The Songlines

  He asked me, with a wicked grin, whether I was a Believer. In two weeks I never saw him pray.

  Later, when I went back to England, I found a photo of a ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ carved in relief on an Egyptian tomb of the Twelfth Dynasty at Beni Hassan: a pitiful, emaciated figure, like the pictures of victims in the Sahel drought, and recognisably the same as Mahmoud.

  The Pharaohs had vanished: Mahmoud and his people had lasted. I felt I had to know the secret of their timeless and irreverent vitality.

  I quit my job in the ‘art world’ and went back to the dry places: alone, travelling light. The names of the tribes I travelled among are unimportant: Rguibat, Quashgai, Taimanni, Turkomen, Bororo, Tuareg – people whose journeys, unlike my own, had neither beginning nor end.

  I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed’s dictum, ‘A journey is a fragment of Hell.’

  The more I read, the more convinced I became that nomads had been the crankhandle of history, if for no other reason than that the great monotheisms had, all of them, surfaced from the pastoral milieu . . .

  Arkady was looking out of the window.

  5

  A BATTERED RED truck had drawn up on the sidewalk and parked. Five black women sat huddled in the back, among a heap of bundles and jerry cans. Their frocks and headscarves were covered with dust. The driver was a hefty fellow with a beer stomach and a greasy felt hat rammed down over a tangle of hair. He leaned from the door of the cab and started shouting at the passengers. Then a gangly old man got out and pointed to an object stuck in among the bundles.

  One of the women handed him a tubular thing wrapped in clear plastic. The old man took it and, as he turned round, Arkady recognised him.

  ‘It’s my old friend Stan,’ he said. ‘From Popanji.’

  We went out on to the street and Arkady hugged Old Stan, and Stan looked anxious that either he or the thing in plastic would get crushed, and when Arkady unhugged him he really looked relieved.

  I stood in the doorway, watching.

  The old man had clouded red eyes and a dirty yellow shirt, and his beard and hairy chest resembled smoke.

  ‘So what you got there, Stan?’ asked Arkady.

  ‘Painting,’ Stan said, smiling sheepishly.

  ‘What you going to do with him?’

  ‘Sell him.’

  Stan was a Pintupi elder. The hefty fellow was Stan’s son, Albert. The family had driven into town to sell one of Stan’s paintings to Mrs Lacey, the owner of the Desert Bookstore and Art Gallery.

  ‘Come on,’ Arkady jerked his thumb at the package. ‘Let’s have a see!’

  But Old Stan turned his mouth down at the corners, tightened his fingers and mumbled, ‘Have to show him first to Mrs Lacey.’

  The coffee-shop was closing. The girl had piled the chairs on the tables and was vacuuming the carpet. We paid the bill and walked out. Albert leaned against the truck and talked to the ladies. We walked along the sidewalk to the bookstore.

  The Pintupi were the last ‘wild tribe’ to be brought in out of the Western Desert and introduced to white civilisation. Until the late 1950s, they had continued to hunt and forage, naked in the sandhills, as they had hunted for at least ten thousand years.

  They were a carefree and open-minded people, not given to the harsher initiation rites of more sedentary tribes. The men hunted kangaroo and emu. The women gathered seeds and roots and edible grubs. In winter, they sheltered behind windbreaks of spinifex; and even in the searing heat they seldom went without water. They valued a pair of strong legs above everything, and they were always laughing. The few whites who travelled among them were amazed to find their babies fat and healthy.

  The government, however, took the view that Men of the Stone Age must be saved – for Christ, if need be. Besides, the Western Desert was needed for mining operations, possibly for nuclear tests. An order went out to round up the Pintupi in army trucks, and settle them on government stations. Many were sent to Popanji, a settlement to the west of Alice Springs, where they died of epidemics, squabbled with the men of other tribes, took to the bottle, and knifed each other.

  Even in captivity, Pintupi mothers, like good mothers everywhere, tell stories to their children about the origin of animals: How the Echidna got its spines . . . Why the Emu cannot fly . . . Why the Crow is glossy black . . . And as Kipling illustrated the Just So Stories with his own line drawings, so the Aboriginal mother makes drawings in the sand to illustrate the wanderings of the Dreamtime heroes.

  She tells her tale in a patter of staccato bursts and, at the same time, traces the Ancestor’s ‘footprints’ by running her first and second fingers, one after the other, in a double dotted line along the ground. She erases each scene with the palm of her hand and, finally, makes a circle with a line passing through it – something like a capital Q.

  This marks the spot where the Ancestor, exhausted by the labours of Creation, has gone ‘back in’.

  The sand drawings done for children are but sketches or ‘open versions’ of real drawings representing the real Ancestors, which are only done at secret ceremonies and must only be seen by initiates. All the same, it is through the ‘sketches’ that the young learn to orient themselves to their land, its mythology and resources.

  Some years ago, when the violence and drunkenness threatened to get out of hand, a white adviser hit on the idea of supplying the Pintupi with artists’ materials and getting them to transfer their Dreamings on to canvas.

  The result was an instant, Australian school of abstract painting.

  Old Stan Tjakamarra had been painting for eight years. Whenever he finished a composition, he would bring it to the Desert Bookstore and Mrs Lacey would deduct the cost of his materials and pay him a lump sum in cash.

  6

  I LIKED ENID Lacey. I had already spent a couple of hours in the Bookstore. She certainly knew how to sell books. She had read almost every book about Central Australia and tried to stock every title in print. In the room which served as an art gallery, she had two easy chairs for customers. ‘Read as much as you like,’ she’d say. ‘No obligation!’ – knowing damn well, of course, that once you sat in that chair, you couldn’t go away without buying.

  She was an Old Territorian in her late sixties. Her nose and chin were excessively pointed: her hair was auburn, from the bottle. She wore two pairs of spectacles on chains and a pair of opal bracelets around her sun-withered wrists. ‘Opals’, she said to me, ‘have brought me nothing but luck.’

  Her father had been manager of a cattle station near Tennant Creek. She had lived with Aboriginals all her life. She would stand for no nonsense, and secretly adored them.

  She had known all the older generation of Australian anthropologists and didn’t think much of the new ones: the ‘jargon-mongers’, as she called them. The truth was that, though she tried to keep abreast of the latest theories, though she battled with the books of Lévi-Strauss, she never made much headway. For all that, when Aboriginal affairs were up for discussion, she would assume her best pontifical manner, changing pronouns from ‘I’ to ‘We’, not the royal ‘We’ but ‘We’ meaning the ‘body of scientific opinion’.

  She had been among the first to see the merit of Pintupi painting.

  Being a shrewd businesswoman, she knew when to give credit to an artist, when to withhold it and to refuse payment altogether if the artist seemed set on a blinder. So when if one of her ‘boys’ turned up, doddery on his feet, at closing time – which, at the Frazer Arms, was opening time – she’d click her tongue and say, ‘Dearie me! I can’t find the key to the cash-box. You’ll have to come back in the morning.’ And when, next morning, the artist came back, grateful not to have drunk away his earnings, she’d waggle her finger grimly, and say, ‘You’re going home? Now? Aren’t you?’ ‘Yes, mam!’ he’d say, and she’d add a little extra for the wife and kids.

  Mrs L
acey paid far less for paintings than galleries in Sydney or Melbourne, but then she charged far less for paintings and the paintings always sold.

  Sometimes, a white welfare worker would accuse her of ‘ripping off’ the artists: but money from Sydney or Melbourne had a way of getting siphoned off into Aboriginal co-operatives, whereas Mrs Lacey paid cash, on the nail. Her ‘boys’ knew a deal when they saw one and kept coming back to the Bookstore.

  We followed Stan inside.

  ‘You’re late, silly!’ Mrs Lacey adjusted her spectacles.

  He was edging towards her desk, between two customers and the bookshelf.

  ‘I said to come Tuesday,’ she said. ‘I had the man in from Adelaide yesterday. Now we’ll have to wait another month.’

  The customers were a couple of American tourists, who were deciding which of two colour-plate books to buy. The man had a tanned and freckled face and wore blue Bermudas and a yellow sports shirt. The woman was blonde, nice-looking but a little drawn, and dressed in a red batik smock printed with Aboriginal motifs. The books were Australian Dreaming and Tales of the Dreamtime.

  Old Stan laid the package on Mrs Lacey’s desk. His head swayed to and fro as he muttered some excuse. His musty smell filled the room.

  ‘Idiot!’ Mrs Lacey raised the pitch of her voice. ‘I’ve told you a thousand times. The man from Adelaide doesn’t want Gideon’s paintings. He wants yours.’

  Arkady and I kept our distance, at the back, by the shelves of Aboriginal studies. The Americans had perked up, and were listening.

  ‘I know there’s no accounting for taste,’ Mrs Lacey continued. ‘He says you’re the best painter at Popanji. He’s a big collector. He should know.’

  ‘Is that so?’ asked the American man.

  ‘It is,’ said Mrs Lacey. ‘I can sell anything Mr Tjakamarra sets his hand to.’

  ‘Could we see?’ asked the American woman. ‘Please?’

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ Mrs Lacey replied. ‘You’ll have to ask the artist.’

  ‘Could we?’

  ‘Can they?’

  Stan trembled, hunched his shoulders, and covered his face with his hands.

  ‘You can,’ said Mrs Lacey, smiling sweetly and snipping at the plastic with her scissors.

  Stan withdrew the fingers from his face and, taking hold of one edge of the canvas, helped Mrs Lacey unroll it.

  The painting was about four foot by three and had a background of pointillist dots in varying shades of ochre. In the centre there was a big blue circle with several smaller circles scattered around it. Each circle had a scarlet rim around the perimeter and, connecting them, was a maze of wiggly, flamingo-pink lines that looked a bit like intestines.

  Mrs Lacey switched to her second pair of glasses and said, ‘What you got here, Stan?’

  ‘Honey-ant,’ he whispered in a hoarse voice.

  ‘The honey-ant’, she turned to the Americans, ‘is one of the totems at Popanji. This painting’s a honey-ant Dreaming.’

  ‘I think it’s beautiful,’ said the American woman, thoughtfully.

  ‘Like it’s an ordinary ant?’ asked the American man. ‘Like a termite ant?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mrs Lacey. ‘A honey-ant’s something very special. Honey-ants feed on mulga sap. Mulga, that’s a tree we have here in the desert. The ants grow honey-sacks on their rear ends. They look like clear plastic bubbles.’

  ‘Is that so?’ the man said.

  ‘I’ve eaten them,’ said Mrs Lacey. ‘Delicious!’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed the American woman. She had fixed her gaze on the painting. ‘In its own way, it is truly beautiful!’

  ‘But I can’t see any ants in this painting,’ the man said. ‘You mean it’s like . . . like it’s a painting of an ant’s nest? Like those pink tubes are passages?’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Lacey looked a little discouraged. ‘The painting shows the journey of the Honey-ant Ancestor.’

  ‘Like it’s a route-map?’ he grinned. ‘Yeah, I thought it looked like a route-map.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mrs Lacey.

  The American wife, meanwhile, was opening and closing her eyes to see what impression the painting would make on her when, finally, she kept them open.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she repeated.

  ‘Now, sir!’ the man addressed himself to Stan. ‘Do you eat these honey-ants yourself?’

  Stan nodded.

  ‘No! No!’ the wife shrilled. ‘I told you this morning. You do not eat your own totem! You could be killed for eating your Ancestor!’

  ‘Dearest, this gentleman says he does eat honey-ants. Is that correct, sir?’

  Stan continued to nod.

  ‘I’m confused,’ said the woman in an exasperated tone. ‘You mean that Honey-ant is not your Dreaming?’

  Stan shook his head.

  ‘Then what is your Dreaming?’

  The old man quivered like a schoolboy forced to betray a secret, and managed to wheeze the word ‘Emu’.

  ‘Oh, I am so confused,’ the woman bit her lip in disappointment.

  She liked this soft-mouthed old man in his yellow shirt. She liked to think of the honey-ants dreaming their way across the desert with the bright sun shining on their honey-sacks. She had loved the painting. She wanted to own it, to have him sign it, and now she’d have to think again.

  ‘Do you think’, she mouthed her words slowly and carefully, ‘that if we deposited the money with Mrs –?’

  ‘Lacey,’ said Mrs Lacey.

  ‘. . . that you could paint us an Emu Dreaming and send it . . . have Mrs Lacey send it to us in the United States?’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Lacey interrupted. ‘He could not. No artist paints his own Dreaming. It’s too powerful. It might kill him.’

  ‘Now I am totally confused,’ the woman wrung her hands. ‘You mean he can’t paint his own Dreaming but he can paint somebody else’s?’

  ‘I get it,’ said the husband, brightening. ‘Like he can’t eat emus but he can eat honey-ants?’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ Mrs Lacey said. ‘Mr Tjakamarra cannot paint an Emu Dreaming because an emu is his paternal totem and it would be sacrilege to do so. He can paint honey-ant because that is the totem of his mother’s brother’s son. That’s right, isn’t it, Stan? Gideon’s Dreaming is honey-ant?’

  Stan blinked and said, ‘Right!’

  ‘Gideon’, she continued, ‘is Stan’s ritual manager. They both tell each other what they can and cannot paint.’

  ‘I think I understand,’ said the American woman, doubtfully. But she still looked quite bewildered and took time to compose her next thought.

  ‘You said that this Mr Gideon is an artist too?’

  ‘He is,’ Mrs Lacey agreed.

  ‘And he paints Emu Dreamings?’

  ‘He does.’

  ‘Goodee!’ the woman laughed, unexpectedly, and clapped her hands. ‘We could buy one of each and hang them as a pair.’

  ‘Now, dearest,’ said the husband in an effort to calm her. ‘First, we have to ascertain if this honey-ant painting is for sale. And if so, how much?’

  Mrs Lacey fluttered her eyelashes and said, archly, ‘I couldn’t say. You’ll have to ask the artist.’

  Stan rolled the whites of his eyes to the ceiling and rustled his lips. Obviously, he was thinking of a price – the price he’d get from Mrs Lacey – and doubling it. Obviously he and Mrs Lacey had been through this rigmarole before. He then lowered his head and said, ‘Four hundred fifty.’

  ‘Australian dollars,’ Mrs Lacey chipped in. ‘Of course, I’ll have to charge my commission. Ten per cent! That’s only fair. And I’ll have to add twenty for the paint and canvas.’

  ‘Per cent?’

  ‘Dollars.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said the man, looking rather relieved.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ the woman said.

  ‘Are you happy now?’ he asked her in a soothing voice.

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘I am so happy.’

  ?
??Can I pay American Express?’ he asked.

  ‘Surely,’ said Mrs Lacey. ‘As long as you don’t mind paying their commission.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ the man gulped. ‘But now I want to know what’s going on. In the painting, I mean.’

  Arkady and I crept up behind the Americans and watched Old Stan point his bony finger at the large blue circle on the canvas.

  It was the Eternal Home, he explained, of the Honey-ant Ancestor at Tátátá. And suddenly it was as though we could see the row on row of honey-ants, their bodies striped and gleaming, bursting with nectar in their cells beneath the roots of the mulga tree. We saw the ring of flame-red earth around the entrance to their nest, and the routes of their migration as they spread to other places.

  ‘The circles’, Mrs Lacey added helpfully, ‘are honey-ant ceremonial centres. The “tubes”, as you call them, are Dreaming-tracks.’

  The American man was captivated. ‘And can we go and look for these Dreaming-tracks? Out there, I mean? Like at Ayer’s Rock? Some place like that?’

  ‘They can,’ she said. ‘You can’t.’

  ‘You mean they’re invisible?’

  ‘To you. Not to them.’

  ‘Then where are they?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ she said. ‘For all I know there’s a Dreaming-track running right through the middle of my shop.’

  ‘Spooky,’ the wife giggled.

  ‘And only they can see it?’

  ‘Or sing it,’ Mrs Lacey said. ‘You can’t have a track without a song.’

  ‘And these tracks run every place?’ the man asked. ‘All over Australia?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Lacey, sighing with satisfaction at having found a catchy phrase. ‘The song and the land are one.’

  ‘Amazing!’ he said.

  The American woman had pulled out her handkerchief and was dabbing the corners of her eyes. I thought for one moment she was going to kiss Old Stan. She knew the painting was a thing done for white men, but he had given her a glimpse of something rare and strange, and for that she was very grateful.