Last nomads a love story for the ages

It may be a world removed from feuding Montagues and Capulets, but for many indigenous Australians the astonishing tale of Warri and Yatungka surpasses the greatest love story ever told.

Forbidden by tribal elders from marrying, the Aboriginal Romeo and Juliet eloped into the equally unforgiving Outback, where they roamed together for four decades. Living as their ancestors had done, the inseparable couple hunted kangaroos and other animals with spears and boomerangs, wandering between natural water holes up to 100km apart.

Their dramatic reentry into modern civilisation came in the back of a jeep, and they were welcomed like returning heroes by those who had cast them out.

The year was 1977, just a decade after a landmark referendum in which Australians finally recognised their Aboriginal neighbours as citizens.

For the descendants of people who first arrived on the continent 40,000 years ago, today's 40th anniversary of supposed equality has been a long time coming. Sadly, its main purpose will be to highlight the shocking violence, social dysfunction and bad health that continues to afflict indigenous communities.

Many Aborigines yearn for fonder times, looking to the lonely but apparently fulfilling existence of their nomadic forebears, of which the Aboriginal Romeo and Juliet were labelled the last.

'Warri and Yatungka are very positive role models for indigenous people,' says filmmaker Glen Stasiuk, who tells their story in a new documentary.

'Every tribe has different laws, and although they broke the law, the other members also knew they were the last of their people to go out there with no contact, no gun, no motor cars and survive in a traditional way. They lived as their ancestors would have 40,000 years ago. They were, if you like, the last link.'

The love story began sometime in the 1930s. Warri and Yatungka may have been part of the same tribe, and shared the same native dialect - Martu - but they were forbidden from marrying due to different 'skin groups'.

Their decision to elope into the vast emptiness of the Gibson Desert in northwestern Australia has become something of a fable for many Aboriginal people.

For 40 years they wandered together across the desolate red landscape eating kangaroo meat hunted by Warri and bush fruit gathered by Yatungka.

As word spread of places with freely available 'tucker' that didn't have to be hunted and killed first, Aboriginals gradually abandoned their traditional lives.

Many of the Mandildjara people who made up Warri and Yatungka's tribe headed to towns like Wiluna and Warburton, but the couple remained in the Outback, terrified of the potential punishment that still awaited them.

It was not until 1977, when the normally parched landscape was in the grip of severe drought, that a worried Aboriginal tracker and tribal elder called Mudjon decided he needed to find his old friends.

He asked explorer Bill Peasley for help, and a search party soon headed into the desert. 'Mudjon navigated without the aid of any features on the landscape,' said Peasley, a Perth doctor and former employee of the Flying Doctor service.

'There were no hills, no tall trees. Nothing to help him orientate himself, yet we travelled in trackless country from one point to another as though they were joined by a highway. Mudjon didn't think there was anything unusual in this.'

But hopes faded as several weeks, and many dried-up water holes, passed. Then they spotted smoke rising from a clay pan. The couple had been found.

When the searchers got closer, though, they were confronted with a sorry sight.

Warri had suffered a leg injury and was unable to hunt. Both were sick and close to starvation.

Naked and emaciated, they agreed to return for medical treatment and climbed into a jeep for the long journey to Wiluna.

'Rarely in one's life does the opportunity arise to participate in a venture such as the journey we embarked upon, a seemingly hopeless search for the last of a people,' said Peasley in the book he later wrote, The Last of the Nomads.

'That it met with success was due to the single-mindedness of all concerned, and the sight of that wisp of smoke rising above the sand hills of the Gibson Desert indicating that the last nomads had somehow managed to survive against appalling conditions of drought was one of the most dramatic moments of my life, and one I shall never forget.'

While their re-emergence made newspaper headlines at the time, the story ended in typically Shakespearean style 18 months later. Warri died first, Yatungka less than a month later.

Ever since their legend has grown.

Peasley's book was the basis for a 1997 documentary in which he retraced the route of his famous search with a number of the Mandildjara tribe, including Mudjon's son Clinton Farmer.

Earlier this month Stasiuk's new film, Footsteps in the Sand, was premiered at an Aboriginal film festival at the Sydney Opera House.

He wanted to take a different approach from Peasley. 'It's a bloody good book but it tells the story from a white perspective,' said the indigenous filmmaker.

Stasiuk felt the 1997 documentary took an anthropological approach.

'Everyone who speaks is non-indigenous and the Martu only appear as part of the backdrop,' he says.

'I don't go into detail about skin groups or the dryness of the land. I look at it from a more philosophical, spiritual point of view. And it's all told by the Martu, most of it in their own language.'

Stasiuk's film includes footage of the moment Warri and Yatungka were found, filmed by one of Peasley's search party.

He likes the Romeo and Juliet comparison, and believes both stories capture in their own ways the timeless and universal nature of love.

'Just like any married couple, Warri and Yatungka needed to be a partnership, working together through adversities,' he said. 'They weren't trying to pay the bills. They had to hunt for food to live every day.'

They also lost a daughter, one of three children, at a young age. The other two - both boys - wandered with their parents until their teens, when they left to join the rest of the tribe. One is now seriously ill, and the other, Geoffrey Stewart - better known as Yullala Boss - has yet to see the finished documentary.

Stasiuk, a lecturer in film and culture at Perth's Murdoch University, hopes his reaction will be as positive as the other tribe members.

'I worked on this for almost three years and sometimes you doubt yourself when you've been involved in something for that long,' he says. 'But the Wiluna people loved it and that proved to me I did their story justice.'

For the latest documentary, it was Yullala Boss who took the filmmakers back into the desert and effortlessly found his old home. Pointing to an area around 200 sq km, he declares: 'This was my playground.'

The couple's oldest son - who is believed to be in his 50s - explains his emotions to the film crew. 'Away from this place I felt sick and lonely. Now that I'm back those feelings have gone.'

Stasiuk hopes he will return to again tread the footsteps of his parents and ancestors. 'Geoffrey can still do that,' he says. 'He lives and works in Wiluna, but hopefully one day he might go back there in his later life.'