The Songlines

‘Thank you,’ she started scribbling on the pad. ‘So the painting’s an Old Man Dreaming?’

  ‘Yairs.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘The rest of the story.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘The story of the Old Man,’ she said, furiously. ‘What is the Old Man doing?’

  ‘Walking,’ said Winston, who doodled a double dotted line in the sand.

  ‘Of course, he’s walking,’ she said. ‘Where’s he walking to?’

  Winston bugged his eyes at the canvas, and looked up at his ‘policeman’.

  Bobby winked.

  ‘I asked you,’ said Mrs Houston, mouthing her syllables. ‘Where is the Old Man walking?’

  Winston drew in his lips and said nothing.

  ‘Well, what’s that?’ She pointed to one of the white circles.

  ‘Salt-pan,’ he said.

  ‘And that one?’

  ‘Salt-pan.’

  ‘That one?’

  ‘Salt-pan. All of ’em salt-pans.’

  ‘So the Old Man’s walking over salt-pans?’

  ‘Yairs.’

  ‘Not much of a story there!’ Mrs Houston shrugged. ‘What about those squiggles in the middle?’

  ‘Pitjuri,’ he said.

  Pitjuri is a mild narcotic which Aboriginals chew to suppress hunger. Winston rolled his head and eyes from side to side, like a man ‘on’ pitjuri. The audience laughed. Mrs Houston did not.

  ‘I see,’ she said. Then, thinking aloud to herself, she began to jot down the outline of the story, ‘The ancient white-bearded Ancestor, dying of thirst, is trudging home across a glittering salt-pan and finds, on the farther shore, a plant of pitjuri . . .’

  She put her pencil between her lips and looked at me for confirmation.

  I smiled sweetly.

  ‘Yes, that’s nice,’ she said. ‘That’ll make a nice beginning.’

  Winston had lifted his eyes from the canvas and fastened them on her.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know! Now we’ve got to fix the price, haven’t we? How much did I give you last time?’

  ‘Five hundred dollars,’ he said, sourly.

  ‘And how much did I advance you this time?’

  ‘Two hundred.’

  ‘That’s right, Winston. You’ve got it right. Well, now there’s the damage to be repaired. So suppose we deduct a hundred for the damage, and I’ll pay you another three hundred? That’s a hundred more than before. Then we’ll be quits.’

  Winston didn’t move.

  ‘And I’ll need to take a photo of you,’ she chattered on. ‘I think you’d better get some more clothes on. We need a nice new photo for the catalogue.’

  ‘No!’ Winston bellowed.

  ‘What do you mean, no?’ Mrs Houston looked very shocked. ‘You don’t want your photo taken?’

  ‘NO!’ he bellowed louder. ‘I want more money!’

  ‘More money? I . . . I . . . don’t understand.’

  ‘I said MORE . . . MONEY!’

  She assumed an aggrieved expression, as though dealing with an ungrateful child, and then said, icily, ‘How much?’

  Again, Winston shielded his face with his arms.

  ‘How much do you want?’ she persisted. ‘I’m not here to waste my time. I’ve named my price. You name yours.’

  He didn’t move.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ she said.

  He said nothing.

  ‘I’m not making another offer,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to name your price.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Go on. Say it. How much?’

  Winston’s lower arm shot downwards, making a triangular slit through which he shouted, ‘SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS!’

  Mrs Houston nearly fell off her stool. ‘Six thousand dollars! You have to be joking!’

  ‘Well, why are you asking seven fuckin’ thousand dollars for one of my paintings in your fuckin’ exhibition in Adelaide?’

  GIVEN THE LINE-UP of real monsters confronting the First Man, it is out of the question to suppose that tribal fighting and warfare were a part of the original scheme of things – only the classical forms of co-operation.

  Ib’n Khaldūn writes that whereas God gave animals their natural limbs for defence, he gave man the ability to think. The power of thought allowed him to manufacture weapons–lances instead of horns, swords instead of claws, shields in place of thick skins – and to organise communities for producing them.

  Since any one individual was powerless against the wild animal, especially the predatory animal, man could protect himself only through communal defence. But, in conditions of civilisation, the war of all against all broke out with equipment designed to keep away the predators.

  What was the weapon to deter a beast like Dinofelis?

  Fire, certainly. I would guess that one day, somewhere, an excavator will discover that Homo habilis did use fire.

  As for ‘conventional’ weapons, a hand-axe? Useless! A club? Worse than useless! Only a spear or lance, like the one St George rams into the jaws of the dragon, would have the required effect: a lance aimed and thrust, with split-second timing, by a young man at the height of his physical powers.

  Democritus (fr. 154) said it was absurd for men to vaunt their superiority over the animals when, in matters of great importance, it was they who were our teachers: the spider for weaving and mending; the swallow for architecture; the swan and the nightingale for singing.

  To which one could go on adding indefinitely: the bat for radar, the dolphin for sonar and, as Ib’n Khaldūn said, horns for the lance.

  Sasriem, Namib Desert

  Herds of ostrich, zebra and gemsbok (the African oryx) moving in the early light against a backdrop of orange dunes. The valley floor was a sea of grey pebbles.

  The Park Warden said of the straight lances of the oryx that they were wonderfully effective against a leopard but were, in practice, a case of over-specialisation: two males, when fighting, would sometimes run each other through.

  When we got out of the car there was an oryx close by, standing behind a bush. The warden warned us to be careful: they have been known to impale a man.

  In one Biblical tradition, the ‘mark’ God set upon Cain was ‘horns’: to defend himself from the beasts of the wilderness, who thirsted for vengeance for the death of their master, Abel.

  The peculiar image, in Pope Gregory the Great’s Moralia, of Christ’s body as a hook for the Beast.

  The third invention, invisible to archaeologists, will have been the sling – fibre or leather – in which a mother carried her nursing child, leaving her hands free for gathering roots or berries.

  The sling was thus the first vehicle.

  As Lorna Marshall writes of the! Kung Bushmen, ‘They carry their children and their belongings in leather capes. The naked babies ride next to the mother supported by a sling of soft duiker leather on the left side.’

  Hunting peoples have no milk from domesticated animals; and, as Mrs Marshall says, milk is what makes a baby’s legs strong. The mother cannot afford to wean the child until the age of three or four or more. And either she or the father must carry it until it can keep up a day’s march on its own: journeys of sixty or a hundred miles, with two or three ‘sleeps’ on the way.

  The married couple are a unit for carriage and defence.

  The late C. W. Peck recorded a myth concerning the origin of weapons from western New South Wales. I suggest that its validity is universal:

  Long ago, when men had no weapons and were defenceless against the wild beasts, there was a big mob of people camped at the confluence of the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee Rivers. The day was hot. Mirages distorted the landscape, and everyone was resting in the shade. Suddenly, a horde of Giant Kangaroos attacked, crushing their victims with their powerful arms. The people fled in panic, and few survived.

  Among the survivors, however, was the headman, who called a meeting to discuss means of defence. It was at this
meeting that men invented spears, shields, clubs and boomerangs. And since many of the young women had dropped their babies in the rush, it was they who invented the ingenious bark cradle.

  The tale goes on to describe how the cleverest of the men, camouflaging himself with fat and dust, stole up on the Kangaroos and drove them off with fire.

  There were Giant Kangaroos in prehistoric Australia – and dangerous they must have been when cornered – but they were not carnivores, not attackers.

  As for the young heroes, they could only become ‘fit’ as a result of the most rigorous training among themselves: in wrestling, grappling and the art of wielding weapons. Adolescence is the ‘sparring’ phase. After that, all enmities are – or should be – channelled outward on to the Adversary.

  The ‘war boys’ are the ones who never grow up.

  Niger

  The manager of the Campement was a Frenchwoman called Madame Marie, whose hair was the colour of goldfish and who did not like other white people. Divorced by her husband for going to bed with black men, she had lost a villa, a Mercedes, a swimming pool en forme de rognon, but she had carried away her jewels.

  On the third night of my visit, she organised a soirée musicale with equal billing for Anou et ses Sorciers Noirs and herself, Marie et son Go. When the show was over, she took one of the sorcerers to bed with her, and at two thirty had a heart attack. The sorcerer rushed from the bedroom, gibbering, ‘I did not touch Madame.’

  Next day she defied the attempts of her doctor to send her to hospital and lay on her bed, stripped of make-up, gazing out across the thornscrub and sighing, ‘La lumière . . . Oh! la belle lumière . . .’

  Around eleven two Bororo boys arrived. They were skittishly dressed in short women’s skirts and straw bonnets.

  The Bororos are nomads who wander up and down the Sahel with total disdain for material possessions, concentrating all their energy and emotion into the breeding of their lovely lyre-horned cattle, and on cultivating beauty in themselves.

  The boys – one with ‘weight-lifter’ biceps, the other slender and beautiful – had come to ask Marie if she had any spare cosmetics.

  ‘Mais sûrement . . .’ she called from the bedroom, and we all went in.

  Reaching for her vanity case, she showered the contents over the bedspread, occasionally saying, ‘Non, pas ça!’ All the same, the boys picked up every shade of lipstick, nail varnish, eye shadow and eyebrow pencil. They wrapped their loot in a headscarf. She gave them a few back numbers of Elle magazine. Then, dragging their sandals across the terrace, they ran off laughing.

  ‘It is for their ceremony,’ Marie told me. ‘Tonight they will both become men. You must see it! Un vrai spectacle.’

  ‘I must!’ I said.

  ‘An hour before sunset,’ she said. ‘Outside the Emir’s palace.’

  From the roof of the Emir’s palace I had a grandstand view of the courtyard, where three musicians were playing: a piper, a drummer and a man who twanged at a three-stringed instrument with a calabash for a sound-box.

  The man sitting next to me, an ancien combattant, spoke good French.

  A ‘master of ceremonies’ appeared and ordered two young assistants to scatter a circle of white powder, like a circus-ring, in the dust. When this was done, the young men stood guard over the space and flew at trespassers with swatches of palm fibre.

  Among the audience were a lot of middle-aged Bororo ladies and their daughters. The daughters wore a kind of white wimple. The mothers were wrapped in indigo and had brass hoops jangling in their ears. They cast their eyes over prospective sons-in-law with the expertise of ladies at a bloodstock sale.

  In the inner court were the young men, who for the past four years had been obliged to parade about in female dress. We heard a volley of whooping cries: then, to the rattle of drums, in walked the two boys plastered with Marie’s make-up.

  The ‘tough’ one had a pink cupid’s bow around his lips; his fingernails were scarlet and his eyelids green. His strapless bouffant dress had lavender panels over a rose-coloured underskirt. The effect was ruined by a pair of fluorescent green socks and gym-shoes.

  His friend, the ‘beauty’, wore a tight mauve turban, a sheath of green and white stripes, and had a more modern sense of fashion. He had been very careful with the lipstick, and on either cheek he had painted two neat rectangles in bands of pink and white. He had on a pair of reflecting sunglasses, and was admiring himself in a hand-mirror.

  The crowd cheered.

  Another young Bororo came out carrying a choice of three ‘Herculean’ clubs, each freshly cut from the bole of an acacia. He offered the beauty his choice of weapon.

  Removing his sunglasses, the beauty pointed languidly to the biggest, popped something into his mouth, and waved to his friends on the rooftop. They howled their approval and raised their plastic boaters at spearpoint.

  The master of ceremonies picked up the beauty’s choice and, with the solemnity of a waiter serving a Château Lafite, presented it to the tough one.

  The beauty then took up his position at the centre of the circle and, holding his sunglasses above his head, started warbling a chant in falsetto. The friend, meanwhile, swinging the club with both hands, pirouetted around the rim of the circle.

  The drummer stepped up the tempo. The beauty sang as though his lungs would burst; and the tough one, whirling faster and faster, closed in. At last, with a bone-crushing thud, he whammed the club on to his friend’s ribcage and the friend let out a triumphant ‘Yaou . . . o . . . o . . .o . . . o . . . ! ’ – but did not flinch.

  ‘What was he singing?’ I asked the ancien combattant.

  ‘I can kill a lion,’ he said, ‘. . . I have got the biggest cock . . . I can satisfy a thousand women . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  Having repeated the same performance twice more, it was the beauty’s turn to club the tough one. When that was over, the two of them – best friends and blood-brothers for life – went sauntering around the spectators, who reached their hands forward and stuck bank notes on to their face-paint.

  Hand in hand, the boys went back to the palace. Two more pairs went through the same business: but they were both less ‘chic’. Then they, too, retired.

  The assistants erased the white circle and everyone thronged into the courtyard, waiting for something to happen.

  It was almost dark when, from the inner court, there came more blood-curdling cries. Another rattle of drums, and all six boys marched in, hard and glistening, in black leather kilts, their hats stuck with ostrich feathers, swaying their shoulders, swinging their swords – as they moved in to mix with the girls.

  ‘They are men,’ said the ancien combattant.

  I looked down, in the half-light, at the mass of blue and black figures, like the waves at night with a whitecap or two, and silver jewellery glinting like flecks of phosphorescence.

  35

  ROLF AND WENDY, to give each other space, had set up separate establishments. Rolf and the books had the caravan. Wendy, on nights when she wanted to be alone, would sleep in a concrete lock-up. It had been the school store in the days when all lessons were in the open air.

  She asked me to come and watch her at work on the dictionary. It was drizzling. A fine light rain was moving in from the west, and everyone had taken to their humpies.

  I found Wendy with Old Alex, both squatting over a tray of botanical specimens: seed-pods, dried flowers, leaves and roots. He was wearing the plum velvet coat. When Wendy handed him a specimen, he would turn it over, hold it to the light, whisper to himself and then call out its name in Pintupi. She made him repeat the name a number of times: to be assured of its phonetic pronunciation. She would then tag the specimen with a label.

  There was only one plant Alex didn’t know: the dried-up head of a thistle. ‘Come with white man,’ he frowned.

  ‘And he’s right too,’ Wendy turned to me. ‘It’s a European introduction.’

  She thanked
him and he walked away, his spears slung over his shoulder.

  ‘He’s the real thing,’ she said, smiling after him. ‘But you can’t ask too much in a day – his attention wanders.’

  Wendy’s room was as austere as Rolf’s was chaotic. She kept a few clothes in a suitcase. There was a grey metal bedstead, a wash-stand, and a telescope on a tripod. ‘It’s an old family thing,’ she said. ‘It belonged to my grandfather.’

  Some nights, she would drag the bed outside and go to sleep gazing at the stars.

  She picked up Alex’s tray and took me to a smaller tin shed, where, laid out on trestles, were many more specimens: not only of plants, but of eggs, insects, reptiles, birds, snakes and lumps of rock.

  ‘I’m supposed to be an ethnobotanist,’ she laughed. ‘But it’s all got a bit out of hand.’

  Alex was her best informant. You couldn’t exhaust his knowledge of plants. He would reel off the names of species, when and where they would be coming into flower. He used them as a kind of calendar.

  ‘Working out here alone,’ she said, ‘your head fills up with such mad ideas, and there’s no one to test them out on.’ She threw back her head and laughed.

  ‘Lucky I’ve got Rolf,’ she said. ‘No idea’s too mad for him.’

  ‘Such as?’

  She had never had a training in linguistics. Yet her work on the dictionary had given her an interest in the myth of Babel. Why, when Aboriginal life had been so uniform, had there been 200 languages in Australia? Could you really explain this in terms of tribalism or isolation? Surely not! She was beginning to wonder whether language itself might not relate to the distribution of the different species over the land.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I’ll ask Old Alex to name a plant and he’ll answer “No name”, meaning, “The plant doesn’t grow in my country.”’

  She’d then look for an informant who had, as a child, lived where the plant grew – and find it did have a name after all.

  The ‘dry heart’ of Australia, she said, was a jigsaw of microclimates, of different minerals in the soil and different plants and animals. A man raised in one part of the desert would know its flora and fauna backwards. He knew which plant attracted game. He knew his water. He knew where there were tubers underground. In other words, by naming all the ‘things’ in his territory, he could always count on survival.