Free Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay Page A

ritual that might help me understand why red ochre was so sacred.
    In the hot summer of 1933, Strehlow was invited by four elders of the Loritja tribe to see a rain ceremony at a place called Horseshoe Bend, not far from Alice. He described how the men—having approached the cave banging shields and boomerangs to warn the Ancestors of their arrival—pulled three sacred rain sticks or tjurunga from the bottom of the cave. Two were slim poles, about the size and shape of didgeridoos, representing rain brothers who had travelled through the Central Desert country at the beginning of time. The third was smaller, and symbolized the brothers’ two grandchildren: greedy infants screaming for blood.
    The thirst of even the most hemoglobin-challenged of ritual objects was satisfied that afternoon. In order to honor the rain ancestors, the four blood donors cheerfully set to work tying their arms and opening the veins on the forearms, Strehlow wrote. They all had problems getting a good flow and spent the first five minutes cutting, splintering glass chips, and pulling at the opening of the cuts. But when the jets came they came quickly, spraying the tjurunga and then drizzling on top, bottom and sides of the cave entrance. It was, the missionary’s son noted, the greatest quantity of blood he had ever seen sprinkled about for a ceremony.
    The account is written in a very matter-of-fact way, but Strehlow added in a footnote that he had to brace himself for this “orgy of bleeding” by downing several good brandies, and even then he had to watch it through the lens of his Graflex camera, standing a short distance away, so he did not feel too sick. It was a hot day and a small gully, and he found the smell of blood quite overpowering. He was told that these three tjurunga were unique among the Loritja in that they were never painted with red ochre, but instead had to be refreshed with human blood at frequent intervals. Later he speculated that the usual practice of smearing tjurunga with red ochre might be a substitute for covering them with blood, although this was, he emphasized, purely a guess.
    When the ceremony ended, the bloodstained sand was trampled until all signs had been wiped away; each man had to scrape the marks from his arms, and wash himself before returning to camp. It was important that the women shouldn’t smell the blood, Strehlow noted. I was reminded of a story I had heard a couple of weeks before, whispered over a beer by a man in the Northern Territory. He knew a man, he said, who had been to an initiation ceremony in the mid-1990s, and had carelessly left the ceremonial red ochre glistening on his arm so that the women could see it. He had carried something dangerous into the world where it could not be contained, and the penalty for that was death. “They did it with spears,” the man whispered, glancing melodramatically over his shoulder.
    In the same library was a book about the Dreaming places of Alice Springs—which directed me to the road running along the Todd River (so dry that there is an annual regatta where the racers run, carrying the boats) and leading to the casino. The map recorded it as Barrett Drive; the Aboriginals preferred to call it Broken Promises Drive. When it was first proposed, the Aboriginal guardians gave permission for it to be built—as long as it wriggled round a spot that was known as the Caterpillar Dreaming because it included a long mound believed to mark the space where the caterpillar Ancestor rested beneath the earth. But the road builders were greedy; the wriggle would cost dollars. They blocked the road off and a few months later opened it unrepentantly—with several meters cut off the tail of the caterpillar. The wound was still there. From the road I could see a long mound about three meters high and five meters wide curling away into the distance, covered with eucalyptus and grass and signposts warning people to stay away. The mound ended abruptly at the road,