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00:06Out on the wastes of the never-never, that's where the dead men lie, that's where the heat
00:12wave stands forever, that's where the dead men lie, that's where the earth's loved suns
00:19The centre of Australia extends for over two million square kilometres of saltpans, scrubland,
00:25deserts, and stark mountain ranges. Strangled by thirst and fierce privation, that's how
00:33the dead men die. Out on wonky grub's farthest... Many of the centre's prominent geographical
00:40features bear testimony to the dashed hopes of white explorers. Mount Disappointment, Mount
00:47Despair, Mount Hopeless, Desolation Camp, and Mount Destruction. There's even an Ophthalmia
00:55range to commemorate those who were blinded by the constant glare of the sun.
01:06There's a great poem by a young suicidal man called Barcroft Boak, who wrote a poem in which
01:14the constant refrain is that out there in the never-never, we are out where the dead men
01:20lie. Out where the dead men lie. Now once you start to build a mythology about a country
01:28that says what matters about its centre is that it's a place which is out where the dead
01:33men lie, you've embarked on a very pessimistic and defeatist notion of what it means to live
01:46in this place and belong to it. It is in some ways a kind of emotional and spiritual dead
01:51end.
01:54Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely. Under the saltbush sparkling brightly. Out
02:01where the wild dogs chorus nightly. That's where the dead men lie.
02:09Boak's poem was written at a time when Australia's white settlers still regarded the centre of their
02:14new country as an horrendous blank. Like all new arrivals into an unknown landscape, they
02:21were to slowly fill in that blank with their own names and their own stories, often of sacrifice
02:27and failure.
02:34It was to take some time for an alternative, more positive vision of this country to evolve. A
02:40vision that was to recognise the extraordinary diversity and beauty of the centre. And to
02:47finally incorporate the way the land has always been imagined and seen by its original inhabitants.
03:06This is a country that has developed into a nation of city dwellers. Four out of every five Australians
03:14live on the edge of the continent, within 30 miles of the coast. Many citizens never venture into the
03:22interior. But that does not mean they ignore it.
03:27The desert is definitely part of Australia's identity. Not only our own structured identity, but the
03:35identity that's put on Australia. If you look at tourist posters for Australia in other countries, along, right up
03:44there with the Opera House is going to be the desert. And of course, it will be the Red Desert.
03:52And this is extraordinarily ironic because there's no country in the world that is so urbanised as Australia. The population
04:00is all concentrated in the fringe, in the cities of the coast.
04:08And yet there is this kind of yearning to acknowledge and even identify with this great emptiness in the centre.
04:31One hundred and eighty years ago, the new white settlers had no idea whether the great blank in the centre
04:37of their country was a desert or a water-fed region ripe for agriculture. The map makers expected it would
04:44be the latter.
04:47All other continents in the world had obligingly got themselves a large inland river system and very large lakes for
04:57water. So why should Australia not have this?
05:03One man who was in no doubt that the centre of Australia had plenty of water was Captain Charles Sturt.
05:11Charles Sturt did develop this obsession that in the middle of Australia there was an inland sea. And he was
05:19an evangelical Anglican. He believed that he had been ordained by God to discover this almost sacred mystery that lay
05:29at the heart of Australia.
05:35Sturt had travelled in western Victoria in the 1820s and he had noted that flights of birds quite consistently flew
05:48north-west from there and he thought, I'm sure they're flying towards water.
05:58When he subsequently went to Adelaide and he noticed birds flying north, he thought they're going for water. So it's
06:06a simple matter of geometry. If we intersect the flight paths, we have the situation where there's an inland sea.
06:14That's what they're all flying to.
06:17So, I was led to conclude that the country into which they went would in great measure resemble that which
06:24they'd left. That birds which delighted in rich valleys would not go into deserts and into flat country.
06:33Everything tends, I believe, to prove that a large body of water exists in the interior.
06:42He sets off with great panoply but also with a whale boat, an enormous thing which he kept having repainted
06:53on the way so that it would be ready to sail on this inland sea.
06:59So off he goes in the 1840s looking for the inland sea and he ends up in the Simpson Desert.
07:19A thousand kilometres north of Adelaide, Sturt and his team blundered into the world's largest parallel sand dune system, a
07:28desert that stretches over 176,000 square kilometres.
07:45Where he stands on a sand dune in the middle of the desert and sees that the waves just go
07:51on and on forever.
07:56He calls them these land waves because the land is taunting him, it's mocking him because where there should be
08:03a great ocean there's just waves of sand.
08:11I really shuddered at the reappearance of those solid waves.
08:15These heart-depressing features existed to damp the spirits of my men and irresistibly depress my own.
08:26For Sturt it was a kind of gothic imprisonment because he was imprisoned at Depot Glen by thirst which was
08:34as big a prison as any iron bars.
08:38And this was also internalised as a kind of psychological imprisonment by the terrors of the landscape.
08:48Hunger, thirst and scurvy eventually drove the Sturt expedition to a complete standstill.
08:54They returned barely alive.
08:58He really does return to the coast, to the civilisation of the coast, defeated.
09:07And that's a very important moment in the shaping of the colonial mind.
09:18Sturt comes back, the man who had believed above all others that there was an inland sea.
09:23And he hasn't found it. He's found desert.
09:32So you get this extraordinary development of an explorer hero who is a failed explorer in the terms of the
09:42original contract.
09:43But who nevertheless achieves an enormous status as a hero who has battled with the land, with the elements, with
09:53thirst and drought and the difficulty of the terrain and all of these things.
09:59And who has done this for some noble, selfless reason.
10:05Sturt rescued his reputation and financed his journeys by writing an account of his struggle against a forbidding enemy, a
10:13remorseless, arid and lifeless desert.
10:19Just as the British thought of Africa as the dark continent, they thought of Australia as the silent continent.
10:27It was a continent waiting to be conquered by the sounds of industry.
10:34And they were confident that they could simply sweep that silence away and introduce productivity and optimism and industry and
10:44bring the continent to life.
10:47But what happens is that the explorers cross a kind of frontier in which they discover that the silence just
10:54won't go away.
11:00Once you cross that frontier, you're in an arid zone where there are no rivers, you're looking every day for
11:05water.
11:06And you can feel the silence hanging in the air.
11:10And explorers like Charles Sturt refer to this not just as silence, but death-like silence.
11:16They feel as though they've entered a zone of death.
11:25In creating this forbidding image of their country, Sturt and his fellow explorers were feeding a public in Europe with
11:32a voracious appetite for stories of discovery.
11:38I mean, they're competing for readership against the African explorers who find great cataracts and great jungles and over every
11:45hill there's a new and exotic people that, you know, treat you to exotic feasts or scare the daylights out
11:52of you with making war on you.
11:55Whereas, by and large, their encounters with the Aborigines were far more unadventurous than that, and often very hospitable.
12:04The Europeans' first encounter with Australia's indigenous people occurred when they met the Dutch explorers in the 17th century.
12:12From the beginning, the relationship was fraught with mutual non-comprehension.
12:17The Aborigines of the centre had been adapting to and celebrating their landscape for at least 40,000 years.
12:25Nothing could be more different.
12:27The Aboriginal people saw the land as a spiritual entity.
12:35When the Europeans came, they felt the land had no context, it had no history.
12:40The converse was true for the Aboriginal people.
12:44For them, every single rock, every tree, every waterhole, possibly even every flat piece of land, had a history which
12:54stretched to the dreaming.
13:01And they believed that in the dreaming, the ancestral, powerful, spiritual beings emerged from the land and made great epic
13:13journeys through what had been a flat and featureless country,
13:18lifting up the mountains, making the waterholes, making the country that they saw, literally creating the country.
13:39So, unlike most creation stories where the power that creates is located outside the earth, in the heavens or somewhere,
13:49for Aboriginal people, the creating power is in the land and it remains so.
14:00Every waterhole, valleys and hills is associated from the time of creation as a very sacred part of who you
14:10are.
14:12They saw country and everything on it as a family member.
14:20See, and that includes every living thing, like every plant, every reptile, every animal, every bird, every insect.
14:30It's all a living entity and must be treated as such.
14:41As settlement along the coast and the fertile areas proceeded, the Aborigines were either marginalised or driven further inland.
14:50New cities developed as entirely white enclaves, with aspirations to all the amenities and institutions to be found in Europe
14:58and North America.
15:01Melbourne in the 1850s is an extraordinary rich city.
15:05Melbourne, discovered at the beginning of the decade, had generated fabulous wealth.
15:10And it allows that society to do all kinds of things which they hadn't been able to do before.
15:15They can build fantastic buildings, they can create cultural institutions like a fabulous library, like a museum.
15:26And it also allows them to think of engaging in serious science.
15:33And very soon the city's great and good formed their very own Royal Society.
15:39Modelled on the illustrious British institution of the same name, it shared the same objectives, the pursuit of scientific inquiry.
15:50And it was this institution which was to launch an expedition which would fill the apparently lifeless desert with a
15:57story of heroism and sacrifice.
16:07And they're thinking, OK, well, here we are, these learned gentlemen, in our fine 19th century clothes, with our fine
16:1419th century manners and our clever books.
16:17We need a jolly good expedition.
16:21After months of prevarication and indecision, the Society's exploration committee resolved upon a scientific expedition that will cross the continent
16:30from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north.
16:37On the way they were to collect scientific specimens, survey the land and paint watercolours.
16:47And they have the most extravagant ideas about what they're going to achieve.
16:52They spend thousands of pounds and they get scientists and they have meetings.
16:59And by the time the whole thing is set up, they have created this lumbering caravan of Victorian scientific endeavour
17:09that costs a fortune and which moves at snail pace out of Melbourne.
17:15And, in fact, makes camp that night, well, within easy walking distance in the nearby suburb of Essendon.
17:22I mean, you could walk back into town and have a drink. It was pathetic.
17:26And in command of this whole outfit is this fellow, Robert O'Hara Burke.
17:32Now, Mr Burke's a nice fellow. He's handsome.
17:34He has a bit of a sort of dashing way about him.
17:36He's been in the cavalry.
17:38But he's famous for not being able to find his way about.
17:41I mean, he is just hopeless as a bushman.
17:46Burke was also not much of a diarist.
17:49It was to be his eventual second in command, John Wills, whose accounts were to become the stuff of legend.
17:58No expense was to be spared on Melbourne's awfully big adventure.
18:0325 camels were shipped across from India with eight Afghan cameleers.
18:11The expedition, which set off from Melbourne with 15,000 spectators and with such high ambitions,
18:17soon shed its scientists and most of its 20 tons of equipment.
18:24The interior they encountered was to be very different from the one that previous explorers like Sturt had experienced.
18:30Their paintings and diaries described a landscape that is often lush and green.
18:39We often think of the centre as being extraordinarily dry and clearly at various times it is.
18:46But Burke and Wills cross the continent in one of the wettest of years.
18:51There is so much water that the grass is so long.
18:55They make the crossing in one of the best of seasons.
18:59The vagaries of the Australian climate were not understood at the time.
19:05This might be the driest of continents, but it is also the most unpredictable.
19:16It's only in the last few decades that we've come to understand how powerful oscillations in the winds
19:22and temperature of the Pacific Ocean can determine the difference between drought and flood.
19:29Burke's expedition entered the centre during what is known as a La Nina year, a wet year.
19:35The climate of Australia, as we've now come to appreciate, is hugely influenced by both the climatic events we now
19:48know of as El Nino and La Nina.
19:54In La Nina years, we often get big rainfall events in the centre of Australia.
20:01We often end up with big amounts of water running through the channel country.
20:05We end up with lake air flooding.
20:14During a La Nina event in the Pacific, millions of birds migrate to temporary lakes in the centre.
20:24For a few months every decade, Sturt's vision of the inland sea comes true.
20:35Burke, Wills and two others successfully crossed the centre and reached the swamps of the Gulf of Carpentaria on the
20:41north coast of Australia.
20:44But it was on their return journey that they began to run out of food and water.
20:48One member of the expedition died.
20:52The remaining three returned to their base camp in Cooper's Creek to find that it had been deserted the same
20:58day.
21:03Burke and Wills walk into camp and the camp is empty.
21:07They expected to find horses, men, a big pot of emu stew, the whole welcoming party.
21:15Instead they walk into silence.
21:17An empty camp.
21:19And this fateful word, carved on the tree, dig.
21:24Dig.
21:26And they dig at the bottom of the tree and they find provisions.
21:30And a note that says that the party, the support party, has left that morning, that very morning after waiting
21:36for months.
21:39And Burke and Wills are, and King, are pretty devastated.
21:51There were people nearby at Cooper's Creek.
21:54People who could have helped.
21:56The Yandruwanda people gave them fish, padloo beans, and a type of bread made from the ground seeds of the
22:03Nardu plant.
22:05If not prepared in the right way, Nardu may cause a form of beriberi.
22:12Fatally, Burke and Wills were not the kind of explorers who took advice from the locals.
22:18At one point when the Yandruwanda came to offer them more fish,
22:22Wills fired above their heads and scared them off.
22:25In June 1861, they both died on the banks of Cooper's Creek.
22:32Now, there are lots of theories about why Burke and Wills died.
22:35But the one that really persuades me is the idea that they were poisoned.
22:42That they were grinding up this Nardu to make flour.
22:46And they didn't know how to prepare it properly.
22:49And that the Nardu basically poisoned them.
22:54And there are really disturbing descriptions by Wills of just how appallingly painful the effects were on them when they
23:05went to the toilet.
23:06I mean, he describes passing these gigantic stools, he says.
23:10And he can't help noticing that he appears to be evacuating a greater bulk than he's actually eating.
23:18Nothing became these two explorers so much as the manner of their dying.
23:23Some of Robert O'Hara Burke's and John Wills' last written notes seem as if they're already preparing for the
23:29hagiographies and paintings that were to later venerate them.
23:35I hope you remain with me here till I am quite dead.
23:40It is a comfort for me to know that someone will be here when I die.
23:44That when I am dying, it is my wish that you should place the pistol in my right hand.
23:51That you leave me unburied as I lie.
23:56It soon became part of the legend that their unburied bodies provided food for the feral dogs of the centre,
24:03dingoes.
24:09The last surviving member of the expedition, John King, was later found almost out of his mind, but alive and
24:16fed by the Yandruwanda people.
24:20Melbourne struggles with the expedition in its aftermath.
24:24There is huge debate over what it meant.
24:28And there is always a very, very powerful body of opinion that this has been a disaster and an embarrassment.
24:38But I guess the officialdom do not want to admit that it had been a failure.
24:45And so they very deliberately elevate Burke and Wills into heroes.
24:51And that involves declaring a holiday and having a massive state funeral and giving them a great sort of mausoleum
25:01in the cemetery and then giving them what in colonial terms was a huge bronze statue in the centre of
25:10the city.
25:1240,000 people attended Burke and Wills.
25:1540,000 people attended Burke and Wills funeral.
25:16Statues were commissioned, granite memorials were constructed, streets renamed, stories were written and pictures painted.
25:26Burke and Wills became Australia's first martyrs to the arid centre.
25:31That horrendous blank in the middle of the continent.
25:38I bet you if you went out and asked Australians what killed Burke and Wills, they'd say they died of
25:44thirst.
25:44They didn't die of thirst.
25:48The country they were in was not that dry.
25:51Cooper's Creek itself is a very fertile place.
25:54It's not a silent place.
25:56It's filled with bird life.
25:58The river there is teeming with fish.
25:59It's the department store of the outback.
26:02You can't go wrong at Cooper's Creek.
26:06But you see, that doesn't fit the mythology.
26:08That doesn't fit the story.
26:14You want Burke and Wills to be claimed by the wilderness.
26:17If they're going to be turned into some story of heroism, then they have to die of thirst in the
26:24desert.
26:27Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely, under the saltbush sparkling brightly, out where the wild dogs chorus nightly, that's
26:37where the dead men lie.
26:45And that's why Burke and Wills are so important.
26:49Because Burke and Wills are an attempt to make sense of the silence.
26:54They're an attempt by white Australia to give a story to the emptiness.
26:59For us to hear some version of ourselves in a land which refuses to speak to us of ourselves.
27:08It's the start of creating a white mythology about Australia.
27:14And it's not risible.
27:16It's not finally an act of folly.
27:21It's a hunger to belong.
27:32The continent's indigenous people have had 40,000 years of storytelling to justify their presence in the landscape.
27:47This dreaming here, this belonged to my grandmother.
27:51My grandmother's country is this place called Anangka.
27:56And from Anangka we got this dreaming called Ngurta.
28:01And in Anangka there was this, there's this lizard, this mountain devil lizard.
28:11The white settlers, they know this lizard as the thorny devil lizard.
28:17This lizard traveled around this country and collected all these rocks and put it in this pouch, which is what
28:24this circle here represents.
28:26And this pouch is found on the back of its neck.
28:30And when it walks through the country, it deposited these ochre colors into sacred areas.
28:38This one belonged to the men.
28:41The men with the boomerang spear.
28:44And the other one belonged to the women dreaming.
28:47Now the woman one, they got sacred place here, which is a water hole.
28:53And I heard this from my grandparents, my grandmother.
28:57This place here, this is called Anangka.
29:00And this is where this lizard come from.
29:11Just as Burke and Will's bodies were being reburied in Melbourne, a rival explorer reached the geographical center of the
29:19continent.
29:20It's notable that John McDool Stewart's achievement in reaching the center and surviving is far less celebrated than Burke and
29:28Will's failure.
29:30Yet it was the route that Stewart blazed from Adelaide to the north coast, which had far more permanent consequences
29:36for the history of Australia, the Aborigines and the country's interior.
29:42In the following decade, you've got teams of men, hundreds of men, living along that route, building the Overland Telegraph.
29:50And that telegraph really does transform the center of Australia.
29:55After the telegraph, it's very hard to get lost out there.
29:59I mean, people still do get lost.
30:00But it's not a kind of great unknown anymore.
30:05There's a kind of highway through the middle.
30:08And there are a series of water holes, basically, across Australia, which are the telegraph posts.
30:14And the most famous of these is Alice Springs.
30:17At Darwin, the wire was linked to an underwater cable that connected Australia to London.
30:23On the 22nd of August 1872, the chief engineer, Charles Todd, tapped out Australia's first instant message to posterity and
30:33the world.
30:36We have, this day, within two years, completed a line of communications 2,000 miles long, through the very center
30:45of Australia.
30:46Until a few years ago, a terror in Cognita, believed to be a desert.
30:52The desert telegraph bisected the center, speeding up settlement, and where there was enough water, these formed the focus for
31:00cattle stations along a line from north to south.
31:04But either side, vast tracks lay undiscovered and undeveloped.
31:16After these great expeditions, really very little was done about desert exploration for maybe 40 years.
31:26There was no sense that we should be bothered with this anymore.
31:29Let's get on with developing the cities.
31:31Let's get on with commerce in an urban sense.
31:35Let's get on with, certainly, pastoral industry, but a pastoral industry in areas where we know it works.
31:42So, the huge cult of the merino sheep, for example, was something which took people's attention away from the desert
31:52and said,
31:53this is where Australia's great value lies.
31:56This is the thing we do.
31:58We do sheep.
31:59We do merinos.
32:01The desert was a kind of dead litter.
32:03Nobody wanted to know about it.
32:07Forty years after the Burke and Wills expedition, a British geologist, John Walter Gregory, was to present the new Australians
32:15with even more reason to keep their backs to the center.
32:22But amazingly, in the hottest time of the year, Professor Gregory gets a group of students from the University of
32:28Melbourne and takes them on the field trip of a lifetime to Lake Eyre.
32:33Lake Eyre is the great, empty salt lake that drains Central Australia.
32:42It would now, I guess, seem like hubris, but he details his students into little squads and some of them
32:48survey the plants and some of them look at animals and some of them look at the Aboriginal culture and
32:53so on.
32:54And he comes back and he writes a book and he gives that book a fateful title.
32:58He calls it The Dead Heart.
33:00That book comes out shortly after the Australian colonies have federated into a nation.
33:09Australia is now a new nation.
33:11And it's still a nation that's attempting to define what it means to be Australian.
33:16It's still a nation that's trying to learn how to be in this land.
33:21And the most powerful book, the best-selling book that comes out of that period is a book that says
33:27at the heart of this continent lies The Dead Heart.
33:33It's not an image that he hasn't thought about carefully.
33:36He really means that Lake Eyre is like a heart muscle that has stopped beating.
33:41And that all those rivers that come out of or that flow into Lake Eyre are like withered veins and
33:47arteries.
33:48That the heart of the nation is dead.
33:53Now that is perpetuating the whole silence, death-like silence, Burke and Wills, necro-nationalist thing that we've been talking
34:02about.
34:03And that's a debilitating idea for a country that's attempting to come up with some sense of purpose and self
34:09-definition.
34:12Although Gregory meant the dead heart to refer to Lake Eyre, it became a cliché for the pessimistic view of
34:19the whole centre of the continent.
34:24But there was a rival, optimistic vision that came from the cattlemen and the hydraulic engineers.
34:30To bring the desert heart to life, just add water.
34:34They also had their influential books.
34:36The centre could be turned green by drawing water from underground wells and irrigation schemes.
34:43These optimists encouraged the cattle drovers to move inland towards the interior.
34:52The most dramatic impact was not that produced by explorers, but the arrival of the first permanent settlers, the squatters.
35:03The outback pastoralists who would arrive in the country of an Aboriginal nation.
35:12Their numbers were quite small, maybe half a dozen men.
35:17But hundreds of sheep and cattle.
35:21Hundreds of them.
35:25Now, these animals needed water.
35:28So the European animals immediately occupied the river frontages or the water holes.
35:36And usually the frontiersmen would take the view that this was their water.
35:45And that cattle and blacks don't mix.
35:50That if we want to get our cattle, in particular, or our sheep to settle on the land, you've got
35:57to keep the blacks away.
36:01What were once pristine water holes where both Aborigines and wild animals drank at the edge, were swamped by cattle
36:08ill-adapted to the relentless heat.
36:12When this new stock arrived, especially the horses and cattle, they walked straight into this water and would mess it
36:21up with urinating and with their droppings and stand there, drink it and do all their terrible things in it.
36:27So it didn't take long for the water to be contaminated, to be unusable, you know.
36:36And that spoilt the waterways for every single one.
36:40And then this then drove our native species away from those areas, which our people was quite able to, you
36:49know, live off.
36:51And then we started moving towards killing the stock that had intruded or come into our land.
36:58And being on my land, I'm quite entitled to take anything that's on it if I need it for survival.
37:04And that's exactly the attitude we had.
37:06So the men started killing some of the stocks to feed us as their children.
37:12And for that, of course, you know, they were really punished badly. They were shot.
37:22And there are many dozens and dozens of lots, you know.
37:28There are a lot of terrible stories about the massacres of our people through those early cattle people.
37:37The range wars with the Aborigines were fought across the continent.
37:41As many as 20,000 were killed or massacred.
37:45Many more died from exposure to the diseases that Europeans brought with them.
37:51The impact was just as devastating for the animal and plant species of the interior.
37:57Cattle, camels, horses, goats and rabbits grazed out much of the plant life.
38:04Foxes and cats took a great toll on the reptiles and smaller mammals.
38:10Australia has lost more mammal species than any other country.
38:15You see, that's one story that just tells you how it is.
38:19And it was like that with all our people and the plant world and the land itself.
38:25It's a living being to us.
38:28And it hurts, same as we hurt.
38:31And we hurt for, same as it hurts for us.
38:35It is a two-way emotional connection.
38:39That's a reality.
38:41And when we see country being damaged like that, okay, we feel the same pain.
38:50Isolated in the vast interior, some Aborigine communities were able to continue clinging on to their culture and relationship with
38:59nature.
39:05Whereas the Aborigines had 40,000 years to adapt to a climate that varies between years of drought and then
39:11sudden rains, the animals of their dream time have had millions.
39:18Totemic animals like the kangaroos have flexible breeding cycles that can take advantage of the sudden blooming of the desert.
39:29Another dream time creature, the thorny devil, has evolved tiny channels in between its spikes and can convey the morning
39:37dew to its mouth through capillary action.
39:44Far away from the rapidly developing cities around the periphery, Australia's dead heart remained an inaccessible wasteland.
39:53Inhabited by primitives and isolated cattlemen.
40:01It was a land portrayed in black and white images, occasionally penetrated by scientific expeditions.
40:08It was from one of these surveys that a new champion was to emerge, someone who saw the desert in
40:14a new light.
40:19Driven by the fear that many species were on the verge of extinction even before they were discovered, Dr. Hedley
40:25Finlayson set about finding and documenting them.
40:29In 1935 he published The Red Center, a book that promoted a radical change in the perception of the interior.
40:38And he goes actually looking for marsupials, but what he comes away with is not so much his zoological finds,
40:49but with a new vision of the desert which he writes about as The Red Center.
40:54And the Red Center for him was absolutely mind-blowing.
41:04Finlayson is absolutely blown away by The Red. He says this fiery cinnabar country.
41:10And of course he's fixated on this iron oxide soil and rocks, which is so stunning, particularly when you have
41:19the white ghost gums against the red sand and this sort of cobalt blue sky overhead.
41:26It is amazing.
41:37And what is fascinating is that when you track back from Finlayson, you find that almost no one else has
41:45mentioned the color red.
41:47All those explorers, all the missionaries, all the settlers who go into the desert, none of them mentions this word
41:55red.
41:55All they're doing is looking for green. And if they can't find green, it's nothing. It's not red.
42:02But it's an indication of how much we only see what we're looking for.
42:08And if we don't see what we're looking for, then there's nothing.
42:12So Finlayson turned around the idea of the dead heart to being something which was vivid and beautiful and well
42:20worth our attention.
42:26Finlayson went further than advocating the way the desert should be seen.
42:30He railed against the destructive influence of the white man.
42:34Above all, he took up the cause of the center's indigenous people.
42:39But the debt we owe them is for the whole white community to discharge.
42:44That it may be done soon and done with an open hand must be the earnest wish of all who
42:50set justice above expediency.
42:55It was this more enlightened attitude that allowed the emergence of a man who was going to paint in the
43:01colors that Finlayson could only describe.
43:09For Australians, with their origins in Europe, the color of beauty and of nature is green.
43:17And the color of death is brown.
43:20When you travel in the center of Australia, the land is brown. The grass is brown.
43:24And it's required a whole shift of imagination to come to understand that the colors of this country can be
43:34thought of as the colors of life.
43:39Now, one of the people who helped us to see the center differently, who transformed Australian sense of the center,
43:46is the Aboriginal artist Albert Namajira.
43:50Now, Namajira is working in the 40s and 50s.
43:53He's a traditional tribal man and he learns watercolor painting.
43:58And he paints these extraordinarily beautiful paintings of his own country.
44:03And these paintings become a fixture of homes around Australia.
44:08When I was a little boy, you know, when you went to see Aunty Vi or Uncle Ken, there would
44:13always be an Albert Namajira on the wall.
44:16There'd be a picture of Her Majesty the Queen as a young and beautiful lady, and there would be an
44:20Albert Namajira.
44:21They became a kind of cliché of the 50s.
44:27The pictures are successful partly because they conform so well to the canons of European picture making.
44:38The ways in which the foreground and the middle ground and the background are organized
44:43and the ways in which you have trees which frame the view and which take your eye into the landscape.
44:53They are hugely accessible and easy for a settler audience to absorb and to embrace.
45:04And Australians loved them because they showed them an Australia they didn't know they had.
45:10Because the central Australia that urban Australians knew, they were grainy, grey photographs in magazines.
45:17So after the Second World War, we start to see central Australia in colour.
45:22And Namajira is absolutely fundamental to opening our eyes to the colour of Australia.
45:28So we stop listening and start looking.
45:35Namajira belonged to the Aranda people who live in the country around what is now Alice Springs.
45:44Although he painted in a Western manner, he, like many Aboriginal artists that followed him,
45:50stuck to portraying the landscape of his country, the Aranda country.
45:56Albert Namajira's painting was extremely useful because he became very popular in the early days of an Aboriginal artist,
46:07presenting the work in a language the wider community could understand.
46:12I believe if he presented it in the dot painting system, then no one would have known what he was
46:17doing.
46:20But he was painting his country and he was honouring his family, you know, by doing what he was doing.
46:32This idea of the sensuousness, the vibrancy, the intensity of the colour of central Australia,
46:42is a kind of spiritual awakening that occurs.
46:47So it's not advertising or politics or rhetoric.
46:52It's an Aboriginal man with a paintbrush who really opens the Australian heart to the Australian wilderness.
47:06Other painters were also beginning to see the potential of the red centre.
47:12Sydney Nolan also became interested in the desert and he was the first person who painted the desert from a
47:20plane.
47:20He went up in an aeroplane around Alice Springs and he flew over the McDonnell Ranges
47:26and he flew even as far as the Tanami, I think, and he painted what he saw from above.
47:33Now, ironically, of course, this is how traditionally Aboriginal people painted the land, looking down into it.
47:41And what he saw then was not a sort of sense of a flat horizon extending forever,
47:48but in fact he saw almost a sense of the bones of the country pushing up through the land.
47:58You have these bare red ranges sticking up like the skeleton of a dinosaur coming out up at you.
48:10And these had an enormous effect on people.
48:14They felt suddenly there is a starkness and a beauty and an excitement about this country.
48:20One place above all would come to represent this new positive vision of the interior.
48:26Local Aborigines call it Uluru, but white explorers gave it another name.
48:33This is the goal.
48:34Heirs Rock looms up like a giant mound from ten miles away.
48:41Fifty years after Federation, white Australians were redefining their relationship with the centre.
48:47The dead heart was becoming the red heart.
48:52In a sense, the sense of nationalism begins to move from the settled pastoral districts into the centre.
49:01And so the centre itself gradually comes to play a role in this sense of Australian nationalism.
49:09Until by the middle of the 20th century, it is the centre that is seen in a way as the
49:16heart of Australia.
49:18But this was still very much a white Australian vision.
49:21Climbing Heirs Rock became a rite of passage, ignoring the reservations of the local Anangu people,
49:27who see climbing it as an act of disrespect for a place they regard as sacred.
49:33The radio mast goes up to confound the spirits of the primitive men who have made the rock for untold
49:39ages
49:40the focal point of their legends and ceremonial.
49:45Nowadays, 400,000 people a year make the long journey to the giant sandstone monolith in the centre of Australia.
49:54But the focus has changed. This is no longer simply Heirs Rock.
49:58It is now recognised as Uluru, acknowledging the local Anangu people's rights to the land
50:04and respecting it as a focal point for their beliefs and ceremonials.
50:12It is just the name of it, but that was it given to it from the period of what we
50:18call the Chilkupa,
50:20or what people refer to as Dreamtime.
50:23It is the name Uluru, and that should be there for all of us to continue calling it that.
50:32Many visitors still ignore the wishes of the Anangu and make the climb to the rock summit,
50:37but each year their numbers decline, reflecting an increasing respect for the local people.
50:44Uluru has become a national icon for Australia and its red centre.
50:49The centre is even more distinctive. The centre is even more uniquely ours.
50:57No one else has got a centre like we have.
51:01So that if we want to be a distinctive people, a nation, then the centre becomes important.
51:12Alongside the recognition of Aboriginal rights and their cultural connection to the centre,
51:17the new Australians have continued to develop their own relationship with it.
51:23I think in Australia, increasingly, there's a real sense that we need to form those bonds.
51:32Spiritual is perhaps too strong a word, but certainly a bond that is more than just physical with the country.
51:39To have a sense of belonging, so that we're not just the dispossessors of the land, but that we can
51:47actually engage with the land.
51:51This engagement has gone beyond painting and tourism, and into television and cinema.
52:07More recently, we have blockbusters like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which is set in the desert because,
52:15or part of it is set in the desert, because the desert represents freedom.
52:20In the climactic scene where the three travellers suddenly expand in their incredible costumes on top of Kings Canyon,
52:31and there's a feeling that now they know who they are.
52:34Now they can go home because they have found themselves.
52:47We can never be the Indigenous people, but the extraordinarily generous thing is that the Aboriginal people welcome this involvement,
52:57welcome this identification.
52:59They don't say, you can't have a part of this.
53:02They welcome attempts by non-Aboriginal people to form these identifying bonds with country.
53:11They speak of this word country, which is, I think, a whole new concept for us, but something which we're
53:19trying very hard to learn.
53:21It's a great paradox, isn't it, that once despised Aborigines producing art about the country in a way that so
53:33many white fellows would have loved to have been able to do, but never could.
53:37Because they could only paint the colours, they could only aesthetically appreciate the landscape.
53:43Whereas the Aboriginal appreciation of it is infinitely greater than that.
53:51So this mountain devil lizard is responsible for collecting all this ochre stones.
53:56And they use these ochre colours during ceremony time.
54:00And the most important colour is the red colour.
54:03Because this red colour is the one we paint our bodies with.
54:07And after we put that on, maybe mix it with emu fat.
54:12And after we put that on, we put the other colours to paint the body design of the dreaming we're
54:19representing from our country.
54:30So this colour here, the red dirt, it's important to our people.
54:34It represents the colour, it represents the earth, it represents our mother.
54:38It's a colour that belongs to all people, all the Aboriginal people in the central region.
54:43It's very powerful.
54:46It's as though the Europeans' search, looking inland for the spirit of Australia, was answered by the Aborigines.
54:59Who said, here it is.
55:09But the story doesn't end there.
55:11And even at this very moment, there is great controversy about the condition of life in the settlements around Alice
55:22Springs and around Uluru.
55:24Many indigenous communities in the interior present a contrasting image of the centre.
55:31Australia's original inhabitants still suffer from the highest levels of social deprivation in the country.
55:38Overall, their life expectancy is 17 years less than the national average.
55:45They've been left behind in a new Australia, which has co-opted their vision of the centre.
55:56But among the populations of the towns and cities around Australia's periphery, older visions of a more sinister interior still
56:04survive.
56:06For some, the centre still holds the same fears that haunted the early explorers.
56:17Now, a very different side of the desert is seen in the psycho-thriller called Wolf Creek.
56:26And this was based on an actual story of hitchhikers who'd travelled into the desert, and one of them escaped
56:36to tell the tale of the others being murdered by a psychopath killer in the desert.
56:44This harks back to the idea of the Gothic desert as a place where, because it's so remote, because it's
56:51so vast, anything can happen and all the normal restraints of civilisation are cast aside.
57:00Every year, backpackers and campers still disappear or die of thirst in Australia's deserts.
57:11There are still unresolved mysteries.
57:13So that idea of a macabre, evil presence lurking in the desert is still very strong in the culture.
57:38In two centuries of nation-building, the new Australians have progressed beyond the original perception of their desert interior as
57:45an horrendous blank, a national embarrassment.
57:49It can now be seen as the Red Heart, a place of wild beauty that gives the nation a sense
57:55of uniqueness.
57:57But this new vision of life and freedom still competes with the vestiges of the older vision of silence and
58:04death.
58:05It's a kind of dynamic, and it won't end, and it shouldn't end, because it's all about wrestling with who
58:11we are and how we belong and how white Australians and Aboriginal Australians are going to live together in this
58:16land and move forward in a way that's filled with prosperity and justice and hope and happiness.
58:21It's an important issue to engage with.
58:25It never stops. This is the great contention which is carrying on in the Australian conversation.
58:32Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely, under the saltbush sparkling brightly.
58:38Out where the wild dogs chorus nightly, that's where the dead men lie.
58:49More incredible scenes from the Earth's remotest regions next this evening here on BBC4
58:53as we explore the Okavango with Steve Backshall in nature's microworlds.
58:58And then tomorrow we meet planet Earth's real old timers in Survivors, nature's indestructible creatures at nine.