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