How to ‘farm’ like the First Nations

In her new collection of essays, Wandering with Intent, award-winning artist and author Kim Mahood writes about her experience of cross-cultural relationships. In this edited extract, she reveals the importance of “hunting” the wild potato.

“Why don’t they cultivate the plants near the community, so they can dig them up when they want them?” David J asks. We have spent the afternoon looking for yams, walking and searching and digging with the two Walmajarri women who are my willing collaborators, always happy to induct visitors into the mysteries of Aboriginal culture.

“Because that would take all the fun out of it,” I say. It’s the first response that leaps to mind, but when I think about it later, it seems to underline a fundamental aspect of the desert Aboriginal world. I could have offered more logical reasons that would have satisfied my friend. I could have explained that the common wild potato, or yam, Ipomoea costata, grows in particular soil types, and that it would be difficult to replicate the conditions in the stony ground near the community. I could have said that anything grown close to the community is at risk of being pillaged early by kids, dug up by dogs, or eaten by the resident camel or horse, and that it would be an invitation to subvert the good intentions of whichever kardiya has had the brainwave to streamline a practice that is about much more than gathering food. I could have drawn on the examples of many failed agricultural enterprises, and the explanations for why they failed.

I tease out what I mean by fun. There’s the social aspect, the gathering of whoever wants to spend the day out hunting. There’s the teaching element – the kids learning about so much more than how to find the yams and dig them up. On any given day, they might harvest some bush medicine, or some bush tomatoes on their prickly stems, or come across an opportunistic find of coolibah bark, which people burn and reduce to a fine white powder to mix with chewing tobacco. There’s the chance of finding a blackhead python basking beneath the warm surface of its burrow. There’s the escape from the pressures and tensions of community life into an elemental world underlaid by the traces of the ancestors making their ruthless way across the landscape. It’s a way for people to be alone in company, wandering singly or in loose pairs, the threads of relationship stretching and holding them as they spread apart into the quietude of hearing all that the country has to say.

It is interesting to bring people from my other life to visit this one. The people in this group are all friends and colleagues of mine who are artists, mostly sculptors. The three men are all called David. The plan is to see how, as artists, they interpret and are impacted by the desert and its people.

I have not foreseen how difficult it would be to stretch myself between the two worlds.

My usual pattern when I arrive is to spend the first couple of days in a state of ennui while my whitefella brain goes quiet, and my other self, the one that has grown and taken shape over the years, emerges from hibernation, stretches, inhales, and fills with the energy and pleasure of coming home. Instead, I have eight individuals who have invested great effort and a lot of money to get here, who are depending on me to manage and interpret the place and people for them.

The first visit to the community is daunting for my friends, who are viewing it through whitefella eyes — a first impression that is always about rubbish and dogs and disorder. I can’t see it that way any more. Instead, I see how the Boxer family have managed to extend the lawn they established last year until it has covered most of the ground between their houses and the dusty communal park. The Boxers are gardeners, not of food plants, but of flowers and trees and grass. They always ask me to bring flower seeds when I visit.