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Aboriginal Romeo and Juliet survive 40 years in the bush

By Kathy Marks in Sydney

Message Sticks Indigenous film festival Sydney Opera House 2007

8 May 2007 - They were an Aboriginal Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers who eloped into the desert because tribal law forbade them from marrying. And for 40 years they roamed, living off kangaroo meat and bush fruit, happy with their own company and the red landscape.

Warri and Yatungka were perhaps Australia's last nomads, leading a traditional lifestyle long after their Mandildjara tribe gravitated to urban settlements. They abandoned the desert only in 1977, when a severe drought dried up the waterholes, and tribal elders, anxious for their welfare, sent out a search party.

The couple, still inseparable, were close to starvation. They agreed to come into town, although they feared they might be punished. In fact, the elders had forgiven them. However, Warri and Yatungka yearned for their peripatetic existence, which was how Aborigines had lived for 40,000 years. In 1979 they died within weeks of each other.

Now their story has been immortalised by an indigenous film-maker, Glen Stasiuk, who was inspired by 16mm footage shot by the search party. "I just fell in the love with the way they never left each other, and their beautiful serenity," he said yesterday. "There was obviously a harshness in their emaciated bodies, but you just knew they were part of this landscape."

The documentary, called Footprints in the Sand, was screened at an Aboriginal film festival at the Sydney Opera House this week. It features Warri and Yatungka's son, Geoffrey "Yullala Boss" Stewart, who travels with the film crew back to his birthplace, a waterhole in the middle of the remote Gibson Desert, in Western Australia. Mr Stewart, now in his fifties, wandered that land with his parents until his teens, when he joined the rest of the tribe for initiation ceremonies. He was overcome with emotion on returning. He told Mr Stasiuk, as he pointed to an area of roughly 200 sq km: "This was my playground."

Warri and Yatungka met in the 1930s, but were from different "skin groups", so their relationship breached tribal law. Rather than separate, they ran away together. They had three children. Their daughter died young, and their other son is now seriously ill.

By the 1960s, with mining companies and pastoralists encroaching on their land, most Mandildjara moved to towns such as Warburton and Wiluna. British nuclear tests conducted in the Outback during the 1950s had also blunted Aborigines' desire to live in the desert.

But Warri and Yatungka stayed there, leading a solitary existence, apart from occasional encounters with tribe members and white anthropologists. It was not until the drought that they struggled to survive. It took the search party, led by an Aboriginal tracker, Mudjon, and a white explorer, Bill Peasley, several weeks to find them. The couple were naked and stick-thin. As well as having to walk for days to find water, they had not eaten meat for a long time. Warri had a leg injury and could not hunt.

Dr Peasley wrote about the experience in a book, The Last of the Nomads, and a film with the same title was made. Mr Stasiuk, a lecturer in film and culture at Murdoch University in Perth, wanted to recount the events from an Aboriginal perspective. "I thought I should give these people a voice, because it's their ancestry," he said.

He weaves archival footage around interviews with people such as Mudjon's brother, and speaks to Aboriginal people, for whom the love story has become a fable.

Mr Stewart and members of his community led the film crew to his birthplace, although it was off the beaten track and he had not been back for 40 years. "We left the road and bounced across the spinifex for two days," said Mr Stasiuk. "We were probably 1,000 km from the nearest anything. Geoffrey had no maps, no GPS. He just knew the place in his head and in his heart. When we got back to Wiluna, he took off into the bush and for two days sang all the songs that his parents had taught him."

The film will be shown on Australian television in July.

Source: The Independent UK

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