When Yuwali first saw the truck, she thought it was a rock. A rock that moved. Turning to her young companions, the 17-year-old Aborigine, who had never seen a white man, said: "You know those big rocks that we always play on? The rock has come alive."
Terrified, Yuwali and her friends fled across the desert, too scared to sleep, lest the "monster" and the "devil men" inside it catch up and eat them.
Yuwali and her mob of desert-dwelling Martu were the last Aborigines to remain untouched by the modern world. All that changed, however, when patrol officers entered their country, in the Percival Lakes region of Western Australia, to clear it for a series of rocket tests in 1964. This historic episode and the subsequent "first contact" is now the subject of a documentary by the Sydney filmmakers Bentley Dean and Martin Butler.
"This story has to be the most extreme clash of cultures ever seen - the height of space technology meets a group of fully traditional hunter-gatherers with absolutely no idea of the outside world," Butler says. "It's a story that has to be told now because in a few years all those Aborigines adult enough to remember pre-contact life will be dead."
Contact, which will screen at the Sydney Film Festival, is told largely from Yuwali's perspective, and features surreal footage, shot by patrol officers, of her group emerging from the desert for the first time carrying little more than digging sticks.
"We were hungry," Yuwali says in the film. "But [the white men's] meat tasted like shit, so we spat it out and buried it in the sand."
Born at Yulpu rockhole in the heart of Percival Lakes, Yuwali spent her early life travelling with her family through the sand and spinifex, their movements dictated by seasonal patterns, the availability of food and the direction of the dreaming tracks.
Fear of strangers was deeply ingrained, owing not only to malpu, human-shaped spirits that were hairy and fanged, but also to "featherfeet", ritual killers from other tribes who travelled vast distances to exact revenge for real or perceived slights.
The patrol officers' sudden appearance, therefore, caused great fear. The first night with the patrol officers, "they tied us with rope around the ankles", Yuwali says, "to stop us running away".
The encounter ended the Martu's nomadic way of life, one they had led for at least 5000 years. Yuwali's group was taken to Jigalong, 200 kilometres south, where they were fed by missionaries and given money. (Thinking it was worthless, Yuwali buried it in a riverbed.)
She got work as a domestic helper on cattle stations, married twice and had four children. Now 62, she lives with two of her children at Parnngurr in the Pilbara. "At first we were sad to leave our country," she told the Herald. But, as she says in the film: "We've been swept up in our new lives. We were carried away by something we never knew before. We left our hearts back in our country."
-Tim Elliott