, in the jaws of Lake Mackay, Northern Great Sandy Desert.
It’s too dangerous to attempt Mina Mina. The route is too treacherous – no roads, just open desert. Even the hardiest get stranded in deep sand, or their tyres are shredded by sharp acacia. There’s no water for hundreds of kilometres, and birds attack the plastic bottles, pecking holes in the side to steal the water. The heat is at the limit of what human beings can endure. To survive, you need shade, but the shade moves. Eight of the deadliest snakes on Earth also need shade.
“One day, Nangala,” Agnes would say. “We’ll dance together at Mina Mina.” And one day, for no good reason, I answered her: “Let’s do this thing.”
We gathered five lady Kirda and Kurdungurlu (custodians and police-ladies), together with the last male Mina Mina dancer, and my skin-brother Wanta. To this crew we added an anthropologist, a sculptor and a computer programmer from England. Seven Warlpiri, three kardiya (non-Indigenous folk) and me – somewhere in between. My dingo Moon would keep us safe from Jarnpa spirits.
The kardiya drove, while the ladies gave directions. They’d never been to Mina Mina, but they’d painted it in great aerial maps. And those maps were burned into their memories. We put Warlpiri reggae on the stereo and Drew, the computer programmer, turned on the air conditioning, showering us with bulldust and dead wasps.
We lost a tyre after Nyirripi, the first of 11. By nightfall we knew we were in trouble. Our water reserves had diminished faster than expected, due to the exertion of mending tyres in full desert heat. Melinda the anthropologist was having conniptions, having realised the extent to which we were winging it. Victoria, the sculptor, was coming down with the flu.
But the Warlpiri ladies remained lighthearted. As we set up camp, Sonja was singing about a philandering ancestor. I wanted to record her for posterity. “It’s the motherfucker song,” she said, followed by shrieks of laughter. “You tell ’em it’s a sacred lady song, Nangala!”
We slept in a ring of warding fires, to keep away snakes, flies, dingoes and spirits, our swags arranged east to west, so as not to cross the sun’s path. Strong ladies slept on the outside, vulnerable ones in the centre.
The next morning, assessing our water and tyre situation, we decided to turn back. We’d been going in circles, and it was starting to feel dangerous.
We left in convoy, my Hilux in the lead. But after a few minutes the Troopie vanished. I looked back and saw Teddy, the Mina Mina dancer, running behind us, shouting “Nangala! Stop! My mother is chasing us in her Toyota!” Teddy was in his late 70s, and we were in the middle of nowhere. I thought he’d succumbed to the heat.
But soon enough, another Toyota emerged from behind a pile of rocks. Alice, Teddy’s skin-mother, was standing on the tray. She’d seen our campfire the night before and set out with her niece and nephew to help us reach Mina Mina. With new supplies of water and tyres, we reached our destination by nightfall.
None of us expected Mina Mina to look like this.
The sand is deep red and punctuated by tall desert oaks. Past the dunes, the landscape opens on to three enormous salt lakes.
By morning it was already 51C. Nobody could walk more than a few metres outside the shade. At that temperature water alone can’t hydrate your body – you need electrolytes. The ladies dissolved salt from the lake into our bottles. The flies were so thick, they crawled under our eyelids. We breathed them in.
Teddy and the ladies convened under desert oaks to paint for ceremony.
Judy, her torso decorated with Yam Jukurrpa, was the first to walk out on to the salt. Agnes followed, her legs trembling. Before the film melted inside my camera, I somehow captured the moment when, despite the odds stacked against us, we stood together on the salt shores of Mina Mina. And suddenly all the flies, the thirst, the bickering of travel companions, was worth it. Agnes laughed, screamed, burst into tears, then started to dance.
From the dunes, I watched six old ladies, and wild-haired Teddy, dance on the salt lakes, the sun setting behind the desert oaks, in the haze of warding fires. And I swear, in that moment, the very nature of holiness revealed itself to me – marks on the body and marks on the land. And that holiness was love and ritual, map-making, salt and guardian trees – figures dancing on a dry lake in the middle of the desert. I will carry that memory to the grave.
Judith Nangala Crispin has a long friendship with the communities of Lajamanu and Yuendumu, which began in 2011 while she was searching for her own Aboriginal ancestry. For three years she worked with the Warlpiri to create Kurdiji 1.0 Aboriginal suicide prevention app. In that time, her friendships with people from Lajamanu deepened and this led to Jangala Patrick offering to become her grandfather. She has been adopted by the Patrick family in Lajamanu, and uses her Warlpiri skin name, Nangala, at the request of Nungarraryi Hargraves and Jangala Patrick. “I have been incredibly blessed to have close connections with many Warlpiri painters and cultural people, and most of the work I have produced in writing and art since 2011 has honoured those friendships,” she says. “I am not Warlpiri by blood. My heritage is from Victoria. But the Warlpiri are the people of my heart.”
The Dingo’s Noctuary by Judith Nangala Crispin is available now through Puncher & Wattmann (RRP AU$130)
