Judith & Moon prepare to cross the Tanami on a DR650 motorcycle
For decades, I’ve spent several months of each year in Lajamanu in the Northern Tanami. I first arrived while searching for my Aboriginal ancestry, and fell in love with the Country and its Warlpiri custodians. I’ve written a book with Warlpiri elders (The Lumen Seed, NY: Daylight Books) and I’m currently working on a new illustrated book set in Warlpiri lands. I’m Judith–an artist and poet, the 2021 artist in residence for Music Viva, and a member of Oculi collective.
Moon came out of the Tanami desert in 2016. He was found on an ant nest near Picaninny bore, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere. At around 4 weeks old, Moon was tiny and pink. He’d lost his hair to mange. He had fleas and ticks, maggots in his mouth. We made a dog coat out of a sock, with holes cut out for his legs.
I was sure he was a goner.
Tabra Cook, a little Warlpiri girl I’ve photographed every year of her life, decided to name him. She called him Kirndangi (the Warlpiri word for the moon), “because he’s white and he looks like he fell from space”.
It was a five day drive back to my home on the Southern Tablelands from the Tanami. Before we left, the Warlpiri gave Moon the skin name Jampimpa, in case he died in the desert — so his ancestors could find him. If he lives, they told me, you can keep him but only if you agree to bring him back to Country every year.
We stopped at vets in Alice Springs, Port Augusta and Castlemaine. All of them said to not get my hopes up. Moon’s body had begun to shut down from toxic shock and malnutrition. I phoned my partner from the road. ‘The bad news’, I told him, ‘is I’m bringing home a mongrel dingo puppy. The good news is he has mange’. It’s a miracle my relationship has survived this long…
Too weak to walk, I carried Moon for weeks in my camera bag– like the mangy antipodean cousin of Paris Hilton’s handbag dog. He emerged at Yuendumu to bark at fireworks, demanded bacon and eggs at Tilmouth Well. He shat on a lovely vet’s floor in Alice, then stole her dog treats. Three weeks after being rescued from the ant nest, Moon saw a beach for the first time and chased seagulls.
Because of his rough start in life, Moon’s legs never grew properly. He looks more like an albino sausage dog than a dingo, but he believes he’s a lion– and belief is important.
Four years have passed and Moon shares a home with two cats, a labrador, seven chickens and some horses. We travelled back to Lajamanu two or three times a year before covid. Since covid, not at all.
In 2017 Moon and I accompanied old Warlpiri ladies, crossing the Great Sandy Desert to reach Mina Mina sacred women’s site, in the jaws of Lake MacKay. He shared a different old lady’s swag every night, learning dog commands in English and Warlpiri language. Kirndangi! we often heard them shout Ngurrju Jarntu!
Fast forward a few years and the world is radically different. I’m scraping a living as a full time artist and poet. Even if the borders were open, which they weren’t, I couldn’t have taken Moon to Lajamanu in 2020 because of the cost of fuel for a Toyota Hilux. But as the months crawled by, Moon and I missed Country more and more. It occurred to me that the 10,000km round trip to the Tanami, costing around $4000 in the Hilux, would cost only a fraction of that on a motorcycle. And a new plan was born.
I bought a DR650 motorcycle and ‘adventurised’ it. I’ve published details of the bike and its modifications for any overland motorcycle enthusiasts out there. A welded steel roll cage was custom built and mounted on the luggage rack for Moon. With a harness, goggles and ear protection, he stays safe and secure on the bike. Because I’d never had anything to do with motocycles previously, I got my L plates, then my P plates. Learning new skills at 50 isn’t easy!
The borders are open now, but nobody knows how long they’ll stay open. There outbreaks all the time, and we daren’t wait. So Moon and I are about to jump on the motorcycle and try to reach Lajamanu.
The only problem is this. There’s not enough time to develop the skills I need to ride in that kind of terrain– especially not with a fully loaded motorcycle and a dingo. I’ve done a couple of off-road riding courses, and sought advice from supportive local Adventure riders, but it takes years to become a confident rider on the dirt. I crash every time I even look at sand. If sand appears on the TV, I fall off the couch.
There is no route to Lajamanu that doesn’t involve hundreds of kilometres of sand. Here’s a link to my post about the three safest route options.
But fear is no reason to avoid trying. So we’re leaving on February 21 for Lajamanu by the easiest possible route — via the Buchanen highway from Elliot to Top Springs, then down Lajamanu road to the community. If we get there without needing to be rescued, we’ll try a harder route home.
Later, after more practice on the trails, we’ll try again to reach Lajamanu via the Tanami track in the middle of 2021. There’s a distance of 750km between petrol stations on that route, so we’ll arrange fuel drops in advance. Toward the end of the year, if we’re not all dead from covid or on fire, Moon and I will brave the open desert, crossing the Tanami from Newcastle Waters to Lajamanu. On these trips we’ll stop to collect plant pressings, write poetry and create Lumachrome glass prints for my forthcoming book. If you’re interested in my work you can find images and poems on my wordpress page.
I’ll publish videos, photos and stories from that trip, as well as the route we’re taking, on medium. It won’t necessarily be a story of triumph. We’re going out into the desert alone, without support vehicles, on a very basic DR650 motorcycle, and almost no off-road skills. But we’ve got an extraordinary human-canine friendship to sustain us, the Country to keep us safe, and, as my Grandmother would’ve said, the luck of the stupid.
