Yulyurdu: Smoke in the Desert

ABSTRACT

I begin this paper with a nod to ‘the beginning’ by linking smoke to fire, and fire to humankind. Bound up in this deep history of smoke and humanity is a dichotomy cleaving humans from animals and the west from the rest. Taking smoke at Yuendumu, a Warlpiri community in central Australia as my subject, I aim to destabilise some of the certainties entrenched in this dichotomy. Smoke, of course, is nigh impossible to pin down, literally as well as conceptually. So rather than trying to immobilise it, I follow in smoke’s own fashion and waft across different kinds of fires and different kinds of analytical approaches. Ethnographically, I draw a narrative picture of the different ways in which smoke at Yuendumu permeates everyday life by considering the smoke of breakfast fires, signalling fires, cooking fires during storms, caring-for-country fires, and the scent of cold smoke on blankets, clothes, and bodies. Analytically, I move from smoke and how it relates to embodied Warlpiri ways of being in the world, to smoke and childhood socialisation, including baby smoking rituals. From there I shift to the smoke of caring-for-country fires, and on to smoke, memory, odourphilia, and odourphobia. I conclude by pondering the potential of a smoke-like approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Fire
• embodiment
• senses
• olfaction
• memory
• aboriginal Australia

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to Yapa-patu Yurntumu-wardingki for teaching me, to Jane Blackwood for evenings filled with conversations about fire and smoke, to Simone Dennis for smoky camaraderie, to Chris Marcatili for research assistance, to the reviewers for their excellent comments, and to the ARC for Future Fellowship FT130100415, which made this research possible.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Or, its alternatives, like dung fire smoke (see Tan, 2017) or seal oil and whale blubber smoke in the Arctic.

2 For more on the politics of the locations of cooking and sleeping fires (as well as the sharing, or not, of firewood by co-residents) at Yuendumu, see Musharbash (2008).

3 Carter et al. (1987) report the singing of ‘borning songs’ during baby smoking rituals. At Yuendumu, however, I have never witnessed any singing during the ‘cooking of babies’.

4 An inverse process happens when, upon death, the residence of a deceased person is smoked. A further link to the interconnections between smoke, country, and person can be found in post-mortem practices such as burning the clothes of the deceased to see whether the smoke leads to the murderer.

5 Smoke for signalling and signal fires used to be prominent in the past, including the recent past (Gould 1971, 20–21; Kimber 1983). Today, however, many of their functions have been taken over by different kinds of communication technologies and signal fires are reserved for (stationary) emergencies, used, for example, in case of a stranded car, where a signal fire’s smoke indicates its position during the day, and the illumination from the fire itself serves the same purpose at night – assisting the relatives of people who did not return home in their search.

6 Dreaming is the English term for Aboriginal cosmologies, including the Warlpiri version of jukurrpa. The interplay between smoke and rain clouds manifests on manifold levels (see also Curran, 2017). For example, atmospherically, smoke clouds attract rainclouds; an attraction expressed also in the taboo against cooking meat during thunder storms. The scent of the cooking meat is said to travel skywards in smoke form and to lure rainbow serpents travelling as storm clouds across the country off their intended tracks, causing them to strike people around the cooking fires instead. Rainbow serpents are Dreaming beings that reside in waterholes but can arise out of them as rainbows or storm clouds. They have protective as well as avenging characteristics.

7 In retrospect, I realise that I should have asked about what the sighting of smoke evokes, rather than its smell. Seeing smoke rise up from the ground towards the sky is an undeniable sign of home: it indicates the presence of people in a camp, the whereabouts of hunters in the distance, and indeed, the aliveness of country.

8 See especially Chapter 4: The Odour of the Other in Classen (1993), Chapter 5: Odour and Power in Classen, Howes, and Synnott (1994), and the chapters of Part I: Odorphobia in Drobnick (2006).

9 Smoke-free here refers to lack of wood smoke. I should point out the younger generations smoke tailor-made cigarettes (as well as marihuana) much more so than senior ones, who generally chew tobacco. The former’s domestic space is thus infused with a different kind of smoke (which would deserve a paper in its own right).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT130100415].