When Tjariya and Inpiti were little girls, the black-footed rock-wallabies were so abundant that their fathers would hunt and spear them for dinner, cooking them in ovens of hot coals in the red dirt of their country in remote north-western South Australia.
Now they are old ladies, or minyma, with the same capacity to make each other giggle they had back then, but the rock-wallaby, or warru, is so endangered they are leading an ambitious program to protect it.
This afternoon, they take us to where Anangu rangers are performing a controlled burn to protect the wallaby’s habitat from wildfires, and to scorch the introduced buffel grass. ''He’s a mean one, that buffel grass,'' says an animated Tjariya in her language.
The buffel grass is good for cattle grazing, but a disaster for the wallaby, overwhelming the bush figs and spear bush and indigenous grasses it feeds on, and making the ground much more difficult for the nomadic Anangu people to traverse in bare feet.
Inpiti Winton, whose talent for spinning and weaving asserts itself in distinctive beanies, apologises before we arrive at the site. This is not good witchetty grub digging country, she announces, then gently lays down her walking stick and settles in to watch the rangers at work.
Tjariya Stanley, whose reputation is growing among the blossoming band of renowned Lands' painters, describes the warru project as her ''number one'' most important work.
It is also one element of an unambiguous, but sadly rare, success story in a region that few Australians have heard of, much less seen – a vast tract of more than 10 million hectares (or 103,000 square kilometres) in far north-west South Australia with a young, overwhelmingly indigenous population of barely 2600 people.
The Anangu live in fewer than 10 communities, often a light plane ride apart. Their young ones are brought up to know their country intimately: every rockhole and spring, every claypan, every species of plant, every animal.
The young men are schooled by their elders in what others call the dreaming and what the Anangu call ''the law'' (in their language, tjukurpa), the rational and moral order of their being. A missing front tooth is one sign of their progression.
But while their culture and languages are as strong as anywhere in the country, the gap between those who live in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY) and non-indigenous Australians is wider than anywhere else, especially when it comes to the other kind of education, the kind that will enable them to make it in the wider world.
''I think these are the forgotten lands,'' is how plain-speaking Indigenous Affairs Minister, Nigel Scullion, expresses it during a four-day sweep through the Lands. ''This has been an abandoned place.''
The neglect shows in dysfunctional governance structures, blurred lines of authority, a very high turnover of outside staff, a bits-and-pieces approach to policy making and a general, but utterly pervasive, lack of urgency.
There may be no better example of the latter than a new family community centre at Fregon, a community named after a Victorian known only as ''Mr Fregon'', who gave a group of missionaries enough money to set up a bore and establish a presence in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
Scullion was told that the centre was completed and fully equipped a year ago, but has not been able to open because state bureaucrats considered the stones outside too sharp and a health hazard.
''I don’t think it would be tolerated in other communities that a perfectly good place would just sit there for 12 months and not be opened for some technical reason,'' he says, before resisting the temptation to score points at the expense of the South Australian government.
Instead, he describes it as emblematic. ''We’ve spoken to the South Australian government and the South Australian government has spoken to the Commonwealth, and we’re all sort of speaking, but nothing is happening,'' he says. ''Somebody just needs a front-end loader, some bloody dirt, some grass seed and a couple of plants and it’ll be compliant.''
Scullion is a minister in a hurry, whose aspiration when he entered politics was to serve in the portfolio that is now his.
He displayed his own sense of urgency after accompanying the community’s school attendance supervisor, Joanne Edwards, on her daily circuit of the community, knocking on the doors of the houses where the children are still inside.
At one house on the outskirts of Fregon, the door was slammed in the face of Edwards before the occupants spilled out into the yard and abuse was hurled at her, and her unannounced companion, prompting the dogs to start barking and the neighbours to join in the fracas.
Later that day, Scullion announced his intention to move ''within months'' to impose financial sanctions on parents who do not send their kids to school.
The very next day, without consulting his South Australian counterpart (nominally responsible for school attendance) or the self-proclaimed Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs in Tony Abbott, he declared that the new policy would be implemented from next Monday, with the first penalties to flow a few weeks later.
''There’s a time when you just have to move,'' he later told Fairfax Media, explaining attendance officers like Edwards who had been recruited under a remote school attendance strategy eight months ago had to be supported at a time when attendance in some schools was going backwards again.
''Not taking the next step might be convenient for government and risk-averse for me, but it’s going to put the plan [to increase attendance] at risk. We need to think about getting the kids to school, not necessarily about the political purity of the decision.''
While the move was generally supported by the communities' leaders and principals of the eight schools, some expressed alarm that financial penalties would simply increase the poverty of some of the country’s most disadvantaged people.
''If they take away the payments, what are the kids going to eat?,'' asked Nupi Lambina, a mother-of-eight who works at the community office at Indulkana, where the school already has one of the better attendance records on the Lands.
Lambina’s biggest fear is that there aren’t any jobs in the community for those who finish school. ''I worry about what they’re going to do when I’m gone,'' the quietly spoken 51-year-old says of her children, alluding to the reality of lower life expectancy for indigenous Australians, especially those in remote communities like her’s. ''Things happen. Maybe bad sickness come and you’re gone. Any time.''
Lambina’s concern underscores the need for a new approach, like the Empowered Communities model championed by Cape York’s Noel Pearson and embraced by both sides of politics before the last election.
The model is all about reducing the number of programs and agencies that interact with communities and ensuring that policy is driven by local leaders and that money is better spent. It includes imposing punitive welfare reform aimed at breaking the cycle of passive welfare.
It’s hardly rocket science, but Scullion’s visit underscored the barriers to progress, from the bureaucratic failure that denied young mothers access to Fregon’s family community centre, to the negative attitude of some Anangu leaders who insist that welfare is a no-strings-attached entitlement.
Pearson’s complaint, expressed in brutal language with Scullion at this month’s Garma festival in Arnhem Land, is that the minister has not being energetic enough in backing the approach, instead waiting for the latest report from bureaucrats. ''I got that message,'' Scullion says, describing Pearson as a mate.
The Lands are one of eight regions that will be used to trial the Empowered Communities model, which has the backing of companies like professional services giant, KPMG, which will second two staff to work in the Lands in September.
''Empowered Communities offers to Aboriginal people the opportunity to take greater control of their own destiny,'' KPMG chairman Peter Nash tells Fairfax Media. ''They understand the needs of their community and the best way to allocate resources. With our skills in developing sustainable economic and business models, we are able to assist the Aboriginal community develop a model to give practical effect to the EC concept.''
The need for change is stressed by the latest general manager of the Lands, Bruce Deans, who has been in the role a few months. ''The whole of this hasn’t changed for a number of years, for all the effort and money that has been put into it,'' he says. ''It’s been neglected and it hasn’t been managed properly and it needs to be revisited and a new model put in place.''
It is also underscored by a review commissioned by the Lands governing body of the cattle industry by retired Adelaide policeman, Trevor Jenkins, who says he did not know much about cattle when he started, but knows a great deal about the importance of governance, transparency and common sense.
The review highlighted what might be called the diseconomies of, among other things, cattle agisters paying a fortune to bring in their materials and labour from outside, instead of building capacity on the Lands.
A case study in the latter can be found in another success story, local building company Wiltja Constructions, run by Tony Rodgers and his partner Aileen Shannon, which has 88 casual workers on its books and is intent on breaking the cycle of training for training sake, with no real job at the end.
Jenkins says the potential for both the cattle and camel industries is huge, provided the right structures are in place. ''These lands, many years ago, had 40,000 cattle on them. It’s 13,000 today. They also have the purest bloodline of Afghan camels and the Afghans would like to come here and get the strain back.''
If those managing the livestock co-ordinate their work with those running the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) and Working on Country agreements, which cover more than half the Lands and include the warru protection plan, an economic and environmental dividend looms, one that could even include a carbon benefit.
Doug Humann manages the IPA work that employs around 150 Anangu rangers and says his aspiration is for all the management roles, including his, to be filled by the Anangu. ''I’m working with rangers who have got a family lineage going back 40,000 years,'' he says.
''It’s just such a wonderful place to work because the Anangu genuinely want to improve their livelihoods, particularly for their children, and a big part of that is looking after and having access to their country,'' says Jen Grindrod, one of the non-indigenous co-ordinators. ''As an environmentalist and someone interested in working with Aboriginal people, it’s the perfect mix.''
Among the Anangu rangers is Ethan Dagg, 29, who is living his dream of protecting his country and culture, while earning a living that enables him to pursue his other passion of motor-cross riding.
Their work has the potential to complement another potentially rich, but untapped, source of employment for the Anangu: eco-tourism.
Outside the community of Amata, Lee Brady gave Scullion a taste of that potential when he took the minister to Cave Hill, a site that is at the centre of the Seven Sisters Dreaming. The story of the sisters and their pursuit by a man named Nyiru is told in paintings in a large cave that Brady says is more like a library, with some paintings that are 20,000 years old.
Brady likens the challenge facing the Anangu to a big race. ''Everybody has got to be part of it to make it happen,'' he says. ''We’ve got to encourage all the children that drop by the way, pick them up so they can all get to the finish line.''
Back at the site of the burning outside Ernabella, Tjariya and Inpiti sing a song inspired by the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their parents.
They cry for the mothers missing their babies, but they are not singing about indigenous children. The subject of the song they wrote together is the warru – and the joeys were taken from these lands as part of an ambitious breeding program to protect them from extinction.
The song has a happy ending because the joeys were returned to their mothers, and it is happier still because they are winning the battle to save the warru. Their hope is that it is a metaphor for an even more ambitious endeavour.
