The Songlines

  ‘Not me,’ I said.

  Le Désert est monothéiste. Renan’s aphorism implies that blank horizons and a dazzling sky will clear the mind of its distractions and allow it to concentrate on the Godhead. But life in the desert is not like that!

  To survive at all, the desert dweller – Tuareg or Aboriginal – must develop a prodigious sense of orientation. He must forever be naming, sifting, comparing a thousand different ‘signs’ – the tracks of a dung beetle or the ripple of a dune – to tell him where he is; where the others are; where rain has fallen; where the next meal is coming from; whether if plant X is in flower, plant Y will be in berry, and so forth.

  It is a paradox of the monotheistic faiths that, although they arose within the ambit of the desert, the desert people themselves show an indifference towards the Almighty that is decidedly cavalier. ‘We will go up to God and salute him,’ said a bedu to Palgrave in the 1860s, ‘and if he proves hospitable, we will stay with him: if otherwise, we will mount our horses and ride off.’

  Muhammad said, ‘No man becomes a prophet who was not first a shepherd.’ But, as he had to confess, the Arabs of the desert were ‘the most hardened in infidelity and hypocrisy’.

  Until recently, a bedouin who migrated within sight of Mecca would not think it worthwhile, even once in a lifetime, to circumambulate the shrines. Yet the Hadj, or ‘Sacred Journey’, was itself a ‘ritual’ migration: to detach men from their sinful homes and reinstate, if temporarily, the equality of all men before God.

  A pilgrim on the Hadj has resumed Man’s first condition: if he dies on the Hadj he goes straight, as a martyr, to Heaven. Similarly, Il-Rāh ‘The Way’ was first used as a technical term for ‘road’ or ‘migration path’ – before being adopted by the mystics to denote ‘the Way to God.’

  The concept has its equivalent in the Central Australian languages where tjurna djugurba means ‘the footprints of the Ancestor’ and ‘the Way of the Law’.

  It would seem there exists, at some deep level of the human psyche, a connection between ‘path-finding’ and ‘law’.

  To the Arabian bedouin, Hell is a sunlit sky and the sun a strong, bony female – mean, old and jealous of life – who shrivels the pastures and the skin of humans.

  The moon, by contrast, is a lithe and energetic young man, who guards the nomad while he sleeps, guides him on night journeys, brings rain and distils the dew on plants. He has the misfortune to be married to the sun. He grows thin and wasted after a single night with her. It takes him a month to recover.

  The Norwegian anthropologist, Frederick Barth, writes of how the Basseri, another tribe of Iranian nomads, were, in the 1930s, forbidden by Reza Shah to move from their winter grazing ground.

  In 1941, the Shah was deposed, and they were free once again to make the 300-mile journey to the Zagros. Free they were, but they had no animals. Their fine-fleeced sheep had suffocated on the southern plains: yet they set off all the same.

  They became nomads again, which is to say, they became human again. ‘The supreme value to them’, wrote Barth, ‘lay in the freedom to migrate, not in the circumstances that make it economically viable.’

  When Barth came to account for the dearth of ritual among the Basseri – or of any rooted belief – he concluded that the Journey itself was the ritual, that the road to summer uplands was the Way, and that the pitching and dismantling of tents were prayers more meaningful than any in the mosque.

  Raids are our agriculture.

  Bedouin proverb

  I against my brother

  I and my brother against our cousin

  I, my brother and our cousin against the neighbours

  All of us against the foreigner

  Bedouin proverb

  Alois Musil, the Arabist cousin of Robert, calculated in 1928 that, among the Rwala bedouin, four-fifths of the men fell in war or vendettas or died from wounds received.

  Hunters, on the other hand, who practise an art of the minimum, deliberately limit their numbers and enjoy far greater security of life and land. Of the Central Australian native, Spencer and Gillen wrote that, though he might occasionally quarrel or fight, the idea of annexing fresh territory would never enter his head: an attitude to be explained ‘by the belief that his Alcheringa (Dreamtime) ancestors occupied precisely the same country as he does now’.

  The pastoral ethic in Australia:

  Someone in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs – I think it was the Minister himself – has said that, in the Northern Territory, ‘foreign-owned cattle’ have more rights than Australian citizens.

  The pastoral ethic in Ancient Ireland:

  Since I took my spear in my hand, I have not been without killing a Connaught man every single day.

  Conall Cernach, an Ulster cattle-man

  Any nomad tribe is a military machine in embryo whose impulse, if it is not fighting other nomads, is to raid or threaten the city.

  Settlers, therefore, since the beginning of history, have recruited nomads as mercenaries: either to stave off a nomad threat, as the Cossacks fought the Tatars for the Tsars; or, if there were no nomads, to fight other States.

  In Ancient Mesopotamia, these ‘mercenaries’ first transformed themselves into a caste of military aristocrats, then into directors of the State. It can be argued that the State, as such, resulted from a kind of ‘chemical’ fusion between herdsman and planter, once it was realised that the techniques of animal coercion could be applied to an inert peasant mass.

  Apart from their role as ‘Lords of the Fertilising Waters’, the first Dictators called themselves ‘Shepherds of the People’. Indeed, all over the world, the words for ‘slave’ and ‘domesticated animal’ are the same. The masses are to be corralled, milked, penned in (to save them from the human ‘wolves’ outside), and, if need be, lined up for slaughter.

  The City is thus a sheep fold superimposed over a Garden.

  A further possibility – not without application to the games theory of warfare – is that the army, any professional army or war department, is, without knowing it, a tribe of surrogate nomads, which has grown up inside the State; which preys off the State; without whom the State would crumble; yet whose restlessness is, finally, destructive of the State in that, like gadflies, they are forever trying to goad it into action.

  Hesiod’s Works and Days provides a metaphorical model for the decline of man in relation to technological progress. His stages of human culture pass from the Ages of Gold to those of Silver, Bronze and Iron. The Bronze and Iron Ages were an archaeological reality, which Hesiod knew from experience and which had culminated in a crescendo of violence and strife.

  Obviously, he was unaware of ‘Palaeolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’, so the Gold and Silver Ages were conceived symbolically. Arranged in the reverse order of metallic perfection, they represent a degeneration from the incorruptible to the tarnished, the corroded and the rusty.

  The Men of the Golden Race, Hesiod says, lived in an age when Cronos, or ‘Natural Time’, ruled in Heaven. The earth provided them with abundance. They lived happy, carefree lives, wandering freely over their lands, without possessions, houses or war. They ate their meals in common, with one another and the immortal gods. They died with hands and feet unfailing as if sleep had come upon them.

  In the Christian era, Origen (Contra Celsum, IV, 79) would use Hesiod’s text to argue that, at the beginning of human history, men were under supernatural protection, so there was no division between their divine and human natures: or, to rephrase the passage, there was no contradiction between a man’s instinctual life and his reason.

  In the part of Libya where the wild beasts are found live the Garamantes, who avoid all intercourse with men, possess no weapons of war, and do not know how to defend themselves.

  Herodotus, IV, 194

  Early Christians believed that, by returning to the desert, they could assume Our Lord’s agony in the Wilderness.

  They wander in the deserts as if they were wild animals
themselves. Like birds they fly about the hills. They forage like beasts. Their daily round is inflexible, always predictable, for they feed on roots, the natural product of the Earth.

  From the Spiritual Meadow of St John Moscus, a description of hermits known as ‘the Browsers’

  Every mythology remembers the innocence of the first state: Adam in the Garden, the peaceful Hyperboreans, the Uttarakurus or ‘the Men of Perfect Virtue’ of the Taoists. Pessimists often interpret the story of the Golden Age as a tendency to turn our backs on the ills of the present, and sigh for the happiness of youth. But nothing in Hesiod’s text exceeds the bounds of probability.

  The real or half-real tribes which hover on the fringe of ancient geographies – Atavantes, Fenni, Parrossits or the dancing Spermatophagi – have their modern equivalents in the Bushman, the Shoshonean, the Eskimo and the Aboriginal.

  One characteristic of the Men of the Golden Age: they are always remembered as migratory.

  On the coast of Mauritania, not far from where the Méduse (of Géricault’s Radeau de la Méduse) was wrecked, I saw the flimsy shelters of the Imraguen: a caste of fishermen who catch mullet in seine nets and enjoy, with cheerfulness and grace, the same pariah status as the Nemadi.

  Similar fishermen’s huts will have stood on the shore of Lake Galilee: ‘Come with me and I will make you fishers of men.’

  An alternative to the vision of the Golden Age is that of the ‘anti-primitivists’: who believe that man, in becoming a hunter, became the hunter and killer of his kind.

  This is a very convenient doctrine if: a) you wish to murder others; b) you wish to take ‘draconian’ measures to prevent their murderous impulses from getting out of hand.

  Whichever way, the Savage must be seen as vile.

  In his Meditations on Hunting Ortega y Gasset makes the point that hunting (unlike violence) is never reciprocal: the hunter hunts and the hunted tries to escape. A leopard at the kill is no more violent or angry than an antelope is angry with the grass it eats. Most accounts of the hunters emphasise that the act of killing is a moment of compassion and reverence: of gratitude to the animal that consents to die.

  A ‘bushie’ in the pub at Glen Armond turned to me and said: ‘Want to know how the Blackfellows hunt?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Instinct.’

  31

  IN ONE OF my earlier notebooks I made painstaking copies from Sir George Grey’s Journal, written in the 1830s. Grey was perhaps the first white explorer to understand that, despite occasional discomforts, the Aboriginals ‘lived well’.

  The best passage in the Journal is a description of a Blackfellow straining all his physical and mental faculties to stalk and spear a kangaroo.

  The last paragraph winds into a coda:

  . . . his graceful movements, cautious advance, the air of quietude and repose which pervade his frame when his prey is alarmed, all involuntarily call forth your imagination and compel you to murmur to yourself, ‘How beautiful! How very beautiful!’

  I fooled myself into believing that some of this ‘beauty’ must survive, even today. I asked Rolf to find a man to take me hunting.

  I had been sitting on my arse for a couple of weeks, and was beginning to feel the disgust for words that comes from taking no exercise.

  ‘The best man to go with’, said Rolf, ‘would be old Alex Tjangapati. He speaks some English.’

  Alex was an elderly man who wore his hair up in ochre-string and a lady’s plum velvet overcoat with padded shoulders. I don’t think he had anything on underneath. He went bush-walking every day, and, in the evenings, he’d hang about the store with his hunting spears, staring at the rest of the Cullen Mob as though they were the real canaille.

  When Rolf asked him to take me, Alex pulled a long, regretful face, and walked away.

  ‘Well, that’, I said, ‘is that.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘We’ll find someone else.’

  Around noon next day, Stumpy Jones drove the truck into Cullen. He was the first to make it through the flood. Even so, he’d got bogged for a day and a night this side of Popanji, and the Magellan Mining boys had to haul him out.

  There was a girl with him. She was the girlfriend of Don, the works manager. ‘And she’s a good girl,’ said Stumpy, winking.

  She had cropped hair and a dirty white dress. Don seemed very pleased to see her, but she gave him a cool, appraising glance and continued to smile at Stumpy.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I don’t whinge about being bogged.’

  Don and I helped unload the crates off the truck. We had almost finished when Rolf came out.

  ‘You want to go hunting?’ he called.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You want to pay for a full tank of petrol?’

  ‘If that’s what they want.’

  ‘I’ve fixed it.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Donkey-donk,’ he said. ‘Good bloke!’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘You’d better go and get your boots on. And a hat!’

  I was walking across to the caravan when a rattletrap Ford Sedan came creaking and groaning up behind. At the wheel was a bearded Aboriginal with a big belly.

  ‘You going a-hunting?’ he grinned.

  ‘With you?’

  ‘Man!’ said Donkey-donk.

  We drove back to get the petrol but, the moment the tank was paid for, I realised my role in this expedition was not that of ‘client’ but ‘slave’.

  Donkey-donk made me buy extra oil, bullets, candy bars, cigarettes. He wanted me to buy him a new tyre. He made me hold his cigarette while he tinkered with the engine.

  We were all set to go when a young man called Walker strolled up. Walker was a great traveller. He’d travelled up and down Australia on a most fastidious search for a wife. He had also spent time in the Amsterdam YMCA. He was very beautiful. He had a godlike profile and very dark skin. His hair and beard were the colour of spun gold.

  ‘You want to come hunting?’ Donkey-donk called to him.

  ‘Sure,’ said Walker, and sat down in the back seat.

  We drove off to find the man who had the gun. He was another incredibly graceful young man, with a feckless smile and hair down to his shoulders. He was sitting outside a brushwood shelter. He had scrawled his name, ‘Nero’, in red ball-point all over his jeans.

  Nero’s wife, it turned out, was the giantess I had watched playing poker. She was a good head taller than he, and about four times as wide. She was sitting behind her shelter, by the campfire, gnawing at a charred kangaroo ham. When Nero got into the car, their small son rushed after him, and did a high dive through the open window. The mother followed, waving her kangaroo-bone bludgeon. She dragged the boy out by the hair and spat in his face.

  We had been going a couple of minutes when Nero turned to the others.

  ‘Got the matches?’ he asked.

  Donkey-donk and Walker shook their heads. We turned round to fetch some matches.

  ‘Smokes,’ Nero grinned. ‘Case we get bogged.’

  We headed south between Mounts Cullen and Liebler and dropped down towards the Gun Barrel Highway. After the rain, the scrub was breaking into yellow flowers. The track began and ended in a mirage, and the chain of rocky hills appeared to float above the plain.

  I pointed to a reddish outcrop on the left.

  ‘So what’s that one?’ I asked.

  ‘Old Man,’ Walker volunteered brightly.

  ‘So where’s this Old Man coming from?’

  ‘Come long way. Aranda Mob, maybe. Maybe Sydney.’

  ‘And where’s he going to?’

  ‘Port Hedland,’ he said, decisively.

  Port Hedland is an iron-ore port on the coast of western Australia about 800 miles west of Cullen, beyond the Gibson Desert.

  ‘And what happens to that Old Man’, I asked, ‘when he gets to the sea?’

  ‘End of him,’ said Walker. ‘Finish.’

 
I next pointed to a low, flat-topped hill which, Rolf had assured me, was a lump of shit the Perenty Man had shat in the Dreamtime.

  ‘And what about that one there?’

  Walker fumbled nervously with his beard.

  ‘I’m too young,’ he said bashfully – by which he meant he had not been initiated into that particular song.

  ‘Ask Nero,’ he went on. ‘He knows it.’

  Nero sniggered and tilted his head from side to side.

  ‘Toilet Dreaming,’ he said. ‘Shit Dreaming.’

  Donkey-donk was splitting his sides with laughter and swerving all over the track.

  I turned to face the two on the back seat.

  ‘Perenty shit?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no,’ Nero giggled foolishly. ‘Two Men.’

  ‘And where do those Two Men come from?’

  ‘Coming from nowhere,’ he flapped his hands. ‘Doing it there!’

  Nero made a sign with his thumb and forefinger making it all too plain what the Two Men were up to.

  ‘Brothers-in-law,’ he said.

  Walker frowned, pursed his lips and pressed his knees tight together.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said to Nero. ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘He! He!’ he laughed, and let fly another helpless peal of giggles.

  He and Donkey-donk were still snorting with laughter when, a mile or so farther on, we stopped by some low-lying rocks. All three jumped out of the car.

  ‘Come on,’ Nero called to me. ‘Water.’

  There were pools of stagnant water among the rocks and mosquito larvae wriggling about in them.

  ‘Tapeworms,’ said Nero.

  ‘Not tapeworms,’ I said. ‘Mosquito larvae.’

  ‘Dingo,’ said Donkey-donk.

  He gestured towards the largest rock, which really did look like a dog lying down. The smaller rocks, he said, were puppies.

  They splashed around in the water for several minutes. We then quit the track and headed west across country.