Day 23 - Tennant Creek

Monday, 21 June 2021

If you look at the picture on the tourist map of Tennant Creek in central North Territories, you’ll see a happy, young family in bright swimming suits seated in a canoe on a beautiful blue lake, their faces spread with smiles. A young man, also white, bright, and happy, windsurfs in the background.

The tourist industry has always been guilty of over-emphasizing the best qualities of the destinations it seeks to attract visitors to. That’s a tall order and a hard job in outback Australia. It’s flat, scrubby, uninteresting, monotonous in its sameness, dry and full of lots of dead things – burnt tundra and scrabbly carcasses of plants that couldn’t handle the aridity and heat. Plus a few dead kangaroo bones.

When we arrive in Tennant Creek we see no young, happy, brightly clad, let alone white people. The lake apparently is a ways out of town. The roadhouse where we get diesel is full of black people ordering chips and other greasy offerings. We drive through the main street of town and the only people sauntering along the footpaths are black, hunkered and desultory as in other towns. The only white people, older, grey haired and slightly fearful looking, are in the big 4WDs pulling their caravans and camper trailers slowly through the town.

We join the slow crawl, looking for the IGA which the map says is “abandoned” in one location and “temporary” in another. As we get to the end of town, a makeshift sign next to the BP station points to the back of a large white non-descript warehouse: “IGA”, it says.

There’s a story here but who knows what it is. Burnt down? Trampled by the locals? Lost its least? It’s surprisingly well-stocked, with trendy items that only urban travellers would buy. Coconut oil. Sirachi sauce. Gluten-free biscuits and muesli bars.

Johan wanders through the Visitors Centre, 1.5 kms out of town with something of a wild west theme park feel, while I catch up on work. It’s late in the afternoon when we cruise back through town. The streets, footpaths and carparks are packed with wandering black people. Has a bus just arrived? Disembarked its passengers who are now ambling home? Or is this the witching hour, the hottest part of the day, when the locals come out for their afternoon strolls? Tired of another day spent hanging out in cramped hot houses.

We are visitors in a foreign land. The businesses are familiar – Beaurepair Tyres, NAB, Mitre 10 – though many of the shop fronts are boarded up and the open ones are covered in dreary dust, metallic screens and secrutiy bars. White Australians stand safely behind the counters. It’s clear they own the town, economically. But the black people occupy it and claim the town’s culture.

Ten kilometres out of town is the female counterpart to the Devil’s Marbles. Kunjarra, The Pebbles, is a women’s meeting place for the traditional owners. A well-groomed gravel road leads you to the carpark and interpretive signs tell the long history of its Aboriginal significance, and the more recent history of the resistance the local indigenous people staged in the 1980s when a mining company brazenly turned up to mine the pebbles. Sit-ins, demonstrations, resistance. Apparently the men joined in to save their women's special place. Amazingly, the miners lost the fight and the locals reclaimed their territory, staking their claim with signs that explain their culture and others that implore visitors to stay off the rocks: be respectful; they’re sacred. Oh, and overnight camping is not allowed.

We head back down the road towards the highway, find a dirt track a respectful distance from the site and set up camp. The mounds of larger “pebbles” sit picturesque on the distant horizon. The smaller marble-sized ones are underfoot, a nice natural flooring for our campsite.