Heather Howard: Encounters with Aboriginal culture through geological mapping

Heather Howard talks about working with the Ngaanyatjarra traditional owners while mapping the Musgrave Province .

Transcript

00:00 Heather

Whilst we came from very different worlds, we had a shared appreciation for the land. For them, the land was all about their ancestry. For us, the land was all about earth processes. But it was nice to have something fundamentally common between us.

00:18 Julie

Welcome to The Rocks Beneath Our Feet. In this series, five geologists talk about their years devoted to working for the Geological Survey of Western Australia. From understanding early life on earth, to resolving the tectonic processes that shaped our planet, using the chemistry of soils, sands, and rocks, and following the trail of new technologies, to make the maps that unearth our understanding of Western Australia’s geology. Through their personal stories of challenges faced and lessons learned, they reveal their shared passion for discovering the stories in the rocks beneath our feet.

I’m Julie Hollis.

In this episode, Heather Howard talks about working with the Ngaanyatjarra traditional owners while mapping the Musgrave Province.

00:51 Heather

The Musgrave Province in central Australia, it's Ngaanyatjarra land, the Ngaanyatjarra people have native title.

00:58 Julie

Yep.

00:59 Heather

And we had to negotiate access, we had to go and meet the people, and we had to have Aboriginal guides with us. So that was quite different, being with people from a different culture. I was there the first day on the ground. And we all sat in the dirt and met in a group and talked.

01:19 Julie

Yeah.

01:20 Heather

And I think that was a learning curve, that couldn't just walk in there and map.

01:25 Julie

Yeah.

01:26 Heather

That we had to start building up relationships with the local people, the elders, so that they would trust us.

The first year we had a 5-week trip, just as a test run, to see how it went. Because what was different about our way of working is that whilst we negotiated with the Ngaanyatjarra Council, we actually talked directly to the Aboriginal people. And one of their guys, Reggie Smith, he was the liaison person. He would go to each of the communities and find the elders who knew the land the most, who had that responsibility for the community

02:08 Julie

Yep.

02:08 Heather

And introduce us to them and we would work with them. And when we reached the boundary of their land, he would go to the next community and find the next relevant elders and we would work with them. And so we went from Wingellina to Blackstone community, Jameson, Warburton. We just followed from one boundary to the next through the communities and worked with a number of different elders through the region. 

02:37 Julie

Yep.

02:37 Heather

And it proved to be really successful, I think because we were on the ground with these people. We camped with them most nights. So we built up some friendships with them.

02:48 Julie

Yeah.

02:50 Heather

And actually, it was a real privilege to work with them and to get to know them the way that we did. And one of the best things about it, I think, is that whilst we came from very different worlds, we had a shared appreciation for the land for very different reasons, I think. For them, the land is all about their ancestry, their songlines, the spirits. But for us the land was all about what do these rocks tell us about earth science, about earth processes.

03:26 Julie

Yep.

03:26 Heather

But it was, yeah it was nice to have something fundamentally common between us.

03:31 Julie

Yeah yeah you’re right. That’s the key isn’t it.

03:34 Heather

And it's a shared respect, I think.

03:36 Julie

Yeah. It introduces a lot of challenges but it seems like you were really lucky to be able to have those experiences that are relatively uncommon for most people, to be able to actually experience Aboriginal culture.

03:50 Heather

I think it was perhaps different for us because we weren't, I don’t know how to say this but, our primary goal wasn't to understand the Aboriginal culture.

03:59 Julie

Yeah.

04:00 Heather

And I think the people that they’d met, coming into those communities, that was there interest. They’d met a lot of anthropologists, a lot of council people. And we just wanted to see the rocks.

04:14 Julie

Yep.

04:16 Heather

I think it was something different for them. I don't think they quite understood it to start with. I think they wanted to show us their culture.

04:24 Julie

I see, yeah.

04:25 Heather

Because that's what a lot of people wanted to know. And whilst we were interested, we were there to do a job and we wanted to see the rocks more than anything else.

04:36 Julie

Were the traditional owners together with you for most of the time that you were working?

04:41 Heather

Often there’d be community meetings or things that drew them back to the community. We’d often have them with us until they were happy that we were in an area that was clear and they were happy with what we were doing, the level of sampling we were doing. And then they’d come back after their meetings.

05:01 Julie

Yep. I guess there’s only so much geology that a non-geologist can take really.

05:07 Heather

It's a little bit boring watching someone looking at rocks, I think.

05:13 Julie

Yeah.

05:14 Heather

When we first started working with these guys. I remember the first day that I went out with two of them and, Reggie and Lance, those were their names. We hadn’t spent much time together and I was used to having a fieldy of my own, a fieldy for all the safety calls, the radio to Perth a couple of times a day, those kind of requirements. And so the fieldy would stay with the vehicle and I would go off and have a look at the rocks. So I went with these two guys and parked the vehicle. They were happy with where I was going to work and I said to them, “OK, you need to stay with the vehicle and I'll be an hour, or so, collecting my notes and then I’ll come back.” So I did this and I came back and they weren’t there.

06:03 Julie

Ah.

06:04 Heather

And the first rule is that you don’t move the vehicle because they won't know where you are then.

06:09 Julie

Yeah.

06:10 Heather

So, I had no choice but to just wait. And they didn’t come back and I don’t know how long I waited. It felt like a long time, a lot of mapping time was just disappearing.

06:21 Julie

Yeah.

06:21 Heather

And eventually I heard a noise. I heard somebody calling me and I looked to a sand dune in the distance and I could see a small figure waving. And so I drove the vehicle over to them. And one of them had a huge grin on his face and a dead goanna in his hand. It was probably about a metre long. And these two old men were grinning at me, you know, ‘Look what we got.’ And they, you know, reenacted the capture of it. Told me how they’d tackled it down and hit it over the head with a rock and brought back this prize for me.

I was actually quite annoyed that I'd lost all this mapping time. And I’d had to find them as well. Anyway, they came back, put it into the vehicle. So we spent the rest of the afternoon with this dead goanna in the cab, which I wasn’t too happy about either. But years later, one of them, Reggie actually turned up when we're out in the field with his family and a goanna that they’d managed to hunt down.

07:34 Julie

Yeah.

07:34 Heather

And cooked it in front of me. So dressed it as they normally would, put it on the branches the fire that they would normally do and showed me how they did that. And the kids that were there were so excited, it was like Christmas. And I think that was the moment that I though actually they were trying to do something really nice for me, in capturing that goanna and wanted to share it

08:01 Julie

Yeah.

08:01 Heather

with us. And I’d just brushed that off as a bit of a waste of time, you know it was mapping time lost.

08:07 Julie

Yeah.

08:08 Heather

So there’s a bit of a lesson there in appreciating the moments and understanding people a bit better, I think.

08:16 Julie

Yeah. So it sounds like there wasn’t too many restrictions on you actually working there. Was it just that they needed to make sure that you weren’t actually going to sample important things that, that needed to be there?

08:30 Heather

Mostly, or if there were events that had happened, sometimes there were places that they didn’t want people visiting, graves, that kind of thing.

08:39 Julie

Yeah.

08:39 Heather

So from the geological perspective, we could take our sample somewhere else.

08:45 Julie

Sure.

08:45 Heather

And we could map around those things. It wasn't a problem. We just had to know where they were. There was one area on Mount Aloysius. Mount Aloysius is right in the corner of four map sheets. And we had access to a PhD thesis that showed the oldest rocks known in the Musgrave Province came from Mount Aloysius. There was some dating done, some radiometric dating. So we were keen to go there. And the first, first season, they didn't want us to go there.

09:16 Julie

Right.

09:17 Heather

But that was ok. We just finished off the map sheet and then the next season we tried again and they didn't want us to go there still. And we actually mapped all the way around it and yeah, didn’t get to go there. I think some of the other geologists went to the base of it, the lower levels, though I couldn't go there. Those old rocks, they just eluded us for a long time. 

09:43 Julie

Yeah. So you never got to go there?

09:45 Heather

No.

09:46 Julie

You had men’s and women’s areas as well, so you had to split up the mapping to some degree.

09:52 Heather

Not all that much actually. There were a few places, that I couldn't go to that the male geologists did go to. But I was quite fortunate because there was a women’s dreaming track that went from Adelaide up to Darwin through two of our map sheets. So that it meant that I had access to all of that. And one day I took a carload of women from Wingellina.

10:17 Julie

Yeah?

10:18 Heather

And they showed me this dreaming trail and pointed out all the geological features that were part of the story. So was it was useful  to me because it meant I didn’t take samples and remove anything that was a part of this story. But it was, yeah it was  a really lovely day actually. It was a lot of fun.

10:237 Julie

Yeah?

10:38 Heather

There was a lot of giggling in the car and just people that were so excited to be out of the community and back on the land actually.

10:46 Julie

Yeah.

10:47 Heather

And towards the end of the day they took me to a hill which I think was a special part of the story. And it was incredibly complicated structurally, in terms of the geology.

11:00 Julie

Right.

11:00 Heather

There were mylonites in all different directions. And so I was, I climbed the hill and spent the afternoon mapping that. The women that were with me stayed at the base of the hill with their sticks and they sang and they danced. So I spent the afternoon listening to them doing this kind of repetitive chanting and doing the dance of the story. It was actually, yeah, one of the most memorable moments I have of that mapping program. It was a really unique experience.

11:36 Julie

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