The Man Who Walked Beside Me
In 1965, when I was three years old, I lived with my family on the North West Cape of Western Australia.
Exmouth did not yet exist as a town.
My father, Alan Burns, was working as a surveyor on the enormous American naval communications project that was being built there. The agreement between Australia and the United States had been signed in 1963. The town of Exmouth and the Harold E. Holt Naval Communication Station would not officially open until September 1967.
We lived much nearer the construction works than the settlement that would eventually become Exmouth. For a time our home was a caravan with a canvas annex, surrounded by poles, drums and the improvised necessities of living in an extraordinarily remote place.
There is a photograph of me standing outside it holding my doll. Unfortunately my face is hidden, but the photograph tells me something more important now. It shows just how small I was.
Beyond our caravan was open country.
My mother called it pindan. Red earth and sand, spinifex, scrub, bungarras and snakes. The ground was not flat. It moved in long, low waves, sandy rises perhaps only a foot and a half or two feet high. To an adult they would have been fairly insignificant. To a three year old they were hard work to climb over.
One day I wandered away to find my friend to play with.
I remember looking down at my feet and thinking how inappropriate my shoes were for the ground. The low sandy rises were already difficult for me to climb, and I knew I was not properly dressed for walking through that country.
Not long afterwards I saw the track of a snake in the sand, and that was when I really understood that I was lost.
I was frightened.
That was the moment when I knew I did not know where I was.
Then I saw an Aboriginal man.
He was some distance away, on slightly higher ground to my right.
In my childhood memory he was a man, but looking back I realise he may only have been in his twenties. He wore a loin cloth and nothing else.
He did not come towards me.
He stayed at a distance.
I remember him beginning to move roughly parallel with me. Somehow, without coming close and without, as far as I remember, speaking to me, he began to guide me.
I followed.
More than sixty years later I have looked again at maps of the place and realised something I did not understand at three years old.
I had been walking in the wrong direction.
I was not finding my own way back. I was heading farther away from where I needed to be.
He must have seen that.
And he decided to intervene.
By then everyone at the camp was searching for me.
Eventually I walked back into the main settlement.
I remember the overwhelming relief of seeing people again. I was so relieved, and presumably surrounded immediately by anxious adults, that I never told anyone about the Aboriginal man who had brought me back.
For most of my life this remained simply one of my earliest and clearest visual memories.
The sand.
The snake track.
The knowledge that I was lost.
The young man on the higher ground.
And then the extraordinary experience of him walking beside me, at a distance, until I was safe.
Only much later did I begin to understand the historical context of what I had seen.
The North West Cape was not empty country waiting for Exmouth to be built. It was Aboriginal country. The Baiyungu, Thalanyji and Yinigurdira peoples are recognised as Traditional Owners of the Cape Range and adjoining Ningaloo country. Aboriginal occupation of this region reaches back tens of thousands of years.
At exactly the time I was there, something immense was appearing on that country.
Thirteen communications towers were being built for the naval station. The tallest would eventually reach nearly 400 metres into the sky. The antenna array covered more than 400 hectares. In that vast and sparsely settled landscape the towers must have been extraordinary landmarks.
The Aboriginal people living and travelling across the Cape could hardly have been unaware of the newcomers, the machinery, the roads and those astonishing structures rising above the horizon.
Yet the young man I remember did not approach our camp.
He kept his distance from us.
I think about that now.
I cannot know what he was thinking, and I do not want to invent motives for a man whose name I never knew. But I wonder whether the distance he maintained from me was deliberate in another sense too. In 1965, an Aboriginal man approaching or touching a lost white child could have placed himself in a dangerous position.
Perhaps he understood that.
Perhaps that is why he helped me in the only way he felt he safely could.
He did not pick me up.
He did not take my hand.
He did not even come near me.
He simply walked beside me at a distance and changed the direction in which I was going.
That knowledge has become much more poignant for me since learning more about what happened to Aboriginal families in this region. Historical accounts record displacement from traditional country, and Baiyungu elder Hazel Walgar has spoken of being sent to a mission as a child and of seeing older people taken away from their country.
I cannot say what happened to the young man who helped me.
I do not know his name.
I do not know where his family was.
I do not know whether he remained on the North West Cape as Exmouth was built, or whether he too was later displaced.
But now that I understand more of that history, the possibility that he may have lost access to the country in which I encountered him makes me deeply sad.
We were the newcomers.
He knew we were there.
He apparently chose not to make contact with us.
Until he saw a three year old child walking the wrong way into the desert.
Then he chose to help her.
I have never forgotten him.