JUDITH NANGALA CRISPIN The Dingo’s Noctuary. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Judith Nangala Crispin fuses poetry, prose and striking works of art in this illustrated account of her journeys across Australian deserts.

But still, at night, I imagine the caravans of the Mongrels pausing under the Pleiades’ heliacal rise – on the eve of winter, when dingo mothers instruct their newborns in the art of howling, and the dogs of Lupus and Leo glimmer through the late acacia scrub.

Time moves in colossal linear gestures, the arcs of Venus and Mercury, the morning and evening stars.

Moments like this, in Judith Nangala Crispin’s motorcycle journey through Australia’s central deserts, bring starlight to a book which is often dark with anger at the historical injustices that reverberate in the lives of the Aboriginal people she knows and sometimes travels with, and the threats faced by their sacred animal, the dingo.

The stars beneath which she travels become a sky-world of animals – star-animal linkages that she invents ‘to make old ladies smile’ as she tells stories around the campfire.

Cygnus is the launching place of travelling interstellar birds – diamond doves and brolgas, snakebirds and wood-duck maned geese.

A kingfisher shuffles through Fomalhaut, the lone blue star. It watches Piscis Austrinus, hoping for a flash of desert fish – glassfish, bream, or spangled perch.

Star maps, shown ahead of pages that describe them in poetic detail, accompany her journey; as, too, does the 2016 track of NASA’s space probe Cassini-Huygens in the last stage of its mission to chart the moons of Saturn. On 30 December 2016, Huygens calves from the side of Cassini and falls slowly towards the surface of one of Saturn’s moons. For Crispin, this becomes a symbol of her own separation from her long-searched-for Aboriginal roots, and The Dingo’s Noctuary is, as she writes in her Author’s Note:

for those who, like me, are undocumented, illegitimate, precarious in their heritage – the mongrels, the dingoes, the nowhere people, those without tribe or clan or people … You are my kith and kin.

Brought up believing that she was of Scottish/Spanish/Moorish descent, ‘Charlotte arrived like a comet – in a letter from an uncle’ who had found her name ‘spider-scrawled in the margins’ of her grandmother’s bible. Long years of searching led to a photograph in an ‘Anthropological record’:

We meet on the surface of a photograph as a fish and bird might meet in a lake, at a point of sky and the water’s plane. Charlotte, in a book called The Aboriginals of Northern Victoria.

Charlotte ‘sits jet-black on earth, wind disarranging her hair’ with ‘goanna kinship scars’ across her chest: ‘grandmother of my grandfather’ says Crispin, ‘I am Judith, and these are my scars.’

Crispin is a poet and a visual artist and her own natural-light photographs illuminate this book. The Dingo’s Noctuary is a record of 37 desert crossings on her motorbike with her wild-born Walpuri dingo-dog, Moon, riding pillion in a specially designed capsule. It is a record of

things passing by night, the nocturnal peregrinations of dingo, woman and starship at some remote intersection of Earth and outer space.

Forty-seven beautiful images – evocative light-pictures in which animals that have died as road-kill or from natural causes rise through star-speckled darkness as ghostly, colourful spirits. These images were made using glass plates, photographic papers, salt, sand, ochres, clay, seeds, flowers, muds and pastes (even Vegemite), coloured markers, and other improvised things, and all were exposed in natural sun or moonlight under a geodesic dome. They are, as Bandjalung writer and artist Djon Mundine says, ‘spiritual death-mask’ prints of ‘twilight’s last gleaming’ and there is nothing morbid about them.

As for the ‘mongrels’, these are part vision and part the hallucinatory beliefs of an old Warlpiri woman, Lily, loved by Crispin, who mourns her death. Crispin’s own mongrel vision arrives one desert night in ‘the liminal hours of milkweed and Sturt’s desert rose’ when, believing she hears someone call her name and surfacing ‘outside’, she sees ‘something wrong with the sky’:

I saw them then, low on the starfields – a night mirage,

A noctilucent shape, dividing itself to figures. I count five,

immense and dingo-headed, striding out in the direction of deserts.

Powerful as thunderheads, their bodies are wild and dark.

Starry.

As they disappear, one seems to ‘turn back its canine head / like an acknowledgement’. So, like Lily, she knows ‘they’re out there somewhere in the north-west’.

In verse and prose, together with star maps, images of pressed plants, RAAF land maps, and her magical lumachrome–chemigram pictures, Crispin, who spends half her year living and working with her adopted Warlpiri people, writes of friendships, losses, grief, happy times in the lives of the people and, importantly, of the threat to the dingo, historically and now, an issue still being hotly debated. She also writes of ecological destruction and barren desert sites like that around the Delamere Air Weapons Range, where ‘An old stock route leads to a counterfeit town … purpose built for US strategic bombers to practice killing.’

 And maybe it’s not the end when squadrons block the sun,

 when the horizon glows like cigarette embers,

 under high explosives and bombs,

 but surely the end begins here.

As a dingo slants between the dunes – ‘sliding into the light’, she thinks that the dingoes ‘should tear us to pieces for betraying this land’.

But somewhere, Lily says, in this million-square kilometres of desert

there’s a mountain surrounded by caravans

of dingo people.

And maybe it’s jacklight, just dementia tales of an old lady in a home,

but I want them to be out there –

noctivagant in the red sand, speaking

that star language, the dialects of desert birds.

‘Listen,’ she says as the book begins (inventing a story based on a Jaru and Walmajarru legend). ‘A star is always coming down over the Tanami, before and now, always falling, always shattering itself against the atmosphere’ and

where those star-fragments fall … something serpentine emerges from that smoke – undulating in the light. And in the track-lines of its tail, oracular herbs germinate and speak in the heads of those who find them.

Serpents, ‘electric people’, dogs, ‘space spiders’ and spirits slip into Crispin’s visions ‘in places where the borders between planes are thinner’. They come to the ‘snake-shores of industry-contaminated skies’, and the track-lines of these beautiful but venomous serpents wind through her journey. She sees ‘correspondences of worm-lines in wood and the river’s trace, / Snakevine in the fire-blackened trees’. When a taipan sloughs its skin in her campfire’s circle, she ‘feels snake’s thoughts turning’ in her head and hears it speak of the ‘Anthropocene’s end’ and of the breath-light, blood-light, body of plasma and stars that enfold her body. Then, at dawn, she watches it

slide, translucent, out of mounded scales,

her whole length coruscating rainbow spectra of lightning –

and she was rayed like a newly formed sun

And she lifted her slow head into the light.

The Dingo’s Noctuary is a very personal book. Crispin’s poetry and prose flow easily and are easy to read, and her words are a powerful reflection of her feelings. Her anger makes some pages uncomfortable reading. Yet always her love of Country and of the Aboriginal people who have been her friends and have mentored and guided her as she created this book shines through, and the unique and imaginative beauty of what she has achieved is stunning. There are notes on many of the Noctuary entries at the back of the book, a list of desert birds, and a ‘Correspondence of creatures and planets’. Crispin has taken great care not to misuse the knowledge she has gained by living and working with Aboriginal people, and, although this is an expensive book, any profits from it will go to support training programs in Lajamanu by The Purple House, and the expansion of their remote dialysis unit.

Judith Nangala Crispin The Dingo’s Noctuary Puncher & Wattmann 2025 HB 268pp $130.00

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy The Dingo’s Noctuary from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: Australian artists, Australian deserts, australian wildlife, Australian writers, Cassini-Huygens, desert journeys, dingoes, Judith Nangala | Crispin, light pictures, motorcycle journeys, star maps, verse novel