The Songlines

  Her husband had none of her resources. He had once been all muscle and rebellion. With age, he would shuffle round the shop, get in everyone’s way, get drunk on his home-made hooch, and gloomily brood on the past.

  He would mumble incoherently about a pear tree in his mother’s garden and of some amulet he had hidden in the fork. Trees, he said, were half-dead in Australia. In Russia there were real trees, which shed their leaves and came alive again. One evening, Arkady’s brother Petró found him hacking down their Norfolk Island Pine. They knew, then, that things were seriously wrong.

  Through the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, they got permission for him and Petró to go back and visit his village, Gornyatskiye. He saw his sister, the old samovar, wheatfields, birches and a sluggish river. The pear tree had been cut down, long ago, for firewood.

  In the cemetery he cleared the burdock from his parents’ grave and sat listening to the squeak of the rusty weathervane. After dark, they all sang, his nephews taking turns to play the family bandura. The day before their departure, the KGB took him to Rostov for questioning. They went over and over his dossier, and asked a lot of tricky questions, about the war.

  ‘Dad’, said Arkady, ‘was happier to see Vienna this time than the last.’

  This had happened seven years ago. Now, once again, he was yearning to go back to Russia. He now talked of nothing but the grave at Gornyatskiye. They knew he wanted to die there, and they didn’t know how to arrange it.

  ‘Even as a Westerner’, I said, ‘I know how he must feel. Whenever I’ve been to Russia, I can’t wait to get away. Then I can’t wait to go back.’

  ‘You like Russia?’

  ‘The Russians are a wonderful people.’

  ‘I know that,’ he answered sharply. ‘Why?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ I said. ‘I like to think of Russia as a land of miracles. Just as you fear the worst, something wonderful always happens.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Small things, mostly. Humble things. Humility in Russia is endless.’

  ‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘Come on. We’d better get going.’

  10

  IT WAS A bright, moonlit night. Only in the moonlight was it safe to take a short cut through the Todd. The Aboriginals had the habit of sleeping off their liquor in the river-bed. In the pitch dark, you ran the risk of running into one of them, who might or might not be dangerously drunk.

  The trunks of the ghost-gums were shining white: several trees had been uprooted by another year’s flood. Across the river we could see the Casino and the headlights of cars driving up to it. The sand was loose and grainy, and we went in over our ankles. On the far bank a tousled figure rose up from the bushes, mumbled ‘Fuckers!’ and sank back with a thud and crack of branches.

  ‘Harmlessly drunk!’ said Arkady.

  He led the way past the Casino along a street of newly built houses. They had solar heaters clamped to their roofs and camper-trucks parked in the driveways. At the far end of the street, set aslant to the others, was an old, ramshackle pioneer house with a wide veranda and fly-screens. From the garden came the smell of frangipani and sizzling meat fat.

  A grey-bearded man called Bill, shirtless and pouring with sweat, was grilling steaks and sausages over a charcoal brazier.

  ‘Hello there, Ark!’ he waved a fork in the air.

  ‘Hello, Bill,’ said Arkady. ‘This is Bruce.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Bruce,’ Bill said, hastily. ‘Help yourselves to food.’

  Bill’s blonde wife, Janet, sat behind a trestle table serving salad. She had a broken arm in plaster. On the table were various bottles of wine, and a plastic tub full of ice and canned beers.

  The night bugs were whirling around a couple of hurricane lamps.

  The guests moved about the garden with their food on paper plates, or sat laughing on the ground in groups, or sat in serious conversation on camping chairs. They were nurses, teachers, lawyers, linguists, architects. All of them, I would guess, worked in one way or other with or for the Aboriginals. They were young and had wonderful legs.

  There was only one Aboriginal present: a lanky man in white shorts with a beard that fanned out below his naval. A half-blood girl was hanging on his arm. Her hair was tied tightly in a lilac headscarf. He allowed her to do all the talking.

  She spoke in a querulous voice: of how the Alice Town Council proposed to put a ban on public drinking. ‘And where would our people drink,’ she asked, ‘if they’re not allowed to drink in public?’

  I then saw the Gym Bore making a bee-line across the garden. He had changed into a Land Rights t-shirt and electric-green boxer shorts. He was, it had to be said, good-looking in a sourish way. His name was Kidder. The shrill, upward note on which he ended his sentences gave each of his statements, however dogmatic, a tentative and questionable bias. He would have made an excellent policeman.

  ‘As I was saying in the pub,’ he said, ‘the days of that kind of research are over.’

  ‘What kind of research?’

  ‘Aboriginals are sick and tired of being snooped at like they were animals in a zoo. They’ve called a halt.’

  ‘Who’s called the halt?’

  ‘They have,’ he said. ‘And their community advisers.’

  ‘Of which you are one?’

  ‘I am,’ he agreed, modestly.

  ‘Does that mean I can’t talk to an Aboriginal without first asking your permission?’

  He jutted his chin, lowered his lids and looked sideways. ‘Do you wish’, he asked, ‘to be initiated?’

  He added that, if I did so wish, I’d be obliged to submit to circumcision if I hadn’t been circumcised, then to subincision, which, as I doubtless knew, was to have your urethra peeled back like a banana skin and flayed with a stone knife.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll pass.’

  ‘In which case’, said Kidder, ‘you’ve no right poking your nose into business that doesn’t concern you.’

  ‘Have you been initiated?’

  ‘I . . . er . . . I . . .’

  ‘I asked, have you been initiated?’

  He ran his fingers through his hair and resumed a more civil tone.

  ‘I think I should acquaint you’, he said, ‘with certain policy decisions.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Kidder, expanding to his theme, said that sacred knowledge was the cultural property of the Aboriginal people. All such knowledge which had got into the hands of white men had been acquired either by fraud or by force. It was now going to be deprogrammed.

  ‘Knowledge is knowledge,’ I said. ‘It’s not that easy to dispose of.’

  He did not agree.

  To ‘de-programme’ sacred knowledge, he said, meant examining archives for unpublished material on Aboriginals; you then returned the relevant pages to the rightful ‘owners’. It meant transferring copyright from the author of a book to the people it described; returning photographs to the photographed (or their descendants); recording tapes to the recorded, and so forth.

  I heard him out, gasping with disbelief.

  ‘And who’, I asked, ‘will decide who these “owners” are?’

  ‘We have ways of researching that kind of information.’

  ‘Your ways or their ways?’

  He did not reply. Instead, changing the subject, he asked if I knew what a tjuringa was.

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  ‘What is a tjuringa?’

  ‘A sacred board,’ I said. ‘An Aboriginal’s “holy of holies”. Or, if you like, his “soul”.’

  A tjuringa is usually an oval-ended plaque, carved from stone or mulga wood, and covered with patterns which represent the wanderings of its owner’s Dreamtime Ancestor. In Aboriginal law, no uninitiated person was ever allowed to look on one.

  ‘Have you seen a tjuringa?’ Kidder asked.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the British Museum.’

  ‘Did you realise you were
acting illegally?’

  ‘I never heard anything so silly.’

  Kidder folded his arms and squeezed his empty beer can; clu . . . unk! His chest was heaving up and down like a pouter pigeon’s. ‘People have been speared for less,’ he said.

  Arkady, I was relieved to see, was coming across the lawn. He had a pile of coleslaw on his plate and a dribble of mayonnaise down his chin.

  ‘I knew you two should get together,’ he grinned. ‘Pair of talking heads!’

  Kidder drew his lips into a tight smile. He was an attractive commodity to women. An intense, dark-headed girl had been hovering round for some minutes. She was obviously dying to talk to him. She grabbed her chance. I grabbed mine: to get away and get some food.

  ‘You owe me an explanation,’ I said to Arkady. ‘Who is Kidder?’

  ‘Rich boy from Sydney.’

  ‘I mean what is he to the Land Rights movement?’

  ‘Nothing and nobody. He’s got a plane, that’s all. Flies about taking messages. Makes him feel important.’

  ‘Air lout,’ I said.

  ‘He’s a nice guy,’ said Arkady. ‘So they tell me.’

  I got some more salad and we went to join Marian. She was sitting on a rug and talking to a barrister. She had put on a dress more faded and tattered than the last, with a pattern of Japanese chrysanthemums. Rags suited her. Rags were her style. Anything other than rags might have made her look dowdy.

  She gave me either cheek to kiss and said she was glad I was coming.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Middle Bore,’ she said. ‘You are coming, I hope?’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Me too,’ she glanced across at Arkady and crinkled up her eyes. ‘I’m the Grand Duke’s sidekick.’

  She told me how Aboriginal women have song cycles of their own and, therefore, different sites to be protected. Few people had realised this until recently: the reason being that the women were that much tighter with their secrets than the men.

  ‘Anyway, it’s nice you’re coming,’ she smiled. ‘It’ll be fun.’

  She introduced me to the barrister, ‘Bruce, this is Hughie.’

  ‘How do you do?’ I said.

  He acknowledged my greeting with a slow inclination of the head.

  He had a pale, oval face and a clipped and pernickety way of enunciating his syllables; and with his freckles, his steel-framed glasses, and the tuft of mousy hair sticking up on the back of his head, he really did look like the brightest boy in school. When the lamplight caught his features, you could tell he was lined and tired.

  He yawned. ‘Couldn’t we find a chair, my dear? I can’t stand another minute and I do hate sitting on the ground. Don’t you?’

  I found a couple of chairs and we sat down. Arkady and Marian, meanwhile, had gone off to discuss arrangements for the trip.

  The barrister had been in court all day, defending a black kid on a homicide charge. He would be all day in court tomorrow. He was a New Zealander. He had gone to public school in England and had been called to the Bar in London.

  We talked about the Lawson case, which had been tried in the Alice court. Lawson was a truckie, who, when apparently drunk, had been refused a drink by the lady proprietor of an Outback motel. He had gone out into the glare of noon, unhitched his trailer, and, twenty minutes later, had driven the truck through the bar at 35 m.p.h., killing five drinkers and wounding twenty.

  After the incident, Lawson went missing in the bush and, when found, said he could not recall a thing.

  ‘Do you believe that?’ I asked.

  ‘Believe it? Of course, I believe it! Mr Lawson’s a very nice and truthful person, and his company kept him dreadfully overworked. The trouble with his defence is that he wasn’t drunk, he was drugged.’

  ‘What on?’

  ‘Amphetamines, poor thing! Hadn’t slept a wink for five days. All these truckies feed on amphetamines! Pop them in their mouths like sweeties! One, two, three, four, five and Whooeee . . . ! they’re away. No wonder he was a little blotto!’

  ‘Did that come out in court?’

  ‘The five days, yes, the amphetamines, no.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Unmentionable! Amphetamines and the trucking business? Un-mentionable! Imagine if there had to be an inquiry. Amphetamines are this country’s answer to distance. Without them, the place’d seize up.’

  ‘It’s a weird country,’ I said.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Weirder than America.’

  ‘Much!’ he agreed. ‘America’s young! Young, innocent and cruel. But this country’s old. Old rock! That’s the difference! Old, weary and wise. Absorbent too! No matter what you pour on to it, it all gets sucked away.’

  He waved his thin white arm at the healthy, suntanned people on the lawn. ‘Look at them!’ he said. ‘They think they’re young. But they’re not, you know. They’re old. Born old!’

  ‘Not Arkady,’ I objected. ‘Arkady doesn’t strike me as old.’

  ‘Ark’s the exception,’ he said. ‘I think Ark must have dropped from Heaven. But the rest of them are old,’ he continued. ‘Have you ever noticed the eyelids of young people in this country? They’re the eyelids of the old. You wake them up and they look like startled fauns – for a bit! Then they go back to being old.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the light?’ I suggested. ‘The glare of Australia that makes one long for the dark.’

  ‘Ark tells me you’ve got all sorts of interesting theories about this and that. I’d like to hear them one day, but tonight I’m tired.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Not, of course, that I haven’t a few pet theories of my own. I suppose that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘I was wondering that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you were doing here.’

  ‘I ask myself, my dear. Every time I brush my teeth, I ask the same question. But what would I do in London? Prissy little dinners? Pretty little flat? No. No. Wouldn’t suit me at all.’

  ‘But why here?’

  ‘I love it here,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The abstraction, you understand me?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Suitable for marsupials, but never meant for man. The land, I mean. Makes people do the most peculiar things. Did you hear the story of the German girl and the bicycle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very interesting case! Nice, healthy German girl. Hires a bike from a shop on Todd Street. Buys a lock from a shop on Court Street. Rides out of town along the Larapinta Drive and gets as far as Ormiston Gorge. She drags the bike through the Gorge, which, as you know if you’ve ever been there, is a superhuman feat. Then, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, she locks her leg to the frame, chucks away the key, and lies down to grill in the sun. The sun-bathing impulse gone haywire! Picked clean, she was! Picked!’

  ‘Nasty!’

  ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘Reconciled! Dissolved! That’s all part of my little theory about Australia. But I won’t bore you with it now, because I’m really so dreadfully tired and I should be in bed.’

  ‘So should I,’ I said and stood up.

  ‘Sit down!’ he said. ‘Why must you Poms always be in such a hurry?’

  He sipped his wine. We sat in silence for a minute or two, and then he said, dreamily, ‘Yes, it’s a lovely place to be lost in. Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely feeling of security.’

  He jumped to his feet. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I simply must go! It’s been very nice talking to you and I’m sure we shall talk again. Good night!’

  He walked away towards the garden gate, nodding his head and saying ‘Goodnight!’ to everyone he passed.

  I rejoined Arkady and Marian.

  ‘What did you make of Hughie?’ he asked.

  ‘What an odd fish!’

  ‘Bloody good barrister,’ he said. ‘Has the court in stitches.’

  ‘I’ll be off now,’ I said. ‘Don’t move. I’ll look in at the offic
e tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re not going yet,’ he said. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Dan Flynn.’ He pointed towards the bearded Aboriginal.

  ‘The Father Flynn?’

  ‘Himself,’ he said. ‘You know the story?’

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Heard it from an Irishman called Father Terence.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have,’ I said. ‘He’s a hermit. He told me to look Flynn up.’

  Arkady threw back his head and laughed.

  ‘Everyone wants to look up Father Dan,’ he said. ‘Until they get the brush-off. If he likes you, you’ll learn a lot. If he doesn’t . . . you’ll know it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did hear he was difficult.’

  11

  SELDOM IN ITS missionary endeavours can the Catholic Church in Australia have suffered from so difficult a case as that of Father Flynn.

  He was a foundling, dumped by an unknown mother at the store of an Irishman at Fitzroy Crossing. At the age of six, he was sent to the Benedictine Mission at Cygnet Bay, where he refused to play with other black children, learned to serve at Mass, and had the habit of asking questions, about dogma, in a soft reverential brogue. One day, he reeled off pat the name of every Pope, from St Peter to Pius XII. The Fathers saw this as proof of his craving for Christ.

  They taught him Latin and encouraged him to take Holy Orders. He was taken in hand by the Mission’s oldest inhabitant, an apparently harmless crank, Father Herzog, who had trained as an ethnographer and taught him the rudiments of comparative religion.

  Flynn was ordained in 1969. He went to Rome. He walked with fellow seminarians in the Alban Hills. He had an audience with the Holy Father, which lasted approximately one and a quarter minutes. On his return to Australia, the Order decided he should be the first Aboriginal to take charge of a mission on his own.

  The place they chose was Roe River, in the Kimberleys. And to equip himself for the task, Flynn was sent to learn from two old-timers, Fathers Subiros and Villaverde, at another Benedictine outpost: Boongaree.