A Sunday Morning with Mr Ingkatji: The Power of Reciprocity for Working in the Northern Territory
The sound of the phone tears through the air and into my muddled dreams. It’s too early, Sunday morning, seven am. On and on it trills, relentlessly cutting through the soft light of morning. The ringing is coming from one of those old, beige phones with the cord attached, stuck to the far wall of the house. Outside, the desert morning is well-below zero and even as I lie in bed, my breath makes clouds. I crack one tired eye open and watch it puff and disappear as the phone drones on. I pull the blanket over my head to muffle the noise, stick my fingers in my ears, put my head under the pillow, pile another pillow on top. Nothing works, and eventually I succumb, stumble out of bed and run barefoot across the cold tiles to the phone. A cheeky voice beams down the line.
“Wai! Jennipa Jennipa! Nyuntu palya?” “Wai, Mr Ingkatji”, I croak back, my voice not yet warmed up after six hours of neglect. “I’m fine. It’s early. What do you want?” “That motorcar battery is flat. You’ll come and startimup?” “What, now? No, it’s too early! It’s Sunday, I need to sleep. Later, I’ll come later.” “But church is soon! And then football! You’ll come now.” This is delivered as a statement, all pretence of my freedom of choice slipping away as the sun breaks over the horizon.
I can just see him, sitting in his little house. The house is sparse, with only a few pieces of furniture. The kitchen table is always strewn with canvases and paints, the floor underneath covered in a patchwork of colourful paint splatters. The broken fridge is used as a pantry and houses tins of tuna and baked beans. Mr Ingkatji will be sitting right next to the television where he keeps his phone, so he can watch the football while he calls around to his friends. He would’ve called everyone he knows in Umuwa and Pukatja, two communities in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands - Aboriginal owned land in remote South Australia - to come and help him. And I’m the only sucker who picked up.
Mr Ingkatji is no ordinary early morning caller. He is 85 years old, was born in the bush and moved to the Ernabella mission when he was eight years old, when he and his family saw white people for the first time. Perhaps most extraordinarily, he only has one leg; his missing one replaced by a stiff fake one that doesn’t bend well and means he walks with crutches. Despite this, he lives on his own at his homeland, David’s Well, with his loyal dog Lassie. She is white with dirty brown spots and has a penchant for sleeping on the roof racks of any four wheel drive she can find.
Mr Ingkatji is the one person I can’t say no to. He is kind and cheeky and laughs easily. He is an incorrigible flirt, and has asked me to marry him on numerous occasions. He often comes over for lunch and sits in the lounge room while I cook, watching the old western movies that he loves, but which we have to fast forward through when any of the lewd kissing scenes come on. He yells “wanti” – leave it, in Pitjantjatjara – and covers his face with his hands. He has come for lunch so many times that he recently declared that he would make me a painting in return. It’s the shape of a parallelogram because he had trouble cutting the canvas by himself, but it’s beautiful, and tells the story of some of his country further north. He came past my office the other day and asked for fifty dollars for petrol. When I said no, he reminded me of the painting and I rolled my eyes and gave him twenty.
The painting was a gift, yet it carried with it the message of reciprocity, cultural inclusion, and tolerance. The gift, while it was generous in its intent, also placed a subliminal burden on me as the recipient. The gift, and the act of accepting it, was an acknowledgement of my new place in the network of relationships. Out here in the desert, we engage in these theatres of encounter that embody friendship, reciprocity and exchange.
By this point of the phone call, my housemate Juliette is awake, standing in the doorway in a big jumper with her arms crossed and an exasperated but amused look on her face. She knows Mr Ingkatji, and she knows we can’t get out of it now. I protest for another ten minutes but my excuses become weaker, and eventually I say yes, just to get my rapidly freezing feet off the cold tiles.
Juliette and I skull a strong cup of coffee each, pull on our boots, and jump in my car - a university owned Troopy. We drive out to David’s Well, about 20 minutes away. Mr Ingkatji’s driveway is a long dirt road and as we bump our way over the soft sand and potholes, we spy his small herd of cattle. Soon, we’re vibrating over the cattle grid and pushing through his gate.
He has moved from next to the television and is sitting out the front of his house on a green plastic garden chair. His leg is held out straight in front of him and he’s wearing a deep red, paint-flecked flannelette and his big signature mukata, or cowboy hat, on his head. Lassie is sitting at his feet but comes bounding down the driveway, doing a good impression of an excited kangaroo when she realises it’s us. We often bring bags of dog food when Mr Ingkatji runs out and has resorted to feeding her Weetbix.
His car is pulled in as close as possible to the house, so he doesn’t have to walk far from the driver’s seat to the front door. His is also an old white Troopy, dyed russet red from the desert dust. In the back he keeps a disassembled wrought-iron single bed with metal springs that can be reassembled if he gets tired and needs to stay over at someone’s camp. He also keeps his enormous swag in there, in which there are – and yes, we’ve counted! – eleven minkies, those fluffy blankets with the garish patterns on them. He uses them like a heater thermostat; depending how cold it is he gets under more and more blankets. One minky, a mild fifteen degrees. Ten minkies, sub-zero temperatures. I’m surprised he can breathe under all that weight.
I pull my car up in front of his, bonnet to bonnet, and climb down, patting Lassie’s wiry head. She’s looking too skinny. “You been feeding her?” I ask. He once refused to feed her when she started digging holes all over the driveway. He complained that they were so big he’d lose the Troopy in one of them and never find his way out. My protestations that she wouldn’t connect the punishment to the crime seemed to fall on deaf ears. “Uwa,” he replies, pointing to a silver bowl overflowing with dog food, indicating that he’s moved from the sublime to the ridiculous. He palms my question off while he grins at his success of getting us out here so early on a Sunday. “Pass the jumper leads then.” I say, holding my hand out. “My ones broken. We use you ones?” he asks. “Oh, for god’s sake! That university Troopy doesn’t have any. Why didn’t you tell us yours don’t work over the phone, we could’ve found some!” I say in exasperation.
He just shrugs. Juliette and I try to push start the car, leaning our insubstantial weights on the back door, but it doesn’t budge.
Mr Ingkatji is not to be deterred by these setbacks and immediately hatches a new plan. I’m told to drive slowly, slowly, slowly around until the front of my Troopy is facing the back of his and very gently give it a little nudge, just to get it moving. I protest, worried about university property, but eventually I relent, as I know I must get that car started or we’ll be co-opted into being his personal chauffeurs for the day and miss out on our much-needed day of rest.
So, under my dear 85-year-old friend's instruction, he gets into the passenger seat of his car with Juliette driving, and I get back into mine. Now, I’m trained in social research – interviews, questions, a little bit of writing. I’m not particularly well versed at driving enormous one-tonne cars with great finesse. Juliette tells me later that it probably wasn’t the finest moment of my PhD when I gave a senior Anangu elder mild whiplash. But the bump from my trusty car does get his rolling, and started too, and, I know no-one will believe this, but there wasn’t a single mark on either of those indestructible cars!
There’s cheers from all vehicles and I toot the horn in celebration. Mr Ingkatji is particularly pleased with himself because the car has been started in time for him drive himself to Ernabella to watch the Pukatja Magpies play footy that afternoon. There’s a flurry as everyone swaps seats, then he sends us off with a wave and a “Palya-oo!” and drives off down the driveway in a billowing cloud of dust. It would be the first of many Sunday mornings I spend with Mr Ingkatji.
…
I was in the middle of the desert helping to push start an old man’s car on a Sunday morning because I was doing fieldwork for my PhD of which I am currently writing up. I work with the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods at CDU on an ARC linkage project that aims to understand the way that local people know whether their Country is healthy or not, and to suggest better tools for monitoring the effectiveness of caring for Country.
I started my PhD in mid-2013 and spent one year out of the first two living and working in both the APY Lands, which are in the north-west corner of South Australia, three days drive from Darwin, and in Ngukurr, in southern Arnhem Land, east of Mataranka, about a seven-hour drive from Darwin. I worked with the Yugul Mangi Rangers in Ngukurr and with APY Land Management in the APY Lands, and talked to them, and other community members, about how they’re measuring the effectiveness of their land and sea management.
And it was a pretty exhilarating and transformative experience if I’m honest. I lived in some of the most spectacular landscapes in the country and worked with the most fabulous people. I drove over 30,000 kilometres in the first year of my PhD. I got 13 flat tyres. I learnt the basics of two Indigenous languages – Pitjantjatjara in APY and Kriol in Ngukurr. But it was also lonely and confusing. I was confused all the time. I was living in the middle of the desert or the tropics, where people did things in ways that didn’t always make sense, thrown into a cultural melee of which I found myself in the minority for the first time in my life.
And so it was through relationships with people like Mr Ingkatji that I found the real value in the work, through relationships with people who spent so much of their own time imparting their stories and knowledge to me.
I’m now nearing the end of my PhD scholarship and I’m buried in writing up a multi-case site, multi-language, ethnographic, social science research project. And it’s been hard. I was in a slump recently, finding it difficult to work or to write. Last week, I was despairingly sifting through data, kicking myself for not transcribing and analysing the interviews earlier, when I came across an interview I did with Mr Ingkatji in 2015, the second time I was living in Umuwa. In it, he talks about changes to Country that he’s observed in his lifetime, and things that he worries about, particularly the young people in community. And it was hearing his sincere but cheeky voice again that kick started me to get working again. Hearing his rollicking yarns again reminded me of our friendship and the importance of finishing the work that I’d started.
I’ve just finished transcribing all those wonderful but exhausting interviews. It was through all this that I realised that, in many ways, working in remote cross-cultural environments are some of the hardest things I’ll ever do. All of us that do this work need something that pushes us to keep coming back, and for me the thing that pushes me are all the people like Mr Ingkatji, in both the APY Lands and in Ngukurr, who have invested so much of their time, energy and friendship into teaching me what I need to know, and who give me the energy to keep coming back and doing my job. Just like two undersized white ladies push starting an oversized Troop Carrier, so those old story tellers keep pushing us onwards.
…
Mr Ingkatji died last year. He was 86 years old. He died just days after putting the final touches to his first solo art exhibition. I think it’s fitting that this man, who spent so much of his life passing on his knowledge to his children, family and community and, on a personal level, taught me so much that is enabling me to write the story of my thesis, named his final show, in Pitjantjatjara: “Kulila Ngayuku Tjukurrpa Wangkanyangka.” “Let me tell you my story.”
This is an edited version of a story told at a live storytelling event at the Institute of Advanced Studies Student Researchers’ Conference at Charles Darwin University on the 2nd May, 2017.
Jennifer Macdonald is the editor-in-chief of Flycatcher and keeps forgetting how lucky she is to have this job.
