The Impact of a Life (and a Death): Colonial Encounters and Aboriginal Desert Practices
Contributors: Jan Turner.
Published
A CONVERSATION WITH JAN TURNER
In 2017, Michelle Bui, Dean Chan, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, and Charandev Singh released a thorough and respectful investigation on Deathscapes about the death while in detention of an Aboriginal desert artist and leader named Mr. Ward nine years earlier. In this moving conversation with Jan Turner, we talk about the Ward family’s “encounter” with Australian colonialism, Mr. Ward’s life and relationship with the desert, as well as the collective repercussions of his premature death.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are kindly advised that this conversation contains multiple references to a deceased Aboriginal person.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: As a very brief first question, may I ask you to tell us about your relationship with the Ward family?
JAN TURNER: I came to the desert from the coast as a young anthropologist, and I was welcomed to the desert by the Ward family. For thirty years, this Aboriginal family has become part of my own family and my children’s family. So my relationship to this case is an extremely personal relationship. I realized how personal it was, when, shortly after his death at the coroner’s inquiry, an investigative journalist kept pushing me to look at questions of systemic racism, and I was so in sorrow, that I could recognize what she was doing. But I couldn’t respond. My relationship to the deceased is an extremely close one. And it means that I’m still in an ongoing network of relationships with his family, in particular, his widow, and his children, but also, his extended family. And I think as this interview continues, you probably get to know the reasons for that.
LL: And can I also ask about your relationship with the desert?
JT: I’m absolutely attracted to the desert. I love the sense of spaciousness, and the fact that you can look low over vast distances to the horizon. I’ve also been lucky that my only times being in the desert have been with desert people. And so I’ve seen the richness of the desert, the wonder of the desert, the vastness of the skies… I think we can enter into the cosmology of desert people. So for me, the desert hasn’t been a place of low rain or scarce resources; it’s been a place of wonder. So I’ve been extremely fortunate to see deserts as places of life.
LL: Part of your work documents the first encounter between First Nations of the so-called “Gibson Desert” and European-descendant settlers in the 1950-60s. The fact that such first encounter could happen decades after the founding of the Australian settler colony (in 1901), which claims the entireness of the continent, is telling about both how colonialism claims things it literally does not know, and how deserts tend to escape the colonial paradigm of sovereignty. Could you tell us about this part of your work in the context of an issue dedicated to the question raised by deserts?
JT: Yes. For me, what is astounding about the Ngaanyatjarra people in the desert and the Manytjiltjarra people, is that the colonial powers should have known better by the time those people were contacted. Cross-cultural contacts were happening in the 1950s but also as late as the 1970s. One of my dear friends and her family came out of the desert in 1976. And she’s living back in that small homeland of Patjarr now. By the 1950-60s, most of these people came out when citizenship rights were starting to be granted, when the Americans had walked on the moon; when one would hope that we would know how to treat people with much more respect, and to treat others’ cosmologies with more respect. But in fact, that didn’t happen. And so I agree with the way you phrase it that colonialism kept colonizing things that they had no idea about—even when they should have.
As for deserts, I think you really see different worldviews being quite opposed here. For the Western settlers, these were arid lands devoid of resources: you couldn’t settle them with cattle… No livestock have ever been put on Mr. Ward’s country, nor will they. It’s just the wrong country. And even in terms of mineral resources, it’s just too far away. There’s not enough water to process minerals. And so these were seen as lands of no worth. And yet, for the people, it was the source, the battery pack of their culture. It had so much worth.
I think the fact they were in a desert and, in this case, thousands of square kilometers of desert, was to their advantage in that they could remain living their own lives for a much longer period than those on the coast.
And ironically, it wasn’t until the nuclear testing and the Blue Streak missile period, when the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia wanted to shoot missiles across the desert, that this country even became considered to be explored. The first roads and the first interior connections of the state of Western Australia to the rest of Australia came only because of Cold War problems. And the roads that were put in as part of that Blue Streak missile testing; the weather station that was put there, and then the roads that came out, are still the only major roads in the desert. There are no new roads. Those roads created in the late 1950s and early 1960s remain the arterial roads for the Desert. And I think Mr. Ward’s family was able to stay in this pocket that the roads hadn’t reached for such a long time.
LL: Roads are an interesting component of the settler colonial infrastructure, in particular in the way these narrow lines claim sovereignty over a territory so much larger than them. There’s something absurd in thinking that a line produces knowledge of an entire area.
JT: Yes, I’m with you! But I’m also thinking about how Mr. Ward’s family and others in that cultural group made their own first road to get back to their country, from which they had been displaced. They did that by cutting bushes down and burning scrub. And they just went from major sacred places: waterhole to waterhole. Adults remember as children making the road they called “the cut line,” because they cut it by hand. And it was such a significant event because they used this technology of the road for the very first time to get back to their homeland. And then, bit by bit, people could drive up, and now of course, it is a well-graded and formed road.
This road is a very significant thing, because they took the artifact of the colonizer, and they used it to make their own way home.
LL: In the frame of our conversation, one specific person’s life and death exemplifies both settler colonial domination and the Ngaanyatjarra’s living relationship with the Desert. This person, whom we’ve been calling and we’ll call “Mr. Ward” throughout this conversation, is the late artist, dancer, and desert savant Kunmarnarra (Ian) Ward. I read in your work that his family was displaced in 1965 because of the U.K.-Australian nuclear bombings of the desert. Could you give us an understanding of how Mr. Ward’s life and art were fundamentally connected to the history and present of the desert?
JT: Mr. Ward was born into a traditional family. His father had five wives, and when that family was filmed in 1965—at the point when they had their first cross-cultural contact—you can see family life as it was lived back then. You can see the man with his wives of varying ages; the children of varying ages, how they’re living and moving through country. This was his background, his early years. And his sister, and his cousin-sister, who’s become a very great advocate for him, in subsequent years, this is the way they were brought up. His cousin-sister, Daisy Tjuparntari Ward is my age, and his other surviving sister, Dorothy is just a little younger. This is within their memory, this life. And then they come in, they come in to sedentary life. As they were growing up, there were problems of overcrowding (in desert terms) of different Indigenous language and cultural groups being put together by the government, as if all Aboriginal people were the same, and that they would all coexist easily. The Ward family were on another culture’ country, and so they were always displaced. I think it was a time when the church was losing its power, when more secular government strategies and policies were coming into place. It was also a time when substance abuse was coming in—in particular petrol sniffing. So we have this group of young people coming in with their parents and their extended families into a very turbulent situation and a very disempowering situation. He grew up in that and he was troubled by it. As a result, he was given by his mother to another woman, who was close family—she had known Westerners for longer—to help him grow up. And she, too, was an extraordinary, charismatic woman. And I think he was extremely fortunate to have that woman to help him because it was just such an overwhelming situation. It was really hard.
Somehow he came through this and became a leader. As he was emerging as a political leader, it was also a time in local regional politics when the people from the desert were not seen as poorly by the Indigenous people of the settled area they were taken to.
It was a time of great expansion in the arts. Art was seen as this cross-cultural means of communication, and the desert people were making these incredible canvases.
They were painting four-meter canvases, painting off the canvases, onto the sands. The canvases weren’t bounding in their way of depicting what they were feeling. It was a time when I think mainstream Australia was beginning to appreciate indigenous art from the center of Australia. And I think for the first time there was this tipping point, that more acculturated people were recognizing that those with the strong traditional basis were really important to everyone’s existence. So Mr. Ward hit his political stride. He had incredible intelligence or it wouldn’t have happened. But he could walk between different Indigenous desert cultures in a way that very few people can.
As mainstream Australian politics started to look at how Indigenous people managed lands, he became the first person who was in a paid job in land management for the whole of this area of the desert. It sounds small, but it was an extraordinary undertaking that this one person could take up a position that reflected several cultures, because in the lands he was managing, there were five main languages spoken. So he could step up. And he did step up. He was a real leader. He was very true to his own family, and to his own upbringing. He was really respected in his own religious traditions. He took on esoteric knowledge, greater than most men of his age. So he was a leader in many ways. And I think the spiritual and religious knowledge that he took on was what allowed him to also take on the political position as a leader. He had a strong underpinning, a strong respect from all men and women. Sadly, he was also caught in the system, where his wife came from another group, a long way, many hundreds of kilometers away, to where he needed to drive. He was often found drinking and driving on his holidays. He had driving-related offenses, and the Western law caught up with him. He was this great leader, but he also was in a situation that wasn’t easy, because a lot of mainstream political institutions were pulling on him as a leader, asking him to sort of side or to help them. And he was trying to keep his own path. And I do believe that there were just times when it just got too hard.
LL: On so-called “Australia Day” 2008 (January 26), Mr. Ward, who was visiting relatives in proximity to the settler town of Laverton was arrested by the police, placed in a van, and driven to the Kalgoorlie jail, four hours away. As our friends at Deathscapes have shown in their report, to which you have abundantly contributed, Mr. Ward died from scorching heat on the way to jail.
JT: I’d rather not go into the circumstances, because I think you can find them elsewhere. But what I do know is that his eldest son was with him. And the eldest son was only a teenager. And the eldest son’s life, as well as his younger brothers’, are marked by the tragedy of those events that happened. I so feel for him.
LL: I understand. Could you then talk about the repercussions of Mr. Ward’s death? I’m thinking in particular of the additional collective displacement it triggered.
JT: Sadly, sadly. It is customary for people to leave the home or close area of where someone has died, particularly when someone has been struck down in middle age. If a death is a natural death of old age, then we can all mourn, mourn the loss of that person. But it is then an “expected death.” The death of someone in middle age in their stride, when they’re the provider for a family—for many families, in his case—is such a shock, such a shock, and it was such an unexpected death. It was such a shock to the system that the full mourning came about. And so people just packed up their things, and they left his homeland community. They didn’t want to be reminded of their great loss by their memories of familiarity.
His funeral wasn’t a regular funeral. And that, in itself caused a lot of heartache for the family. It was almost like a state funeral. There has never been as many airplanes on the Warburton community airstrip ever. On the day of his funeral, there were police planes escorting prisoners. There were government officials; there were hundreds and hundreds of desert people who had come from remote communities, some of them over a thousand kilometers away. It was a seething, tense, funeral. And it was really difficult for his widow and children, and for his mothers because it was so overwhelming. It was a funeral, like has never been seen before or since at Warburton.
This created a sense of the colonizers’ time, the time when planes are going to land, when the prisoners are able to come; when the police forces are there; when the dignitaries come… It’s a sense of timing that’s not the sense of Indigenous timing.
I was with his biological mother at the time, and it was all happening so fast. She just wanted it to slow down. So even the events of his actual burial were traumatic. And in this part of Australia, we have two funerals. We have a first funeral, which is the respectful placement of the body. But we also have a second funeral. Sometimes it’s called an “opening,” which relieves people of the mourning taboos. But because of the time taken by the detailed coroner’s report, everything took so much longer. I’ve not been able to speak about this before, but it was a real trauma from his death, that he could not even really be buried in the way that was customary because of all these interventions. And so everything was sort of displaced, nothing was quite right. And it did mean that the community of Patjarr, that they’d fought for, that they had cut their first road to go back to, never really recovered. There is a possibility that it will start to recover next year, so many years after his death…
Another consequence though, a repercussion of his death, was an immediate cessation of some of the lower level criminal offenses being able to be dealt with within the community by local Justices of the Peace (JPs). Prior to his death, there were some respected men, Indigenous men, respected leaders who acted as JPs. After his death, there was an immediate cessation of the role of the JP, because of the way a Justice of the Peace had worked outside the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the town of Laverton. The consequence was that the Indigenous leadership, which could listen to cases locally, was disbanded. And that’s something I think we don’t often talk about, because it’s been subsumed under a wider mainstream political argument. But that actually disempowered the local leadership.
LL: And another thing might have been the sum of the desert knowledge Mr. Ward had, which was lost for all the day of his death?
JT: Yes, an enormous amount of knowledge. When a geologist would come looking for ancient fossil forms, people would say: “Oh, go to him, explain what you want, and he’ll be able to take you there.” He intimately knew his landscape; he cared for and mentored younger men, and was extremely respectful of older men. But what I think we also lost, that I can talk about, is we lost one of the three outstanding people who could manage change—the two others being his cousin-sister, Daisy Tjuparntari Ward, and another Indigenous woman, Elizabeth Marrkilyi Giles Ellis, who’s now a doctor of linguistics. These three all had similar traditional upbringings, but they all had this vision for how they could help their families navigate in a new world. With his loss, his premature death, we lost the male voice of this trio. The two women continued, but we lost a really strong male voice. And those women still mourn his passing.
LL: In the last years of his life, Mr. Ward was particularly interested in fighting for Yarnangu people from Patjarr to obtain what is now known as “Native Title.” Could you tell us about what that entails and how Aboriginal nations claiming it have to compose with settler justice, language and, more generally, cosmology, to obtain the rights to their lands?
JT: In Australia, until recently, Aboriginal rights to country were not recognized. And there was then a very famous case, the Mabo case, which opened the door for Aboriginal groups to be able to claim their rights to customary title. It’s always a difficult process, because it is a court process at the highest court in the land, the Federal Court of Australia.
The proofs that are required, are extensive, and are very difficult for many people to understand who are claiming them, which means they rely on brokers, anthropologists, lawyers… They have to have faith, really, that their words will be able to be translated into this extremely foreign high English forum.
In the desert when the Mabo case came about, we thought that we would be very lucky, because people came out of the desert as recently as the 1960-70s. And surely, their ways of being able to speak about their rights to country would be very easy for the courts to understand. However, in the case of Mr. Ward’s family’s country, only a decade after his family were taken out of that country, it was made an A-class nature reserve by the state of Western Australia (WA). By making it an A-class nature reserve, it meant that people’s rights to Native Title were removed. Many desert groups were able to claim their Native Title rights through negotiated settlements with the state of WA. Remembering that in many places, there are few mining interests, there are few other interests in country in title. However, in the case of an A-class or the highest possible class of Nature Reserve, Native Title rights had been taken away.
Now this was really confronting, and at the signing of a large Native Title settlement for much of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, Daisy Tjuparntari Ward and Mr. Ward, together with three older men signed a sub-document, called a “memorandum of understanding.” It meant the state of WA would in good faith try to work out the best way that Native Title rights could be gained to this nature reserve. Although they were photographed signing the document, the two younger middle aged people, Daisy Tjuparntarri Ward and Mr. Ward were really gutted that this was the best possible thing that could happen for their families; that the state of Australia and Western Australia had not recognized that they were the right people to that country automatically. And so we started on this “second best” way of working, and Mr. Ward was part of that work. It meant taking delegations of people 1,800 kilometers from their homeland, to Perth to Parliament. In Western Australia, we had a very strong environmental party, who were very pro-Aboriginal people getting their rights back, and they led the charge. So a piece of legislation went through both the lower House of Parliament and the upper House; and Mr. Ward’s families’ country would have had a way of being worked out with the state of Western Australia. However, a general election was called. The legislation was put to one side, and it was at that point that he died prematurely. This was a knock back that Tjuparntari could not consider. Not only had she lost her political mate and her first cousin, it was absolutely inconceivable that some of the last people to have lived on their lands in their own way according to their own lifestyle, should be denied Native Title rights. Mr. Ward’s premature death just left this vacuum, which now is being filled by other men of his age.
But at the time of mourning, the vacuum was so great that it put back the people’s capacity to even engage with the state, the very state that killed him, and have properly acknowledged their customary rights and responsibilities to country.
In 2010, we started to take the state of WA to the Federal Court under the Native Title Act to ask for compensation for the lack of Native Title. For two weeks, people gave evidence on their country. And Daisy Tjuparntarri Ward showed and led the women’s private sacred evidence that men had never seen before: the judge was the only man to have ever seen it. The men took the judge to show them what they considered to be their sacred “title deeds”: their sacred boards. People gave of themselves and of their knowledge for ten days on country. Over the weekend, in between the two sitting weeks, they took the judge and the court to an art gallery in Warburton, where they laid out their paintings and the glass artworks of Mr. Ward. His sister spoke to these glass bowls, glass artworks, and, in that way, she brought her brother’s voice back. She said how crucial these artworks were, because they embody the major songlines that run through the country. For me, it was a time when the people were able to try as best they could, all through interpreters, to present how they felt about country to the court. For most of the rest of the time, it was legal arguments and legal construction.
At the end of that ten days, there was a feeling that people would win this case; that they’d revealed more than they perhaps would want to reveal of their culture, but that it was worth it. It was only, sadly, a little while later that the news came that the WA government had objected to them being able to get the quantum of their rights recognized because of some oil licenses that had been granted in 1920. Now this became a matter of law; the judge then had to sit and see whether these oil licenses did in fact, reduce the people’s rights to gain compensation. What really shocked the people was the news that the proclamation of these oil exploration licenses in the 1920s had indeed reduced their Western legal rights to have their customary title recognized, and therefore the quantum of compensation. This was absolutely inconceivable to all of us, because in 1920, there was no English town within 1,000 kilometers of that piece of country: this is an abstraction of Western mapping. That is an absurdity, a total absurdity! Never had those licenses been activated. But the fact they were proclaimed by the Crown, by the state, was enough to reduce people’s rights.
At this point, the people just had enough, and the consequences were absolutely devastating socially. The decision was made to not legally pursue their Native Title claim; to withdraw. By withdrawing, they would leave their options open, as the Commonwealth, the Federal Native Title Act may change in the future, which indeed it now has. But, at the time, the senior people who had taken the responsibility of revealing so much of their culture, were ridiculed by others: “Why did you do that? Look, what’s happened!” And there was this feeling—Tjuparntari will still say it: ”Is the state punishing us because we were the last to come and be assimilated?” It’s actually very hard for me to talk to her because I can talk about the legal stuff, but her feelings are the sentiments of that whole group of people and family. They were just devastated. They felt that yet again, they were being talked about in the pejorative; they were seen somehow as savages; that they weren’t somehow worthy of having their title rights recognized. And so things went into abeyance from 2014. The government in Western Australia changed once more after another election, and we no longer had a government that was antithetical to Aboriginal rights in country. The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and the Minister of the Environment came out and camped overnight on country, and allowed people to tell them their story. And at that point, a minister for the WA government— an Aboriginal man himself—said “we must write the wrongs that the tide of history has made.” And from that point on, things have changed positively. But it’s been an extraordinarily bumpy and sickening example of colonialism. When I began, I said that the state should have known better. The state should have known better by now.
LL: Is there anything else you would like to add?
JT: Yes, there’s one thing I would like to say if we have time. And that’s how I got the news; how I heard the news. I was in my home in Perth, and his cousin-sister, Tjuparntari, rang me. She was in Kalgoorlie, which is where he formally was declared dead, at the hospital. She was in a hotel room. She was wailing so much on the phone. I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She could barely draw a breath. She was just wailing. So for quite a while I just waited, listening, waiting for that raw emotion to pass. And then she told me—she calls him brother, because that’s the right way of calling him—, she told me her brother had passed. And I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I said: “No, it can’t be true.” And she said: “Yes, they’ve killed him. They killed him in the car. They’ve killed him, Jan.”
Now, this was before anyone else, I think, was publicly aware. I think it was before even the G4S drivers had been taken by the police for questioning. This is a hospital with mostly Indigenous patients. And the patients were hearing, they were finding out what was happening in the emergency section.
So this word, this incredible howl of anguish, was spreading among the Indigenous people in the hospital, and out before the hospital itself, announced him dead; before the formalities. I’ll never forget that howl of anguish.
And I think there are so few opportunities when we speak about the consequences of a single death. There are so few opportunities for us to think about that wave, that howl of anguish, when people—not just the family—are aware of what’s happening before the news is formally released. And how they absorb it… It’s a real howl of anguish. It’s a primal scream, really. And almost a sickening knowledge that this can happen. ■
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THE ROAD: PASSAGE THROUGH THE DEATHSCAPE (excerpt) ///
Mr Ward, a senior Ngaanyatjarra lore man and artist, aged 46, died of burns in the back of a prison van while being transported across the Western Australian desert on January 27, 2008. His death painfully instantiates how the material conditions of remote Australia, with its colonial infrastructure, entrenched disregard for Aboriginal lives, and racially marked systems of policing, entwine with neoliberal practices of management to lead to his dying, or being made to die, in the custody of the state.
Mr Ward’s story can be plotted along the axes of the roads that score his country. The road on which he was arrested, between his country and the settler town of Laverton (originally named British Flag), is the road on which he begins his journey to death on Australia Day (Invasion Day, the day that celebrates the arrival of the British First Fleet in 1788).
The second road runs from Laverton to Kalgoorlie prison. It is along this road that Mr Ward was killed in the back of a prisoner transport van operated by the private contractor G4L. His body temperature registered over 41 degrees and he sustained large burn marks where his flesh had sizzled when it was seared by the metal sides, floor and seat of the scorching, airless van in which he was transported over 350 kilometers through the Western Desert to Kalgoorlie jail.
A third road, from what is now Patjarr, at the edge of Mr Ward’s country, to the town of Warburton, marks his people’s journey into a landscape scored by histories of usurped sovereignty, enclosure, exploitation of the land and the abrupt removal of people from their own waterholes and country.
Mr Ward’s death in custody is also inscribed by the operation of two systems of law: the violently imposed law of the settler state and its legal regimes of criminalization of Indigenous people, regimes that ensure the serial production of Indigenous deaths in custody; and surviving Indigenous Law that continues to contest the legitimacy of settler law and that is inextricably bound to the very flourishing of Aboriginal life and Country.
Michelle Bui, Dean Chan, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, and Charandev Singh, Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States, 2017.