Lord's Work

The Northern Territory’s identity is shaped as much by its remarkable characters as its wild landscapes. MAX ANDERSON explores the Top End with bushman guide Sab Lord.

“This gallery was about the teaching of laws, and the punishments exacted when they were broken.” Sab Lord points up at the rock face painted with elongated spirit figures. The warm air smells of vegetation and wood smoke, as it would have 50,000 years ago, when the powerful Mimi spirit figures were daubed using a mixture of fat, charcoal and red ochre.

Lord turns to the lad beside him: “How old are you, Harry?”

“Fourteen,” says Harry. “Fifteen soon.” “Well, unfortunately for you, you’re at the right age for ceremony. That’s when you’d be taken away and taught the lessons of life. The sap from the milkwood tree would be used to glue feathers onto your body and you’d be taught the songline until you were sick of hearing it. And let me tell you, I’ve had some ceremony” – he makes cutting motions in the air – “and parts of it are not pretty.”

I’m hoping our 24-hour safari with Lord will be a chance for my son to learn some life lessons of his own, far from the comfortable suburb he’s grown up in. The bushman was born in the Territory. He has a face best described as lived-in, and an impish sense of humour. His knuckles are swollen from youthful brawling. Thomas Sebastian Lord is also one of the most soughtafter and highly paid private guides in Australia.

Lord, 58, is of European descent, and his connections with Arnhem Land are like the tributaries of the East Alligator River: exotic and complex, deep in places, sometimes dark. He grew up on his father’s 1300-square-kilometre buffalo station. The local Bininj families who worked on the property became his extended Aboriginal kin, and he was more comfortable speaking Gagadju than English. So at 12, the barefoot Territory kid was shocked when his father packed him off to Scots College in Sydney, where he had to wear a boater and blazer.