Tom Griffiths was fourteen when he came across a book by Alice Duncan-Kemp in his school library. “The dusty volume was sitting unobtrusively on a shelf of ‘Australiana’,” he recalls, but it looked “different from its companions” and was mysteriously titled Where Strange Paths Go Down. What curious fourteen-year-old can resist that? He picked it up, and in that moment took his first step on a strange path of his own, a path towards understanding the life of its author and her stories about friendship and learning across cultures in remote Australia in the early twentieth century.
The book, Alice Duncan-Kemp’s second, had been published in 1952. Her first, Our Sandhill Country, had appeared in 1933 just as curiosity was building among Australians wanting to learn more about the “outback.” Readers readily took to the idea that the “dead heart” of Australia was not dead at all, and Alice’s book was warmly received. Our Sandhill Country was an early example of outback literature and established Alice’s reputation.
She never stopped writing. In 1961 she published Our Channel Country, and in 1964 a volume that combined the contents of her first two books, retaining the title Where Strange Paths Go Down. The last book published in her lifetime, Where Strange Gods Call, came out in 1968. After her death in 1988 her work slipped from view, and in 2005 her family arranged the publication of an unpublished manuscript, People of the Grey Wind.
Read together, these titles offer an invitation to share what Griffiths calls the “enchanting otherworld” of Alice’s books. She wrote about a landscape inhabited by humans but also, as Griffiths writes, “plants, animals and spirits, and by invisible creatures of the Dreaming and of the here and now.” As a teenager Griffiths was drawn into her “glowing stories,” and their “compelling strangeness” stayed with him until eventually, after a visit to the Channel country for another project in the early 2000s, he began the work that now appears as his latest book, Alice’s Dreaming.
His is a study of Alice Duncan-Kemp’s writing and its impact. It is based on a close reading of Alice’s published and unpublished work (half a million words altogether, he estimates) and many years working with Alice’s family and the traditional owners of the country where she grew up.
Griffiths is in complete control of a complex narrative but readers must be patient. I’m advising you — no, I’m telling you, for the love of Mike — to put down your phone. Don’t Google “Alice Duncan-Kemp,” don’t expect a linear narrative because this is not a biography, and don’t spot check the index (excellent though it is) for any little facts you may already know. Trust the historian. He’ll take you on a far journey, but, as the title of the last section of his book indicates, he’ll also show you the way home.
Channel country is a vast arid landscape watered intermittently by rivulets of the Cooper, Diamantina and Georgina rivers. The region Alice knew was “The Kirrenderri,” which means “heart of the channel country.” Her home was Mooraberrie, a cattle station 220 kilometres west of Windorah, managed and later owned by her parents, William and Laura Duncan. Alice was born in 1901 but after her father died in 1907 her mother continued to run the station with the help of white and Aboriginal stockmen and servants. The traditional owners were (and are) the Mithaka people.
Griffiths begins his book the way Alice did hers, by plunging straight into story. It is 1908 and Alice is rambling in the sandhills with her two sisters and their Mithaka nurse, Mary Ann Coomindah. Mary Ann is talking to the three white girls about plants and teaching them bush skills. They do this often, but this time a wind springs up and Mary Ann realises fire is coming their way from the north. She hurries the children to the safety of Teeta Lake, two kilometres away, where they’re joined by other Mithaka people rushing to the same sanctuary.
They arrive only just in time because the grass around the lake is already scorching and the water very warm. Various other wild things float past, forced into an “uneasy truce” by the common threat. Drawing on Alice’s account, Griffiths relates that “one floating wooden box contained a death adder, a lizard, spiders, a sandhill rat, grass birds and a wild cat.” Surrounded by fire, Mary Ann must shelter the girls with her body, suffering blistering burns as a result. “But the children were safe and Mary Ann led them home.”
This is how Griffiths introduces the reader to Alice’s “wonderland,” the name he gives the first section of his book. We join Alice, slightly older, on mustering expeditions to outlying parts of the station and learn how the work was managed in harmony with the Mithaka people’s traditional laws and customs. Alice’s father William had believed Aboriginal people were the rightful owners, and he often referred to two Elders as “the landlords.” After his death her mother Laura maintained this unusually sympathetic attitude.
Griffiths lingers long on this immersion in Alice’s childhood, as if reluctant to leave it for the inevitable necessity of explaining the white invasion that had begun in the Channel country in the 1870s. Appropriation of land and spoiling of water had been followed by massacres and removals. These events shaped the lives of Alice’s Mithaka teachers and friends before her birth, as Alice gradually learns.
She did have two extended periods of formal schooling, in Sydney and later in Brisbane and Toowoomba, so received the standard education for girls at that time. However, Griffiths leaves unaddressed the question of how she went about blending Aboriginal and Western knowledges. I spent the entire book wondering how Alice might have reconciled Aboriginal cosmology with the story of God having created the world in six days and resting on the seventh. What did she actually believe? Possibly Alice herself was silent on the subject.
In 1923 Alice married Fred Kemp, a grazier and later bank manager, and the couple was kept busy with five children and the necessity to move from town to town for Fred’s bank placements. Alice seems to have married without her family’s approval, for there was no wedding gift. Mooraberrie was in financial difficulties, and Alice’s mother and sisters decided, without consulting her, to sell. The decision was reversed (and the property remained in family hands until 1998) but relations were tense.
The half-million words were written out of a sense of loss and nostalgia because Alice rarely visited Mooraberrie after the early 1930s. Some of her dearest Mithaka friends had died and the landscape seemed drained of the enchantment she remembered from her earliest days. While still very young she had asked her parents: “Who were the Aborigines and where did they come from?” She became a compulsive writer on any scrap of paper she could find and her subject was and always would be the same: who the Aborigines were, and where they had come from.
Alice was not an anthropologist and states clearly that she never set out to “study” Aboriginal people, but to write things as “they themselves would have told it.” Griffiths stipulates that she was not mimicking Aboriginal storytelling but representing it, or performing it. Hence this is not Mithaka Dreaming, but Alice’s Dreaming.
Where she encountered profound difficulties was when she needed to supplement her narratives with experiences not her own. There she drew on the work of anthropologists and other writers but, untaught in scholarly protocols, she sometimes — more than sometimes — failed to alert her readers when she was doing this.
Questions over Alice’s reliability matter because her texts have been drawn upon by many professionals including botanists, linguists and others, and in support of the Mithaka people’s successful native title claim in 2015. Griffiths dedicates the final chapters of his book to showing that Aboriginal people in this region of Queensland have not “died out,” as some historians have claimed. Mithaka people are still there and Alice’s books have helped demonstrate longstanding connections to country.
At the heart of Alice’s Dreaming is Griffiths’s commitment to a deep reading of all Alice’s writing. He worked slowly, curiously and with an open mind, noting her achievements, accepting her failings, and celebrating the glorious originality of her layered and circular storytelling. His patient attentiveness to Alice’s work, and to listening to the current generation of Mithaka people, is awe-inspiring.
French philosopher Simone Weil famously wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” and that unmixed attention is akin to prayer. Griffiths’s capacity for deep attentiveness is, I think, what invests his book with a spiritual quality rare in Australian historical writing.
And yet the story really begins not with Griffiths or even Alice Duncan-Kemp, but on Mithaka country with Mary Ann, Alice’s beloved nurse. Mary Ann walked with Alice and her sisters, teaching them to read the land, telling them stories of her people and inspiring Alice with her great love of plants. From Mary Ann and other Mithaka people Alice learned that every tree, leaf and rock has a story. Everything has a purpose and everything is connected. •
Alice’s Dreaming
By Tom Griffiths | Black Inc. | $36.99 | 384 pages
