The Nomadic Alternative – Page 168

To enforce this fossilization of their way of life, the relatively immobile Aranda have recourse to a most complicated body of tradition. They hold puberty ceremonies of excessive cruelty, such as the flaying of a boy's urethra, to impress upon him what it means to be an Aranda. They impose the very strictest taboos, for which the penalty of sacrilege is death. This obsessive attention to ritual observances reveals the Aranda's anxiety about their place in the world.

Their immediate neighbours, the Matantave, live on identical territory, but behave in a totally different way, and ecological pressures can have no possible bearing on this difference. They are compulsive wanderers. Despite the excellence of their game reserves and water-holes, nothing will make them sit still. Unlike the Aranda they voluntarily deprive themselves of plenty in a land of plenty, and unlike them they have no sense of inner emptiness or of not belonging. They enjoy the benefits of the Society of Equals. They are flexible and open minded, and borrow freely the artistic conventions, the songs and religious concepts of other peoples, providing these do not interfere with their uninterrupted freedom of movement.

For their way of life is a perpetual walkabout. The Aranda rarely stray from their territory. The Matantave rarely stay in it.

"They walked", writes Strehlow, "with an ease and grace that no 'civilized' Australian either dark or white can emulate; for their grace was the grace of a people accustomed to bearing heavy loads on their heads without touching them with their hands. The dignity of the older men and the litheness of the younger could not have been surpassed anywhere. But the most striking thing about them was their ready laughter - they were a cheerful laughing people who bore themselves as though they had never known a care in the world."

Aranda men 'civilized' on sheep stations said, "They are always laughing - they can't help it."

All over Australia zig-zagged the mythical tracks of the ancient ancestors, who had wandered about the sub-continent "in the dreamtime" creating topographical features as they went. One could only see