The Songlines

  Timmy meanwhile was sucking at his carton of apple juice. He put it down, re-aligned his hat, sucked again and then said, thoughtfully, ‘What about Big Tom?’

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘Sure he’s here.’

  ‘Would he come?’

  ‘Sure he’d come.’

  We walked towards a shack with a lean-to trellis of paddy-melons under which Big Tom was sleeping. He was shirtless. His heaving paunch was covered with whorls of hair. His dog began to yap and he woke.

  ‘Tom,’ said Arkady, ‘we’re going up to Middle Bore. You want to come?’

  ‘Sure I’ll come,’ he smiled.

  He crawled out, reached for a brown shirt and hat, and pronounced himself ready to leave. His wife, Ruby, a spindly woman with a dizzy smile, then crawled out from her side of the shelter, covered her head with a green spotted scarf and said she, too, was ready.

  I never saw two married people pack up and get going so quick.

  We were a party of six now, and the smell inside the Land Cruiser was rich and strange.

  On the way out, we passed a long-limbed young man with fair hair in rat-tails and a reddish beard. He was lying full-length on the dirt. He had on an orange t-shirt, washed-out red jeans, and around his neck there was a Rajneesh rosary. Four or five black women squatted round him. They appeared to be massaging his legs.

  Arkady tooted the horn and waved. The man nearly managed a nod.

  ‘Whoever’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s Craig,’ he said. ‘He’s married to one of the women.’

  18

  AT THE BURNT Flat Hotel, where we stopped for a tank of gasoline, a police patrolman was taking affidavits about a man found dead on the road.

  The victim, he told us, had been white, in his twenties and a derelict. Motorists had been sighting him on and off along the highway, over the past three days. ‘And he’s a right mess now. We had to scrape him off the bitumen with a shovel. Truckie mistook him for a dead roo.’

  The ‘accident’ had happened at five in the morning but the body – what was left of it by the road-train – had been cold for about six hours.

  ‘Looks like somebody dumped him,’ said the policeman.

  He was being most of ficiously polite. His adam’s apple worked up and down the V of his khaki shirt. It was his duty, we would understand that, to ask a few questions. Run over a coon in Alice Springs and no one’d give it a thought. But a white man . . . !

  ‘So where were you boys at eleven last night?’

  ‘The Alice,’ said Arkady in a flat voice.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ the officer touched his hat brim. ‘No need to trouble you further.’

  All this he said, looking into the cab, without once removing his stare from our passengers. The passengers, for their part, pretended he did not exist and stared with set faces at the plain.

  The policeman walked towards his air-conditioned car. Arkady rang the bell for service. He rang again. He rang a third time. Nobody came.

  ‘Looks like we’re in for a wait,’ he shrugged.

  ‘It does,’ I agreed.

  It was three in the afternoon and the buildings were swimming in the heat. The hotel was painted a toffee-brown and, on the corrugated roof, in bold but peeling white letters, were the words BURNT FLAT. Under the veranda there was an aviary of budgerigars and rosellas. The bunkrooms were boarded up, and a sign read, ‘This business is for sale’.

  The name of the proprietor was Bruce.

  ‘Profits went down’, said Arkady, ‘when they took away his off-licence.’

  Bruce had made a mint of money, until the change in licensing laws, selling fortified wine to Aboriginals.

  We waited.

  An elderly couple drove up in a camper, and when the husband pressed the service bell, the bar-room door opened and a man in shorts came out with a bull-terrier panting at its leash.

  Bruce had quarter-to-three feet, red hair, flabby buttocks and oval jowls. His arms were tattooed with mermaids. He tied up the dog, which yelped at our passengers. He eyeballed Arkady and went to serve the couple with the camper.

  After the man had paid, Arkady asked Bruce very civilly, ‘Could we get a tank, please?’

  Bruce untied the dog and waddled off the way he’d come.

  ‘Pig,’ said Arkady.

  We waited.

  The patrolman was watching from his car.

  ‘They have to serve us eventually,’ Arkady said. ‘By law.’

  Ten minutes later, the door re-opened and a woman in a blue skirt came down the steps. She had short hair, prematurely grey. She had been making pie and the pastry still clung to her fingernails.

  ‘Don’t mind Bruce,’ she sighed. ‘He’s mad today.’

  ‘Unusual?’ Arkady smiled, and she hunched her shoulders and exhaled a long breath.

  ‘Go on in,’ he said to me, ‘if you’d like to see some local colour.’

  ‘Go on,’ the woman urged, as she hung up the nozzle.

  ‘Have we time?’

  ‘We can make time,’ he said. ‘For your education.’

  The woman tightened her forelip and let out an awkward laugh.

  ‘Why don’t I buy them a drink?’ I suggested.

  ‘Do that,’ said Arkady. ‘I’ll have a beer.’

  I poked my head through the window and asked what they’d have. Mavis said orange but changed her mind to orange and mango. Ruby said apple. Big Tom said grapefruit and Timmy said Coke.

  ‘And a Violet Crumble,’ he added. Violet Crumble is a chocolate-covered candy bar.

  Arkady paid the woman and I followed her into the bar.

  ‘And as you come out,’ he called after me, ‘look to the right of the light switch.’

  Inside, some men from a road-gang were playing darts, and a station-hand, togged up in Western gear, was feeding coins into a juke-box. There were a lot of Polaroid pictures pinned to the walls: of fat people naked and a lot of long balloons. A notice read, ‘Credit is like Sex. Some get it. Some don’t.’ A ‘medieval’ scroll had the caricature of a muscle-man and some ‘Olde Englishe’ lettering:

  Yea, though I walk through

  The Valley of the Shadow of Death

  I will fear no Evil

  For I, Bruce, am

  The Meanest son of a Bitch in the Valley.

  Alongside the bottles of Southern Comfort, there was an old bottle topped with yellow liquid and labelled, ‘Authentic N.T. Gin Piss.’

  I waited.

  I heard Bruce tell one of the drinkers he’d bought a place in Queensland where you could ‘still call a Boong a Boong’.

  A telegraph engineer came in dripping with sweat, and ordered a couple of beers.

  ‘Hear you had a hit-and-run job up the road?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah!’ Bruce displayed his teeth. ‘More meat!’

  ‘What’z’at?’

  ‘I said more edible meat.’

  ‘Edible?’

  ‘White man.’ Bruce hung out his tongue and guffawed. The engineer, I was glad to see, frowned and said nothing.

  The engineer’s mate then pushed through the door and sat on a bar-stool. He was a lanky young Aboriginal half-blood, with a cheery, self-deprecating smile.

  ‘No coons in here,’ Bruce raised his voice above the noise of the dart-players. ‘Did you hear me? I said, “No coons in here!”’

  ‘I ain’t a coon,’ the half-blood answered. ‘I just got skin problems.’

  Bruce laughed. The road-gang laughed, and the half-blood clenched his teeth and went on smiling. I watched his fingers tighten around his beer can.

  Bruce then said to me in a voice of forced politeness, ‘You’re a long ways from home. What’ll it be?’

  I gave the order.

  ‘And a Violet Crumble,’ I said.

  ‘And a Violet Crumble for the English gent!’

  I said nothing, and paid.

  On my way out I looked to the right of the light switch and saw a bullet-hol
e in the wallpaper. Around it hung a gilded frame with a little brass plaque – the kind of plaque you see nailed below antlers or a stuffed fish – reading ‘Mike – 1982’.

  I handed round the drinks and they took them without a nod.

  ‘So who was Mike?’ I asked as we drove away.

  ‘Is Mike,’ Arkady said. ‘He was Bruce’s barman.’

  It had been a similar baking summer afternoon, and four Pintupi boys, driving back from the Balgo Mission, had stopped to get gas and a drink. They were very tired and excitable and when the eldest boy saw the ‘Gin Piss’ bottle, he said something quite abusive. Mike refused to serve them. The boy aimed a beer glass at the bottle, and missed. Mike took Bruce’s .22 rifle – which Bruce kept handy under the counter – and fired above their heads.

  ‘That, at any rate,’ said Arkady, ‘is what Mike said at the trial.’

  The first shot hit the kid through the base of the skull. The second shot hit the wall to the right of the light switch. A third, for good measure, went into the ceiling.

  ‘Naturally,’ Arkady continued in the same unemotional tone, ‘the neighbours wished to contribute to the unfortunate barman’s legal fees. They organised a gala, with a topless show from Adelaide.’

  ‘And Mike got off?’

  ‘Self-defence.’

  ‘What about the witnesses?’

  ‘Aboriginal witnesses’, he said, ‘are not always easy to handle. They refuse, for example, to hear the dead man called by name.’

  ‘You mean they wouldn’t testify?’

  ‘It makes the case for the prosecution difficult.’

  19

  WE FORKED RIGHT at the sign for Middle Bore and headed east along a dusty road that ran parallel to a rocky escarpment. The road rose and fell through a thicket of grey-leaved bushes, and there were pale hawks perching on the fence-posts. Arkady kept swerving to avoid the deeper ruts.

  Not far to the right, we passed an outcrop of weathered sandstone, with free-standing pinnacles about twenty feet high. I knew it had to be a Dreaming site. I nudged Big Tom in the ribs.

  ‘Who’s that one?’ I asked.

  ‘Him a small one,’ he cricked his index finger to imitate a wriggling grub.

  ‘Witchetty?’

  He shook his head strenuously and, with the gesture of feeding a grub into his mouth, said, ‘Smaller one.’

  ‘Caterpillar?’

  ‘Yeah!’ he beamed, and nudged me back.

  The road ran on towards a white house in a clump of trees with a spread of buildings beyond it. This was Middle Bore Station. There were chestnut horses grazing in a field of bone-white grass.

  We veered left along a smaller track, crossed a watercourse and stopped at the gate of my second Aboriginal camp. The place had a less woebegone look than Skull Creek. There were fewer broken bottles, fewer festering dogs, and the children looked far healthier.

  Although it was late in the afternoon, most of the people were still asleep. A woman sat sorting bush-tucker under a tree and, when Arkady greeted her, she looked down and stared at her toes.

  We picked our way past the humpies, zigzagging through clumps of spinifex towards the wheel-less body of a Volkswagen van. There was a green tarpaulin stretched over the door, and a length of plastic hose dribbled into a patch of watermelon. Chained to the van was the usual sharp-muzzled hound.

  ‘Alan?’ Arkady raised his voice above the yapping.

  No reply.

  ‘Alan, are you there? . . . Christ,’ he said under his breath, ‘let’s hope he’s not gone off again.’

  We waited a while longer and a long black hand appeared around the edge of the tarpaulin. This was followed, after an interval, by a wiry, silver-bearded man wearing a pale grey stetson, dirty white pants and a purple shirt printed with guitars. He was barefoot. He stepped into the sunlight, looked clean through Arkady, and majestically lowered his head.

  The dog continued to bark, and he walloped it.

  Arkady talked to him in Walbiri. The old man listened to what he had to say, lowered his head a second time, and retired back behind the tarpaulin.

  ‘Reminds me of Haile Selassie,’ I said as we walked away.

  ‘But grander.’

  ‘Much grander,’ I agreed. ‘He will come, won’t he?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Can he speak any English?’

  ‘Can but won’t. English isn’t his favourite language.’

  The Kaititj, Arkady told me, had had the misfortune to live along the route of the Overland Telegraph Line and so came early into contact with the white man. They also learned to make knives and spear-points from the glass-conductors, and, to put a stop to this practice, it was thought necessary to teach them a lesson. The Kaititj took revenge on their murderers.

  Earlier in the afternoon we had passed on the roadside the grave of the telegraph operator who, in 1874, dying of a spear-thrust, succeeded in tapping out a farewell message to his wife in Adelaide. The police reprisals dragged on until the 1920s.

  Alan, as a young man, had seen his father and brothers gunned down.

  ‘And you say he’s the last one left?’

  ‘Of his clan,’ he said. ‘In this stretch of country.’

  We were sitting back to back against the trunk of a gum tree, watching the camp come alive. Mavis and Ruby had gone visiting their women friends. Big Tom had dozed off, and Timmy sat cross-legged, smiling. The ground was parched and cracked, and a solid, undeviating stream of ants was passing within inches of my boots.

  ‘Where the hell is Marian?’ Arkady said, abruptly. ‘Should have been here hours ago. Anyway, let’s get some tea.’

  I dragged some brushwood from the thicket and lit a fire while Arkady unpacked the tea things. He passed a ham roll to Timmy, who gobbled it up, asked for another and, with the air of a man accustomed to being waited on by servants, handed me his billy to fill.

  The water was almost boiling when, all of a sudden, there was a tremendous hullabaloo in the camp. Women shrieked, dogs and children scuttled for cover, and we saw, hurtling towards us, a column of purplish-brown dust.

  The willy-willy roared and crackled as it approached; sucked up leaves, branches, plastic, paper and scraps of metal sheet, spiralling them into the sky and then sweeping across the camp-ground and on towards the road.

  A moment or two of panic – and everything was back to normal.

  After a while we were joined by a middle-aged man in a sky-blue shirt. He was hatless. The stiff grey bristles on his head were the length of the bristles on his chin. His frank and smiling face reminded me of my father’s. He squatted on his hams and shovelled spoonsful of sugar into his mug. Arkady talked. The man waited for him to finish and answered in a low whisper, doodling diagrams in the sand with his finger.

  Then he walked away, in the direction of Alan’s living van.

  ‘Who was he?’ I asked.

  ‘The old man’s nephew,’ he said. ‘And also his “ritual manager”.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘To check us out.’

  ‘Did we pass?’

  ‘I think we can expect a visit.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘I wish I understood this business of “ritual manager”.’

  ‘It’s not easy.’

  The smoke from the fire blew in our faces but at least kept away the flies.

  I took out my notebook and propped it on my knee.

  The first step, Arkady said, was to get to grips with two more Aboriginal expressions: kirda and kutungurlu.

  Old Alan was kirda: that is to say, he was the ‘owner’ or ‘boss’ of the land we were going to survey. He was responsible for its upkeep, for making sure its songs were sung and its rituals performed on time.

  The man in blue, on the other hand, was Alan’s kutungurlu, his ‘manager’ or ‘helper’. He belonged to a different totemic clan and was a nephew – real or ‘classificatory’, that didn’t matter – on Alan
’s mother’s side of the family. The word kutungurlu itself meant ‘uterine kin’.

  ‘So the “manager”’, I said, ‘always has a different Dreaming to the boss?’

  ‘He does.’

  Each enjoyed reciprocal rites in each other’s country, and worked as a team to maintain them. The fact that ‘boss’ and ‘manager’ were seldom men of the same age meant that ritual knowledge went ricocheting down the generations.

  In the old days, Europeans believed the ‘boss’ was really ‘boss’ and the ‘manager’ some kind of sidekick. This, it turned out, was wishful thinking. Aboriginals themselves sometimes translated kutungurlu as ‘policeman’ – which gave a far more accurate idea of the relationship.

  ‘The “boss”’, said Arkady, ‘can hardly make a move without his “policeman’s” permission. Take the case of Alan here. The nephew tells me they’re both very worried the railway’s going to destroy an important Dreaming site: the eternal resting place of a Lizard Ancestor. But it’s up to him, not Alan, to decide if they should come with us or not.’

  The magic of the system, he added, was that responsibility for land resides ultimately, not with the ‘owner’, but with a member of the neighbouring clan.

  ‘And vice versa?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Which would make war between neighbours rather difficult?’

  ‘Checkmated,’ he said.

  ‘It’d be like America and Russia agreeing to swap their own internal politics –’

  ‘Ssh!’ Arkady whispered. ‘They’re coming.’

  20

  THE MAN IN blue was coming through the spinifex at the pace of a slow march. Alan followed a step or two behind, his stetson rammed low over his forehead. His face was a mask of fury and self-control. He sat down next to Arkady, crossed his legs and laid his .22 across his knee.

  Arkady unrolled the survey map, weighting the corners with stones to stop them lifting in the blasts. He pointed to various hills, roads, bores, fences – and the probable route of the railway.

  Alan looked on with the composure of a general at a staff meeting. From time to time, he would stretch a questioning finger to some feature on the map, and then withdraw it.