CAMELEERS
To have a strange white man die on Mithaka land would have been considered a terrible thing , and very bad luck . He cites as evidence the phenomenon they call the “ Burke and Wills teardrops ”, manmade teardrop-shaped rock formations . Mithaka Elders believe the stone arrangements formed an arrow to try to lead Burke and Wills to water . By helping the Burke and Wills expedition survive , they were ensuring the white men would leave their country , which is what they would have wanted . Barry then applies his theory to Plant Camp itself . If the local people were watching and following the party , then they would have observed the white men digging for a whole night , before burying something and moving on . He said the buried items would have been retrieved by the local people and removed to “ safe places ”, caves and crevasses , and made off-limits by bad spirits . They would have been special places where the bad luck of the items could not affect the tribes . Barry believes the items in Wills ’ cache are no longer at Plant Camp . They are hidden . We continued searching for Aboriginal artefacts during the next couple of days and the discoveries continued to add to the Mithaka story . Occupation during a very long period was evident in the abundant finds . We were then taken to an area to rediscover something very special to the Mithaka people , not a sacred site , but confidential in the short term . It was a rocky ridge rising from the gibber plain floor and we were despatched to use our new skills to find the items known to exist in the area . The mystery was solved , and , no doubt , will eventually be made public , but it was during this search Tegan made a discovery that directly related to Plant Camp . She squeezed into a narrow opening leading to a small cave . She ignored her clothes being covered in burrs to retrieve the pair of European hand shears in the cave ( after first asking if she should do so ). The shears were inside the cave , on land that would have been no use to white pastoralists , next to the skull of a long-dead dingo . The hand shears , once used to remove the wool from sheep , were resting , purposely hidden in a cave . They had been there a very long time . Sheep had not been grown in the area for more than 100 years , dingoes ensuring the demise of that industry . Why were they there ?
Barry ’ s theory was that they were found by Mithaka people and hidden , with the slain dingo placed with them to keep bad luck away . It seems to lend weight to his theory of what might have happened at Plant Camp . Maybe it was meant to be that the Plant
George Koulakis in front of a scarred tree
Camp expedition was cancelled this year . When we deploy on the Plant Camp 2018 expedition , as we surely must , will we be digging , or will we be searching cliffs for caves and crevasses for the long lost equipment of Burke and Wills ?
- BEN JENKINS
28 | OCTOBER 2017