The Songlines

  Rolf lifted the lid of one and dipped his finger in.

  ‘Still warm,’ he said. ‘We were expecting you earlier.’

  He handed Arkady the key. Inside the caravan there was soap, there were towels, there were sheets.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said. ‘Look over at the store a bit later. We close at five.’

  ‘How’s Wendy?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘In love with me,’ Rolf grinned.

  ‘Monkey!’

  Arkady raised his fist as if to cuff him, but Rolf jumped down the steps and strolled off, inconsequentially, through the bushes.

  ‘That one needs some explaining,’ I said.

  ‘It’s what I always tell people,’ said Arkady. ‘Australia is a land of wonders.’

  ‘For a start,’ I said, ‘how old is he?’

  ‘Anything from nine to ninety.’

  We showered, changed, put our feet up and then Arkady outlined what he knew of Rolf’s background.

  He belonged, on his father’s side, to a lineage of Barossa Valley Germans – eight generations of Prussians, solid Lutheran with solid money, the most rooted community in Australia. The mother was a Frenchwoman who had landed up in Adelaide during the war. Rolf was trilingual, in English, German and French. He got a grant to go to the Sorbonne. He wrote a thesis on ‘structural linguistics’ and later had a job as ‘cultural correspondent’ for a Sydney newspaper.

  This experience gave him so rabid a hatred for the press, press-lords and the media in general that, when his girlfriend Wendy suggested they maroon themselves at Cullen, he agreed on one condition: he’d have as much time as he liked to read.

  ‘And Wendy?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, she’s a serious linguist. She’s collecting material for the Pintupi dictionary.’

  By the end of the first year, he went on, Rolf had read himself to a standstill when the job of storekeeper came up.

  The previous storekeeper, another lunatic called Bruce, believing himself more Aboriginal than the Aboriginals, made the mistake of picking a quarrel with an unhinged old man called Wally Tjangapati, and had his skull split open by Wally’s boomerang.

  Unfortunately, a splinter of mulga wood, needle-thin or thinner, escaped the eyes of the X-ray operator in Alice Springs, and made a traverse through Bruce’s brain.

  ‘Affecting’, said Arkady, ‘not only his speech but his lower bodily functions.’

  ‘Why did Rolf take it on?’

  ‘Perversity,’ he said.

  ‘What does he do with himself?’ I asked. ‘Does he write?’

  Arkady frowned.

  ‘I wouldn’t mention that,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a sore subject. I think he had his novel turned down.’

  We had an hour’s siesta and then walked over to the dispensary, where the radio-telephone was. Estrella, the Spanish nursing sister, was bandaging a woman whose leg had been bitten by a dog. On the roof of the dispensary, several galvanised sheets had worked loose and were clattering up and down in the wind.

  Arkady asked if there’d been any messages.

  ‘No,’ Estrella yelled above the din. ‘I don’t hear nothing.’

  ‘Any messages?’ Arkady bellowed, pointing at the radio.

  ‘No. No. No messages!’

  ‘The first thing I’m going to do tomorrow’, I said as we walked away, ‘is to fix that roof.’

  We walked towards the store.

  Because Stumpy Jones had brought a consignment of melons – rock-melons and water-melons – about fifty people were squatting or sitting around the petrol-pump, eating melon.

  The dogs were disgusted by melon rind.

  We went inside.

  The lights of the store had fused and the shoppers were groping about in semi-darkness. Some were ferreting in the deep-freeze. Someone had spilt a bag of flour. A child was howling for a lost lolly, and a young mother, her baby cinched inside her scarlet jumper, was taking swigs from a tomato-sauce bottle.

  The ‘mad boomeranger’, a gaunt, hairless man with rings of fat around his neck, stood in front of the till, angrily demanding cash for his welfare cheque.

  There were two cash registers. One was manually operated; the other was electric and therefore out of order. Behind the first one, an Aboriginal girl sat totting up the bills with deft-fingered competence. Behind the second, head down, oblivious to the noise and the stink, was Rolf.

  He was reading.

  He looked up and said, ‘Oh, there you are!’ He was reading Proust.

  ‘I’m about to shut,’ he said. ‘Need anything? We got a great line in coconut shampoo.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He was, to be precise, nearing the end of the Duchesse de Guermantes’s interminable dinner party. His head swayed from side to side as his eyes ran across the page. Then, with the satisfaction of concluding a Proustian paragraph, he let out an involuntary ‘Ah!’, inserted the bookmark and slapped the Pléiade shut.

  He jumped to his feet.

  ‘Out!’ he barked at the shoppers. ‘Out! Out! Scram!’

  He allowed the women already standing in line to complete their purchases. All other customers, even the ‘boomeranger’, he sent packing for the door. With a moan of anguish, the young mother shielded her basket from him. He was unrepentant.

  ‘Out!’ he repeated. ‘You’ve had all day. Come back at nine tomorrow.’

  He grabbed the basket and returned her tins of ham and pineapple to the shelves. Finally, when he had shoved the last customer through the door, he pointed to an ‘Eski’ hidden behind his cash till.

  ‘Hardship rations,’ he said. ‘Courtesy of Stumpy Jones. Come on, you two big thugs. Give us a hand.’

  He allowed Arkady and me to carry the container to his caravan. Wendy had not yet come back.

  ‘See you later,’ he nodded. ‘Eight sharp.’

  We read for a couple of hours, and at eight sharp walked across to find Rolf and Wendy grilling chicken over a charcoal fire. There were sweet-potatoes baking in silver-foil. There were greens and salad. And in defiance of the regulations, there were four bottles of ice-cold Barossa Valley ‘Chablis’.

  The moment I set eyes on Wendy I could hear myself saying, ‘Not another one!’ Not another of these astonishing women! She was tall, calm, serious yet amused, with golden hair done up in braids. She seemed less demonstrative than Marian, but less highly strung, happier in her work, less ‘lost’.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ she said. ‘Rolf badly needs someone to talk to.’

  29

  TITUS TJILKAMATA, THE man Arkady had come to see, lived about twenty-five miles south-west of Cullen settlement, in a shanty beside a soakage.

  Apparently he was in such a foul mood that Arkady, who had been bracing himself for the ordeal, suggested I stay behind until he’d ‘taken the temperature’. He enlisted the support of Titus’s ‘manager’, a soft-spoken man with a limp and the nickname ‘Limpy’. The two of them set off in the Land Cruiser at nine.

  The day was very hot and windy and there were scribbles of cirrus blowing across the sky. I walked over to the dispensary. The noise from the roof was deafening.

  ‘They fix-ed it once,’ Estrella yelled. ‘Costed two thousand dollars! Imagine!’ She was a tiny young woman with a very humorous face.

  I climbed up to inspect the damage. The job had been hopelessly botched. All the roof timbers were askew: in the not unforeseeable future, the building was going to collapse.

  Estrella sent me over to Don, the works manager, to ask him for a hammer and roofing nails. ‘None of your business,’ he said. ‘Or mine.’

  The work had been done by some ‘shit-artist’ from Alice.

  ‘That doesn’t lessen the risk’, I said, facetiously, ‘of one suicidal Spanish nun. Or a child cut in two when a sheet blows off.’

  Don relented with bad grace and gave me all the nails he had. I spent a couple of hours hammering down the sheets and, when the job was done, Estrella smiled, with approval.
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  ‘At leasted I can hear myself think now,’ she said.

  On my way back from returning the hammer, I looked in on Rolf at the store.

  Nearby, sheltering from the wind behind a ring of empty drums, a party of men and women were playing poker for very high stakes. A man had lost 1,400 dollars and was resigned to losing more. The winner, a giantess in a yellow jumper, was slapping her cards on to the groundsheets with the droop-mouthed, hungry expression of ladies at a casino.

  Rolf was still reading Proust. He had left the Duchesse de Guermantes’s dinner party and was following the Baron de Charlus through the streets to his apartment. He had a Thermos of black coffee, which he shared with me.

  ‘I’ve got someone here you should meet,’ he said.

  He handed a toffee to a small boy and told him to run and fetch Joshua. About ten minutes later, a middle-aged man appeared in the doorway, all leg and less body, very dark-skinned in a black cowboy hat.

  ‘Ha!’ said Rolf. ‘Mr Wayne himself.’

  ‘Boss!’ said the Aboriginal, in a gravelly American accent.

  ‘Listen, you old scrounger. This is a friend of mine from England. I want you to tell him about the Dreamings.’

  ‘Boss!’ he repeated.

  Joshua was a famous Pintupi ‘performer’, who could always be counted on to give a good show. He had performed in Europe and the United States. On flying into Sydney for the first time, he mistook the ground lights for stars – and asked why the plane was flying upside down.

  I followed him home along a winding path through the spinifex. He had no hips to speak of, and his pants kept falling down to reveal a pair of neat, calloused buttocks.

  ‘Home’ lay on the highest point of the saddle between Mount Cullen and Mount Liebler. It consisted of a gutted station-wagon which Joshua had rolled on to its roof so he could lie under the bonnet, in the shade. The cab was wrapped in black plastic sheet. A bundle of hunting spears poked out from one window.

  We sat down cross-legged in the sand. I asked him if he’d mind pointing out some local Dreamings.

  ‘Ho! Ho!’ he broke into a wheezy cackle. ‘Many Dreamings! Many!’

  ‘Well, who –’, I asked, waving towards Mount Liebler, ‘who is that?’

  ‘Ho! Ho!’ he said. ‘That one a Big One. A Walk One. A Perenty One.’

  The perenty, or lace-monitor, is the largest lizard in Australia. It can reach a length of eight feet or more, and has a burst of speed to run down a horse.

  Joshua stuck his tongue in and out like a lizard’s and, twisting his fingers into claws, dug them crabwise into the sand to imitate the perenty’s walk.

  I looked up again at the cliffline of Mount Liebler and found I could ‘read’ into the rock the lizard’s flat, triangular head, his shoulder, his foreleg and hindleg, and the tail tapering away towards the north.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see him. So where was this Perenty Man coming from?’

  ‘Come long way,’ said Joshua. ‘Come long, long way. Some way up Kimberley.’

  ‘And where’s he going on to?’

  He raised his hand towards the south, ‘Out that country people.’

  Having established that the Perenty Songline followed a north–south axis, I then swivelled round and pointed to Mount Cullen.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Who’s this one?’

  ‘Women,’ Joshua whispered. ‘Two women.’

  He told the story of how the Two Women had chased Perenty up and down the country until, at last, they cornered him here and attacked his head with digging-sticks. Perenty, however, had dug himself into the earth, and escaped. A hole on the summit of Mount Liebler, like a meteorite crater, was all that remained of the head wound.

  South of Cullen the country was green after the storms. There were isolated rocks jutting out of the plain like islands.

  ‘Tell me, Joshua,’ I asked, ‘who are those rocks over there?’

  Joshua listed Fire, Spider, Wind, Grass, Porcupine, Snake, Old Man, Two Men and an unidentifiable animal ‘like a dog but a white one’. His own Dreaming, the Porcupine (or echidna), came down from the direction of Arnhem Land, through Cullen itself and on towards Kalgoorlie.

  I looked back again towards the settlement, at the metal roofs and the spinning sails of the wind-pump.

  ‘So Porcupine’s coming up this way?’ I said.

  ‘Same one, Boss,’ Joshua smiled. ‘You seeing him good.’

  He traced the line of the Porcupine track across the airstrip, past the school and the pump, then on along the foot of the Perenty cliff before it swooped down on to the plain.

  ‘Can you sing him for me?’ I asked. ‘Can you sing him coming up this way?’

  He glanced round to make sure no one was in earshot and then, in his chesty voice, sang a number of Porcupine couplets, keeping time by flicking his fingernail against a piece of cardboard sheet.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Boss.’

  ‘Tell me another story,’ I said.

  ‘You like them stories?’

  ‘I like them.’

  ‘OK, Boss!’ he tilted his head from side to side. ‘Story ’bout the Big Fly One.’

  ‘Dragonfly?’ I asked.

  ‘Bigger one.’

  ‘Bird?’

  ‘Bigger.’

  Aboriginals, when tracing a Songline in the sand, will draw a series of lines with circles in between. The line represents a stage in the Ancestor’s journey (usually a day’s march). Each circle is a ‘stop’, ‘waterhole’, or one of the Ancestor’s campsites. But the story of the Big Fly One was beyond me.

  It began with a few straight sweeps; then it wound into a rectangular maze, and finally ended in a series of wiggles. As he traced each section, Joshua kept calling a refrain, in English, ‘Ho! Ho! They got the money over there.’

  I must have been very dim-witted that morning: it took me ages to realise that this was a Qantas Dreaming. Joshua had once flown into London. The ‘maze’ was London Airport: the Arrival gate, Health, Immigration, Customs, and then the ride into the city on the Underground. The ‘wiggles’ were the twists and turns of the taxi, from the tube station to the hotel.

  In London, Joshua had seen all the usual sights – the Tower of London, Changing of the Guard and so on – but his real destination had been Amsterdam.

  The ideogram for Amsterdam was even more perplexing. There was a circle. There were four smaller circles around it: and there were wires from each of these circles which led to a rectangular box.

  Eventually, it dawned on me that this was some kind of round-table conference at which he, Joshua, had been one of four participants. The others, in a clockwise direction, had been ‘a white one, a Father one’, ‘a thin one, a red one’, ‘a black one, a fat one’.

  I asked if the ‘wires’ were microphone cables; Joshua shook his head vigorously. He knew all about microphones. They had microphones, on the table.

  ‘No! No!’ he shouted, pointing his fingers at his temples.

  ‘Were they electrodes or something?’

  ‘Hey!’ he cackled. ‘You got him.’

  The picture I pieced together – true or false I can’t begin to say – was of a ‘scientific’ experiment at which an Aboriginal had sung his Dreaming, a Catholic monk had sung the Gregorian Chant, a Tibetan lama had sung his mantras, and an African had sung whatever: all four of them singing their heads off, to test the effect of different song styles on the rhythmic structure of the brain.

  The episode struck Joshua, in retrospect, as so unbelievably funny that he had to hold his stomach for laughing.

  So did I.

  We laughed ourselves into hysterics and lay gasping for breath on the sand.

  Weak from laughter, I got to my feet. I thanked him, and said goodbye.

  He grinned.

  ‘Couldn’t you buy a man a drink?’ he growled in his John Wayne accent.

  ‘Not at Cullen,’ I said.

  30

  ARKADY CAME BACK in
the late afternoon, tired and worried. He showered, wrote up some notes and Jay on his bunk. The visit to Titus had not gone well. No, that is not true. He and Titus had got on very well, but what Titus had to tell him was a depressing story.

  Titus’s father was Pintupi, his mother was Loritja, and he was forty-seven or forty-eight years old. He had been born not far from his shanty, but around 1942 – attracted by the white man’s jam, tea and flour – his parents had migrated out of the desert and taken refuge at the Lutheran Mission on Horn River. The pastors recognised in Titus a child of outstanding intelligence, and took him for education.

  Even as late as the 1950s, the Lutherans ran their schools on the lines of a Prussian academy – and Titus was a model pupil. There are pictures of him at his desk, his hair neatly parted, in grey flannel shorts and spit-and-polished shoes. He learned to speak fluent English and German. He learned calculus. He mastered all kinds of mechanical skills. As a young lay preacher, he once astonished his teachers by delivering a sermon, in German, on the theological consequences of the Edict of Worms.

  Twice a year, in June and again in November, he would get out his double-breasted suit, board the train for Adelaide, and spend a few weeks catching up with modern life. In the Public Library he would read back-numbers of Scientific American. One year, he took a course in petrochemical technology.

  The ‘other’ Titus was the ultra-conservative song-man who lived, half-naked, with his dependants and his dogs; who hunted with a spear and never a rifle; who spoke six or seven Aboriginal languages and was famous, up and down the Western Desert, for his judgments on tribal law.

  To have the stamina to keep both systems going was proof – if proof were lacking – of an incredible vitality.

  Titus had welcomed the Land Rights Act as a chance for his people to go back to their country – and their only hope of getting rid of alcoholism. He detested the activities of the mining companies.

  Under the Act, the government reserved the right to all minerals under the ground and to grant licences for prospecting. Yet the companies, if they wished to make soundings in Aboriginal country, were at least obliged to consult the ‘traditional owners’ and, if mining operations started, to pay them a royalty.