Overkill

The Age

Saturday July 14, 2007

Carrie Tiffany

Former Northern Territory ranger Carrie Tiffany finds that once again, something looks wrong in the landscape.

WHEN I LIVED AT Uluru, about 20 years ago, I liked to go walking in the sand dunes after work. One evening, just as it was getting dark, I heard a car approaching through the scrub. Actually I heard it from a long distance away as it made the particular chugging noise caused by a nearly blown head gasket.

A battered Holden ute came in to view. Four Mutitjulu boys were out with their rifles shooting rabbits. The ute stopped. The boys waved and smiled. Would I like a lift? I was in my khaki ranger shirt and jeans and a pair of new white high-top sneakers. The boy who was driving had the barrel of his rifle poking out of his window. He pointed it up and back to motion for me to climb on to the tray. I could see a few soggy carcasses and I didn't want to get my sneakers dirty, so I said no and kept walking. The boys drove off; the ute shuddering forward in a kind of mechanical distress. I felt stupid for not getting in. I felt like an out-of-place-white-sneakered-white-girl.

When I thought about it later it occurred to me that the boys hadn't immediately pointed their rifles away from me in that exaggerated way you see on television or in the movies. And I thought that was probably why - those boys hadn't watched a lot of television or movies. They weren't up on Sunday Too Far Away. They weren't imagining they were Jack Thompson out being dangerous with guns in the empty heart of Australia. They were just out getting dinner.

A rifle is a tool in a ranger's toolkit. When I worked in the Northern Territory, rangers were expected to kill feral animals including donkeys, horses, camels, cats and foxes. But only on declared parks or reserves that were within our jurisdiction. My boss, the Senior District Ranger, said a good ranger is always alert for anything that looks out of place in the landscape.

"If it doesn't look right in the landscape, it is probably introduced and it should probably be shot," he told me.

I must have looked a bit queasy at this so he smiled at me encouragingly. We had this conversation on a long patrol to several isolated parks and reserves north-west of Alice Springs. This was serious four-wheel driving country, so not many tourists made it out to these places. We visited them a couple of times a year to check the fences and signs and rubbish bins and to shoot any feral animals. On that trip we stopped at a place called Brooks Soak, near Coniston Station. There were no signs or fences, I don't think it was even an official reserve, just a place that tourists sometimes stopped. My boss said it had heritage significance. We collected the rubbish - being careful to only get the modern rubbish, not the possibly historical rusty jam tins. On the way back, my boss shot a donkey. It was a sick donkey. Thin and dehydrated. He said it was better dead out on the flat where the eagles and dingoes could get a feed than polluting a waterhole. My boss was a good shot, but we still walked over to the donkey to check it was dead. He put his boot under the donkey's head. Its ears waggled dustily, but it was clearly dead. My boss told me that he once shot a donkey in front of an Aboriginal woman and she was angry with him. She told him he shouldn't have shot the donkey because it was part of the Jesus dreaming story. And he was a white fella and that was his dreaming story, so he'd broken his own law.

"I even showed her my firearms licence," he told me. "I showed her it was all legal. Not that it made her any happier."

When I got back to the office, I looked up the file on Brooks Soak. In 1928 a white man who had been trapping dingoes in the area was speared and killed there. In retaliation there was a massacre at nearby Coniston. The exact number of Aborigines shot in the Coniston massacre in 1928 is unknown, but the records said at least 32.

In order to use a firearm as a ranger in the Northern Territory, you need a firearms licence. When I had been in the ranger service for six months or so, I was sent on a firearms training course at the Alice Springs rifle range. At the end of the course I would get my licence. The course was run by the Northern Territory police.

It went for a week and involved theory and practice with different rifles and handguns - even high-calibre automatics that we would never be required to use. A serious case of overkill.

I enjoyed the firearms course and the other rangers did, too. We were all living on isolated parks and it meant coming to a proper town and staying in a motel and eating better-than-usual food. We went out to the shooting range each day in a minibus. I was a passably good shot and dexterous enough with loading and handling. At the end of the week I had arranged to stay in town and spend the weekend with my boyfriend, who was a painter - walls not pictures - at the Yulara Tourist Resort. He had recently bought a motorbike and we planned to spend the weekend riding out to some of the remote gorges west of the town and swimming in the deep waterholes.

On the last day of the course the police instructor brought out a dozen high-powered automatic rifles with telescopic sights. He taught us how to line up a target in the cross-hairs of the sight. It was like being a sniper in an American stake-out film. I'd never shot with a scope before. We were lying on our stomachs in a line of dugouts facing a set of cardboard, human-shaped targets. I pushed my left eye right up to the outer edge of the scope - to try to sharpen my vision and cut out all the extraneous light. I lined up the central chest area of the target in front of me and squeezed the trigger. The butt of the gun belted back in to my shoulder and the hard edge of the scope punched straight in to my face, cutting the flesh around my eye. It was a pastry-cutter wound; perfectly circular, deep at the top in the soft eyebrow flesh and deep enough everywhere else. It bled like hell. The police instructor drove me to the hospital where one of the trainee nurses started screaming because she thought I'd been shot through the eye. They stitched the wound, gave me a tetanus shot, an eye patch and some painkillers and released me for the weekend.

It isn't worth describing how terrible I looked. My boyfriend arrived at the motel before I had changed my shirt and was sick in the flower bed outside. He was sweet enough, though. We spent the Saturday in bed watching television and eating and talking and changing the icepacks on my face. During the night the throbbing was unbearable and I moved the furniture so my body was on the bed but my head was lower down on a plastic chair. The next morning we were both bored and fractious. He wanted to go out riding on the motorbike but felt bad about leaving me. He kept going to the window and looking at the bike through the curtains. We started bickering. I told him he should just leave, just go riding on his own, and he did. He put on his helmet and rode out to one of the gorges and went swimming. On the way back he stopped at a phone box and rang me to say he'd met some tourists out there from his home town (he was German) and they were heading for Darwin and he was going with them. And that was that.

I was almost grateful for my face when I went back to work the next week. I didn't have to explain the way I looked. It is expected that ugly and sad will go together.

In my second year as a ranger, another ranger gave me an old .22 rifle that he didn't want any more. It was beautiful. The stock was made from a smooth lemony timber that might have been silky oak. I didn't have to sign a gun out of the armory at the office any more. I took my rifle out on patrol and occasionally shot a feral cat with it. Or at least sometimes I aimed in to the bush and fired. I doubt I actually hit anything. When something bigger came along, a horse, a camel, or a donkey, I looked the other way.

In 1989 when I left the Northern Territory and moved to Victoria, I brought the rifle with me. It was wrapped up in my canvas swag with a rusty jaffle iron and a canvas water bag that hung over the bull-bar of a four-wheel-drive to be cooled by the wind as you drove. All of these things were essential for my life in the territory, but not really needed in Victoria. There was a different way of being a ranger in Victoria. If you had to go away for work, you weren't expected to camp; you could stay in a motel. And there were a lot more women. I worked in the Central Highlands for a while where the rangers were in charge of a works crew of older local guys - ex-pastry cooks and saw-millers and truck drivers. The works crew did the heavy stuff. When the pit toilet needed pumping out, we told the works crew to do it. They mostly ignored us and sat on their Eskies in the bush taking hour-long smokos and reading pornos. They called us wankers behind our backs but always just loud enough so we could hear.

At the time I moved to Victoria, a staggering number of people were being shot by the police. Between 1984 and 1995, police in Victoria shot dead 35 people. Twice as many as the rest of Australia combined. Trigger-happy was the phrase of choice. Why were Victorian police so trigger-happy? I talked about this with friends. We were embarrassed to be living in Victoria. It was like going to sleep somewhere you thought was sophisticated and waking up to find you lived in Queensland.

In 1995 the Victorian police announced an amnesty on firearms. You could take unlicensed weapons to the police to be destroyed without risk of prosecution. I was no longer a ranger then. I was living in the suburbs with two small children. I was making a good life and I had an unlicensed rifle in the cupboard.

One morning I collected my three-year-old-daughter from kindergarten and drove to the Nunawading police station to hand in my rifle. It was unnerving to be approaching the police station carrying a rifle, even one with the bolt removed. This was a time when people were alarmed and frightened by police shootings. It was felt that the police were shooting first and asking questions later. Police had shot people on beaches, in car parks, on public streets and in their homes. Only a few of the people they shot were armed. Some carried kitchen knives, one carried a tomahawk, one a pick axe. I walked into the police station carrying the rifle and holding my small daughter's hand. My daughter is short-sighted. She was wearing her tiny gold-framed glasses that made her look owly and smart - like a fully-qualified librarian, miniaturised. I felt both glad and afraid to have her with me. The glass doors opened. I held the gun pointed downwards in that exaggerated way you see on television or in the movies. The desk sergeant went to get the firearms sergeant, who laid the rifle on the counter and began to fill in a form.

"Where had I got the gun from? Why was there no licence?"

I told him I had been cleaning up at home and found the gun stashed with some timber under the shed. I went on to describe the timber and my voice got a bit inflated which alerted my daughter's attention.

"No, that's not right." She told the firearms sergeant, pushing her glasses higher up on her nose. "That's my mum's gun. That's my mum's gun that she keeps in the cupboard with the spare pillows. It's her ranger gun for shooting animals that are in the wrong place."

All of this was a long time ago. It is 20 years since I saw the Mutitjulu boys out rabbit shooting; 12 years since I handed in my rifle. But last month the Prime Minister announced he was sending Federal Police into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to clean them up, and I saw a Mutitjulu woman on the television news. She was leaning on a wire fence surrounded by gingery camp dogs with Uluru in the background. She said that when the Federal Police come in to the community with their wagons and their guns, everyone will be frightened. She said that some people were talking about running off in to the hills.

Seeing the woman on the news made me think again about my rifle, about the donkey my boss shot on the way back from Coniston, about all of the people that were shot at Coniston, about the rifle that cut my face, about the boys out shooting rabbits, about the people shot by police in Victoria. It made me think about force. And the word overkill came in to my mind.

Carrie Tiffany is a Melbourne writer. Her novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, (Picador) was shortlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction.

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