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The Healing Spring has an iconic place in the religious practice of Arrernte people at Ltyentye Apurte/Santa Teresa. Unobtrusively it joins ArrernteAltyerre and Catholic imaginaries together. Here is an account by Bessie Oliver of the discovery of the Healing Spring.344 It occurred when a young man, a member of her extended family, was very sick and homebound. Bessie went to see him:

When I saw that young man, I was crying. He was really weak and lying down. We was holding our hands then, me and my sisters. We was praying for him: “God help him to get up.” But he could hardly stand up. We said three Hail Mary and three Our Father inside this room. And we was crying then. Then he said to my sister, his mother: “Mummy you better go and get holy water. Go and look for that water”. But

343 _{W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming & Other Essays (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 68.}

344 _{Bessie Oliver is acknowledged as being the principal owner of the Healing Spring story. Personal}

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we was just thinking, you know, what water, nobody knows the water was there. Then we was outside and talking: “Where’s the water?” You know that two big hills, two big stones, below. He talked to his mother. And we asked Leonie. So, we got a little tin, fruit tin. We didn’t know anything was there. Leonie said: “Sister we got to go and look for this water.” Well, that young man, he told me to go and look for that water. “Mother Mary was saying to me, that was holy water,” he said. And he saw Mother Mary on top there, on the other side of that little stone. Mother Mary was standing: I think he was just looking at Mother. We went up then, Leonie and my sister and me, slowly, and talking and looking. And we did went up. And we was just standing above that hill, and the little creek down there, and we was just standing, the three of us. We can see something, just here and the water was rising up. Then we stand for a while and there was a big wind, just like a whirly wind. And we was holding each other. And we said: “What’s happening now, the wind?” And we went down and we saw, that water was rising up. We got that water in the little tin. Then we went back and took the water and gave the water to the young man. And when I saw him, I was very sad to see his face. He was really thin. And he told us he saw Mother Mary. And he drank that water and he got better after about three weeks. And everybody came from everywhere with jerry cans to get that water. We were really excited and we said: “that’s really true”. Me and Imelda, we was thinking that he should turn back to Church and he should go to Mass.

Therese Ryder, who was living at Ltyentye Apurte at the time, knows this story very well. Therese talked about the significance of this story in relation to the power of dreams:

Now a lot of people said the water might be coming out of the tank.345 _{I don’t know.}

But it was in that dream. People believe in dreams. Some say that’s just a dream, it’s not real. I don’t know. I collect the water and I collect the sand and when I had problem, I spread the sand around the house and people stopped coming. I used to have a yard full of young people drinking with my sons and so I sprinkled that sand everywhere where people drink and everywhere around my house. And people stopped coming. It works. The young fellas didn’t know that I had sprinkled the water. It’s powerful. I believe in the power of the sand. And I believe about that

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young fella’s dream as well. That tank on the top of the hill is separate altogether from the springs. It’s not leaking out of the tank. I believe in that. Santa Teresa was built on a rain dreaming apmere/place. At Uyetye346 _{there is a place with a spring, my}

conception place. I’m one of the kids from Altyerre kwatye-ntyele (the rain dreaming from Uyetye), Old Jim Hayes and Bruce Hayes’ traditional country.347

Kwatye/wateris a powerful and common Arrernte conception totem. It is significant that Therese links the kwatye/water dreaming of the place/apmere to the young man’s Catholic religious dream of Mother Mary. Indeed, three principal Arrernte informants to this thesis are connected to kwatye. M.K. Turner pointed out that her being was Akerte-renye, from the rain dreaming at Akerte. Therese declares herself to originate from Uyetye, a conception place associated with the kwatye/rain dreaming. Kathleen Kemarre Wallace’s grandfather Atyelpe348_{/native cat or Bill Hayes}349 _{was a rainmaker.}350 _{Unobtrusively this story joins}

Arrernte and Catholic imaginaries together.

The idea of conception totemism351 is a powerful force in Arrernte culture. The MacDonnell Ranges/Tyerrtye attract rain, and its many waterholes and the Finke River and its tributaries provide an abundant supply of life-giving water in all but the very driest of times. It is obvious that the lightning and storms that bring rain, and the water that persists after rain,

346 _{Uyetye is a traditional camping place of the Eastern Arrernte people close to Santa Teresa. It is Kathleen}

Kemarre’s kwatye [water or rain] conception place.

347 _{Therese Ryder, personal communication, November 12, 2018.}

348 _{Atyelpe is the Arrernte name for the native cat written in the Eastern and Central Arrernte orthography. In the}

Gap Area of Alice Springs, where from the 1960s many Aboriginal people lived, is Achilpa Street. For years I did not know that Atyelpe and Achilpa were the same word. This difference in orthography is a source of confusion for non-Indigenous people and dissent by many Arrernte people, regarding the best way to render Arrernte words.

349 _{In Central Australia many Arrernte people have European names which are often derived from the name of}

the lessee of the cattle station upon which they lived and worked in the settler period. The Hayes family is a significant settler family in the vicinity of Alice Springs. There are many Arrernte with the name Hayes, not all of whom are related to each other. Having the name of the station owner does not mean that the Arrernte are direct descendants of a white settler. In some cases, however, non-Aboriginal settlers cohabited with local Aboriginal women and the children of these unions were acknowledged by the fathers. T.G.H. Strehlow in Journey to Horseshoe Bend, 75, recounts the relationships that Bob Buck and Alf Butler, famous settler pioneers in the region, had with Arrernte women in the 1920s at their station at Henbury, close to Hermannsburg. Both men had de-facto Arrernte wives and “half-caste” children. These children did not live with their fathers but did bear their surnames; their fathers provided funds for their education and retained contact and affection for their daughters.

350 _{Kathleen Kemarre Wallace, Listen deeply, let these stories in (Alice Springs: IAD Press, 2009), 37.}

351_{Conception totemism describes the Arrernte belief that every person draws their utnenge/spirit from the}

apmere/place where their mother noted that she had conceived by the quickening in her womb. This conception will often occur in the apmere/country of the woman’s husband because upon marriage a woman normally moves to her husband’s estate. This helps to confirm a patrilineal association with sacred sites and place primary responsibility for maintenance of apmere/country on father’s father’s side.

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have become powerful symbols in Arrernte mythology. Much of the perennial travelling of EasternArrernte people was from waterhole to waterhole, especially in the summer months. For Western, Eastern and Mparntwe Arrernte rain, water, and waterholes provide rich material for myth.

Fire is another elemental force in the Altyerre. A meaning given in the Eastern and Central Arrernte Dictionary for fire/ure reads, “When lightning strikes and starts a bushfire, the country burns.”352 _{The Mparntwe Arrernte have a name for this fire – Ure alharrkentye}

iperre.353 Often working together through lightning strikes, kwatye/water and ure/fire provide the backdrop to the drama and help form the imaginary of Arrernte lives. Carl Strehlow indicates that Mt Rubuntja in the Western MacDonnells is associated with a fire ceremony.354

Peter Latz, one of Australia’s foremost experts on Central Australian ecology, comments on the role of fire in the history of Hermannsburg Mission:

The last six months of 1921 were somewhat drier, and during most of November there was a severe heat wave. This was followed by dry thunderstorms which gave rise to huge bushfires ignited by lightning, which raged everywhere and lasted from four to six weeks … Unlike coastal areas which usually have fires during drought times, in the Centre it is only after exceptionally good rains that there is enough fuel to carry fire throughout the land. If there is little rain after these fires, one ends up with the paradoxical situation of good seasons actually doing more harm than good. In the past the severity of these fire events would have been reduced by traditional burning practices.355

Both fire and water can bring life and augur destruction. While the kwatye/water from the Healing Spring offers life, the arrival of the first Europeans in Central Australia could be interpreted as a ure akngerre/firestorm, threatening to engulf and destroy the Arrernte. These

352 _{Henderson and Dobson, Eastern and Central Arrernte Dictionary, 594. Dianne Austin-Broos, Arrernte}

Present, Arrernte Past, 57, records the Western Arrernte Kaporilja myth as collected by Carl Strehlow. Talking of two rain men, Strehlow reports: “From time to time atua kwatja [water man] would throw a burning kangaroo tail (ara-parra) from on high and caused the earth to burst into flames (lightning struck).”

353 _{Therese Ryder, personal communication, September 11, 2018.}

354 _{Anna Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa (Canberra: ANU Press, 2013), 90.}

355 _{Peter Latz, Blind Moses: Aranda man of high degree and Christian evangelist (Alice Springs: IAD Press,}

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two themes will run through Part Two as it examines the impact of the Invasion on Altyerre and the survival of Altyerre both in spite of and because of the missionaries.