[Green snake, red Gaia]
[Edward Cranswick]
[2003-10-24 07:02]

Ginny-
I summarize below what I have learned on the road from Coober Pedy to Marree, some of which I've told you in our phone conversations.

i first heard about the mound springs at the kulini kulini gathering at coober pedy when i was told they were being affected by WMC's water extraction of the great artesian basin, and first i thought of them in terms of sources of water as i rode my bike. but as i read about them, i saw how they were related to tectonically produced fractures of the aquitard related in turn to the rising of the flinders ranges and the subsiding of lakes torrens/eyre -- to earthquakes along the trend of the adelaide hills which might pose a hazard to the nuclear waste dump. and as i read more about these mound springs, this chain of oases that snaked its way from marree west across the desert to william creek and northwest to oodnadatta, dalhousie springs, i realized it was the green path of life in the red dust that the aborigines traveled across the land. and they were followed by the european explorers who were only months ahead of the white pastoralists who included my mother's family ... and the ebb and flow of el nino across the pacific brought the cycles of drought and manic/depression that rippled up and down the track. john warren married margaret hogarth in 1865, and hogarth/warren became one of the chief pastoralist partnerships of south australia more than a century ago. they were saved from the drought by selling meat to the men who strung the wires of the transcontinental telegraph from mound spring to mound spring, and their first station at strangways springs was a complex of mound springs -- at which i arrived by the light of the full moon two weeks ago tonight --that became the site of a telegraph repeater station. and in the next few decades, the ghan railway snaked its way along this route. the pastoralists needed the aborigines as feudal labor to run the stock, and now the aborigines needed the pastoralists to augment the their traditional food which was no longer so abundant on the grazed land -- and the technology of train & telegraph joined up the black & white peoples along green snake track across gaia's red breast. and where the peoples of different colours of mingled in work, life, lust, and love ... so did the colours of the people mingle in their genes and hearts ... and law. for white francis warren married his black arabana wife, and to protect their brown children from being stolen away from their native land -- shipped to some distant city and/or mission -- he broke the warren/hogarth covenant and led his family to the promised land of finiss creek in the middle of the land of mound springs and there contrived a web of law to bind his family to each other and their land, safe from adelaide's parliment house. for the crown recognized -- in principal -- that the aboriginal people had rights to their land: to live uopon it, to hunt, to have access to its water sources. if the mother were indigenous and the father a white pastoralist, a latter-day lord of the bush, then their children would have a strong claim to the land ... if the law could not hide its head in the red dust. and soon all of the australian outback might be owned by brown people -- this is why they were stolen, to separate them from their land ... stalin used the same trick, so did the US government, except when it was just easier to shoot them. when the stock and train lived on the green snake, the black people had important work the whites needed them to do, but petrol drove the jobs away, and many of the black people went to town where there were no jobs halfway between the bush of their parent's lives and the new desert of white bourgeois suburbia. and now WMC drains the blood from the GAB which feeds the green snake which torpidly writhes in the red dust that is now considered only good for tourists and nuclear waste.
-edward