When I first went to the desert with people who come from there, we travelled by car and on foot to some very out of the way places. They had names, but were not to be found on kartiya (whitefella) maps, even under a kartiya name. Sometimes I found myself wondering whether I was the first white person to have set foot in some of these places. I had, after all, been brought up in England in the days when much of the map of the world was coloured red, and when British people were proud of the Empire. I read books such as King Solomon’s Mines. I learnt about the great explorers of Africa: Livingstone and Burton were among my heroes. My heart swelled with pride at the age of 12 when, as I sat in the rain awaiting the Queen’s coronation parade, it was announced over the loudspeakers that a British team had conquered Everest. No one mentioned that they could not have got anywhere near the summit without massive support from the local Nepalese. I thought Hilary and Tensing were both Englishmen.

Of course, digging for water in the middle of a desert plain does not cut quite the same dash as stepping onto the summit of the world’s highest mountain, but I had inherited the cultural sense that to be the first white person, especially if you were of British origin, to stand anywhere is somehow significant. The Great Sandy Desert was my frontier.

But one person’s frontier is another person’s home. At the same time that I was experiencing the newness of the desert, a country without settlement or, nowadays, human habitation of any kind for hundreds of square miles, I was learning how differently the country appeared to the people who grew up there. In this landscape, regarded by some as so inimical to human settlement as to be a suitable receptacle for the world’s radioactive waste, they were profoundly at home: indeed, far more at home in the sandhills than they were in Fitzroy Crossing, where they had spent the past thirty or forty years. Not only is Fitzroy Crossing a town with kartiya rules and expectations, but also it lies within the country of the riverside Bunuba people, where the desert people who now live there remain forever outsiders.

At first, the desert appeared to me beautiful but undifferentiated. I saw regular, long red sandhills and swales clad in spinifex, wattle and small trees. Only as I picked up some of the vocabulary of the Walmajarri people did I begin to distinguish one area from another, and start to perceive pattern instead of randomness. I learnt that one place where we used to go hunting fairly regularly was a ‘tinyjilwarnti’ – characterised by claypans and large numbers of Eucalyptus victrix. Another, to me similar, eucalypt called a yarun grew on some sandhills in stands known as kurrmalyi. A third, whose pure white bark people cut to use as disposable utensils, tended to grow in ones and twos and was called nyumpurl. Other trees that once I would have described as ‘stunted’ – in other words, inferior as measured against a European yardstick of height, as if there were tall, non-stunted specimens to be found somewhere else – gradually became transformed into perfectly adapted hakea and grevillea, with flowers that provide welcome mouthfuls of nectar, their curved trunks the matrix from which people draw forth pairs of boomerangs.

Of course, any botanist would have made these simple distinctions at once, without having to go through a cross-cultural learning process. But the botanist would very likely have been just as naive or blind as I was when it came to the true nature of sandhills. I challenge anyone who comes to the desert for the first time to distinguish between a jilji and a jitpari, a kurrkuminti and a larralarra: terms describing sandhill formations for which English has no words.

But words are not the only means by which different perceptions of the desert are expressed. Desert art is another. In her book, Seeking the Centre, Roslynn Haynes has discussed the emptiness of 19th century paintings of the desert: it is a landscape of skulls, the starvation desert of Lasseter, Burke and Wills. Today that perception is changing, artists are seeing the desert as beautiful, but more for its sweeping vistas of sameness than for its variety or its detail.

In 1996, when preparing their Native Title claim and struggling with the insuperable communication gap between themselves and the Native Title Tribunal, a group of Walmajarri people decided to present their claim visually, through a painting. About seventy artists and other claimants collaborated on a huge work, measuring eight by ten metres, depicting their country. Each artist worked on his or her own area or, under direction, on that of a non-artist claimant. The result is a vast map.

Compare this with an ordnance survey map of the same area. Here indeed is terra nullius: the empty imagination of strangers.

This blindness is not confined to the desert. Let me quote three comments about the pindan savanna country of the West Kimberley region. The first comes from a pastoralist: ‘That land’s only good for nuclear testing or growing cotton,’ he said. Note the inadvertent equation of two environmentally disastrous uses of land.

The second comment was made by a Federal Opposition spokesman on the environment. I met him to discuss a proposal to clear 250 000 hectares of the natural pindan bush for cotton production. He looked at me quizzically. ‘What do you see as the problem?’ he asked. ‘There’s not much there, is there?’

The third is one of the cotton proponents. He is on record as saying, of the pindan bush where I go hunting and bushwalking and rejoicing in the abundance of nature every weekend, ‘It’s literally dead.’ Dead, this country of hugely varied flora, teeming with wildlife, its air filled with birds and insects? The same country that the Karajarri people plead for so eloquently, the country that supported them and several other language groups for countless thousands of years?

How can three men of presumably reasonable intelligence get it so wrong? From where do they inherit their selective blindness?

Whether we were born in Europe or Australia, we kartiya share European archetypes, as Jay Arthur has shown so effectively through her analysis of the concepts underlying the words we use. Our ideals of nature include striking features of landscape: mountains and hills, flowing rivers, tall trees, perhaps even hedgerows. The pindan has none of these. It is flat and densely vegetated, though burnt fairly regularly. For people used to navigating by hills and valleys, it is easy to get lost in. Non-Aboriginal people, apart from pastoralists, seldom venture into it. They drive past on their way to the next town, and most never see beyond the dead wattle and the cockroach bushes near the roadside. Proposals to clear many thousands of hectares of it to grow cotton meet with barely a murmur. The qualities of the pindan are subtle, and must be lived with, learnt and understood. They reveal themselves gradually, to those who make an effort to find them. And they are known intimately by the people who truly belong there.

A ‘frontier’ is culturally determined. It is a concept inextricable from colonial expansionism and conquest. One never has a frontier in one’s own country. It is always in someone else’s country. And the other person is part of the country still to be conquered. This may seem odd to people who consider the whole of Australia their country, and even that of several generations of ancestors. But Australia, to its indigenous inhabitants, is not one country but many. And much of it is still in the process of being colonised. Large areas of it are not yet ‘tamed’. And, while the rest of Australia is talking about reconciliation, the people in northern Australia are still being dispossessed.

A few years ago, a middle-aged Australian couple, driving a new four-wheel drive car, well-equipped and provisioned with food and water, broke down on a desert track. Unable to get their car started, they decided to wait for rescue. They waited for two weeks. They said afterwards that they had spent the entire two weeks sitting in their car. After a number of days of this, with no sign of rescue, they wrote their wills. Somewhat belatedly, their daughter reported them missing, a rescue party went out, and they were found. This is in country that, not so long ago, was inhabited by people who knew nothing of cars, who walked confidently from waterhole to waterhole with no more equipment than they could carry in their hands and on their heads.

I once broke down in the desert with Jimmy Pike and two dogs. We spent a day-and-a-half trying to get our car started again, but failed. After lunch on the second day, Jimmy announced that we would have to walk. Carrying the rifle and a small esky of water we set off. Where I would have had to retrace our journey along the seismic lines, Jimmy cut across country, heading as the crow flies, straight towards our camp, thereby saving us hours of foot-slogging. Even so, the journey took all afternoon and most of the night: we reached camp shortly before dawn. On the way we killed and cooked a couple of small goannas to eat and set fire to the spinifex to warm ourselves. I had no fear, because I was in the competent hands of someone who knew the country intimately and was at home there. Even if we had broken down two hundred kilometres away, I have no doubt we would have got back safely, though it would have taken a little longer.

On another occasion, I lost a key. We had driven to a particular spot, parked the car, and gone hunting on foot. After a few hours of following tracks wherever they led, we headed back to the car. When we got there, I felt in my pocket: no key. I remembered taking a packet of dried fruit out of my pocket somewhere in the course of our walk, and supposed I had pulled the key out with it. Jimmy and I looked at one another. My dismay was greater than his. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ll just have to follow your tracks back and find it.’ I pleaded, he relented, and we set off in a straight line back across the sandhills, Jimmy leading, me following. No need to retrace our tortuous tracks. After some time, with a slight jerk of the head and a nonchalance all his own, Jimmy indicated a spot on the ground. ‘There’s your key,’ he said. And there it was: a single car key lying on the red sand where it had fallen.

I have just come back from a two-week journey into the Great Sandy Desert with 20 traditional owners. We were well equipped with modern vehicles and communication systems. Even so, it is hard travelling. The seismic lines are covered with several years of regrowth and, when you approach the waterholes, you make your own tracks. For hours you bump over the spinifex in the flat, then hurl your vehicle up sandhills, relying on your momentum to carry you over the humps to the crest, sometimes becoming airborne on the other side. It is hot, dry; the only water is what you carry, or what you dig. It is the sort of journey for which, if you were a tour operator, you would have an age limit and require your passengers to obtain medical clearance. Yet most of our passengers were in their sixties, seventies and eighties, suffering from all manner of ailments: diabetes, heart disease, obesity, blindness. At night they slept in their swags on the sand and got bitten by centipedes. They lived largely on tins of corned beef and kippers, with an occasional treat of goanna or feral cat. Yet the only complaint we heard from those old people was when we ran out of milk for the Weetbix. And several of them said spontaneously: ‘We don’t get sick out here; we only get sick in town.’

People found and dug out waterholes they hadn’t seen in 45 years or more. They identified over 150 plants and, where relevant, described their uses.

These are the differences between being at the frontier and being at home.

But there were a few younger people on the trip, children and grandchildren of the happy older people, who were experiencing the desert for the first time. They complained of the heat and the bumps. They were unfamiliar with the plant life. They said they would not be able to find the waterholes again, by memory, the way the older people had done. They no longer understand their country in the way their parents or grandparents did. They attend kartiya schools and learn kartiya concepts. They learn much that is new, but in doing so they unlearn much that is not only old, but priceless.

Once, Jimmy and I were talking to a class of school children in Fitzroy Crossing. I showed them our book, Jilji^[1], the title of which means ‘sandhill’. It is a book about Walmajarri people’s country in the Great Sandy Desert, which consists almost entirely of jilji: these long, regular sandhills stretching sometimes for hundreds of kilometres across the landscape. Expecting most people in the class to know, I asked, ‘What does jilji mean?’ No one answered. ‘Are there any Walmajarri people here?’ I asked. A forest of hands flew up. ‘You should be able to tell us: what is a jilji?’ Not one child knew. All had been brought up as exiles in Fitzroy Crossing and had attended kartiya schools. None had ever seen a jilji, let alone walked around the waterholes in their own country. How many, when they grow up, will be able to find a key left forgotten on the sand? In a single generation, the knowledge of countless former generations will be lost. It still exists, but it is fading from the world’s screen and there is no way of retaining more than a smattering of it. The Walmajarri children’s map of the desert has diminished from the big painting to the ordnance survey map. The home of their parents and grandparents is becoming for them, as it has always been for us, the unknown frontier.