Read Online Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay - Free Book Online Page A

first, then she warmed up. Later she told me why she was so sad: her younger brother had died the Sunday before. He had been thirty-one and one of the last true bushmen, I heard from someone in town later. He had also not been a drinker. On that Saturday night he had seen a cat in the darkness, and the next morning he was dead. He had had an argument with a close relative a year back, Patsy said, and shrugged. In our different ways we both paused to picture a world that encompassed sorcery and revenge. She agreed to take me into the bush, to show me how she finds the dyes for baskets. We drove for several kilometers past electric fences that Dave had promised he would switch off—and as Patsy leapt out of the car with her axe and started digging up a small bush lying near one of them, I prayed that he had remembered. “Yellow color,” she explained. “And red too.” I asked what she meant, but she said she would show me later. She also showed me how she found gray from the green fruit of the kapok tree, which contained gray feathery intestines also used to stuff mattresses in the old days.
    Breakfast was the white heart of a sand palm—succulent and bittersweet—and for “jam” we ate bush apples and red ants with green bottoms that were so full of vitamin C they tasted like stings. As I looked out for buffalo (which apparently could be dangerous) Patsy chopped down half a tree to make a forked stick, and then started hooking out the leaves of a pandanus tree—a palm with long spiky leaves bursting out from it like wild thick hair. This was the raw material for making baskets, she said, and when we returned to the farm we sat on a mat made of corrugated iron and she showed me how to strip the leaves, separating the soft underside from the hard top. She completed fifty to my one, but we sat companionably for an hour or so. Her puppy was getting tangled up in all the leaves. Patsy smacked him and then hugged him and then smacked him again. Suddenly a dinosaur crossed the path near us. “That’s just Stumpy,” she said, laughing at my look of alarm. Stumpy was a goanna—a meter-long lizard with a fierce face that gives a good clue to his general disposition, and no tail, having lost it in a fight.
    Patsy took the roots of the yellow bush—which she called anjundum —and scraped off the skin. She divided them between two saucepans and started to boil them with the stripped pandanus. All my many wasted pandanus-stripping attempts were then gathered up and burned into ashes on our corrugated mat. “This is the red one,” she said, adding the ashes to one of the pots. “And this is the yellow one,” she added, pointing to the other. I realized that anjundum had a similar characteristic to pieces of ochre, in that the yellow ones could be transformed into red through cooking— although for the dyes it was a matter of adding some kind of alkali, like wood ash, and not just heat. She showed me a book: Penny Tweedie’s Spirit of Arnhemland —which contained photographs of a boy called Jazmin being decorated for a ceremony, his face sprayed from a man’s mouth with white ochre, rather like the technique of hand painting I had seen in the caves, and his thin chest painted with a singlet of yellow, white and red ochre stripes.
    Another picture showed a ceremonial dilly bag on the back of an elder. It was cylindrical, hard like a basket, and covered in white, red and yellow diamonds. I suddenly realized how strongly the natural dye colors mirror the ochres—red, white, yellow and black. “Dangerous,” Patsy commented casually, flicking through the pages. “Women can’t see this,” she said, pointing at other pictures. I asked her whether it was dangerous for us to see the pictures. “No, we can see the photos, just can’t see in real life,” she explained, suggesting that by the very act of being set up for a photograph, the subjects had suspended their sacredness for the camera. Her sense of danger was