The Songlines

  ‘Fear not!’ he gripped my hand.

  The thunderheads were rolling closer. A warm wind began to blow off the waves.

  ‘Fear not!’ he called again.

  I turned to wave at the two dim figures: a man in a flowing white robe and a wallaby with its tail in a question-mark.

  ‘Fear not!’ He must have said the same words in my sleep, for when I woke in the morning they were the first ones that came to me.

  14

  IT WAS GREY and overcast when I went downstairs for breakfast. The sun was like a white blister, and there was a smell of burning. The morning papers were full of news of the bushfires north of Adelaide. The clouds, I then realised, were smoke. I put through a call to some friends, who, so far as I could judge, were either in or near the fire zone.

  ‘No, we’re OK!’ Nin’s cheerful, crackly voice came down the line. ‘The wind changed just in time. We did have a hair-raising night, though.’

  They had watched the rim of the horizon on fire. The fire had been moving at 50 m.p.h., with nothing but state forest between them and it. The tops of the eucalyptus had been breaking off into fireballs, and flying in the gale-force winds.

  ‘Hair-raising, I’ll say,’ I said.

  ‘This is Australia,’ she called back, and then the line went dead.

  Outside, it was so hot and muggy that I went back to my room, switched on the air-conditioner, and spent most of the day reading Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia.

  It was an awkward, discursive and unbelievably long book and Strehlow, by all accounts, was an awkward cuss himself. His father, Karl Strehlow, had been pastor in charge of the Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg, to the west of Alice Springs. He was one of a handful of ‘good Germans’ who, by providing a secure land-base, did more than anyone to save the Central Australian Aboriginals from extinction by people of British stock. This did not make them popular. During the First World War, a press campaign broke out against this ‘Teuton spies’-nest’ and the ‘evil effects of Germanising the natives’.

  As a baby, Ted Strehlow had an Aranda wet-nurse and grew up speaking Aranda fluently. Later, as a university graduate, he returned to ‘his people’ and, for over thirty years, patiently recorded in notebooks, on tape and on film the songs and ceremonies of the passing order. His black friends asked him to do this so their songs should not die with them entirely.

  It was not surprising, given his background, that Strehlow became an embattled personality: an autodidact who craved both solitude and recognition, a German ‘idealist’ out of step with the ideals of Australia.

  Aranda Traditions, his earlier book, was years ahead of its time in its thesis that the intellect of the ‘primitive’ was in no way inferior to that of modern man. The message, though largely lost on Anglo-Saxon readers, was taken up by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who incorporated Strehlow’s insights into The Savage Mind.

  Then, in late middle age, Strehlow staked everything on a grand idea.

  He wanted to show how every aspect of Aboriginal song had its counterpart in Hebrew, Ancient Greek, Old Norse or Old English: the literatures we acknowledge as our own. Having grasped the connection of song and land, he wished to strike at the roots of song itself: to find in song a key to unravelling the mystery of the human condition. It was an impossible undertaking. He got no thanks for his trouble.

  When the Songs came out in 1971, a carping review in the Times Literary Supplement suggested the author should have refrained from airing his ‘grand poetic theory’. The review upset Strehlow terribly. More upsetting were the attacks of the ‘activists’ who accused him of stealing the songs, with a view to publication, from innocent and unsuspecting Elders.

  Strehlow died at his desk in 1978, a broken man. His memory was served by a dismissive biography which, when I glanced at it in the Desert Bookstore, struck me as being beneath contempt. He was, I am convinced, a highly original thinker. His books are great and lonely books.

  Around five in the afternoon I dropped in on Arkady at the office.

  ‘I’ve got good news for you,’ he said.

  A radio message had come in from Cullen, an Aboriginal out-station about 350 miles away on the West Australian border. Two clans were having a quarrel about mining royalties. They had called in Arkady to mediate.

  ‘Like to come?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘We can get through the railway business in a couple of days. Then we’ll head out west across country.’

  He had already arranged my permit to visit an Aboriginal reservation. He had a long-standing date for the evening, so I called up Marian and asked if she felt like a meal.

  ‘Can’t!’ she called back, breathlessly.

  She’d been locking the front door when the phone rang. She was off that minute to Tennant Creek, to pick up the women for the survey.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘See you.’

  I had supper at the Colonel Sanders on Todd Street. Under the glaring neon, a man in a sleek blue suit was delivering a sermon to some teenage potential chicken-friers, as if frying Kentucky chicken were a kind of religious observance.

  I went back to my room and spent the evening with Strehlow and a bottle of ‘burgundy’.

  Strehlow once compared the study of Aboriginal myths to entering a ‘labyrinth of countless corridors and passages’, all of which were mysteriously connected in ways of baffling complexity. Reading the Songs, I got the impression of a man who had entered this secret world by the back door; who had had the vision of a mental construction more marvellous and intricate than anything on earth, a construction to make Man’s material achievements seem like so much dross – yet which somehow evaded description.

  What makes Aboriginal song so hard to appreciate is the endless accumulation of detail. Yet even a superficial reader can get a glimpse of a moral universe – as moral as the New Testament – in which the structures of kinship reach out to all living men, to all his fellow creatures, and to the rivers, the rocks and the trees.

  I read on. Strehlow’s transliterations from the Aranda were enough to make anyone cross-eyed. When I could read no more, I shut the book. My eyelids felt like glasspaper. I finished the bottle of wine and went down to the bar for a brandy.

  A fat man and his wife were sitting by the pool.

  ‘A very good evening to you, sir!’ he said.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said.

  I ordered coffee and a double brandy at the bar, and took a second brandy back to the room. Reading Strehlow had made me want to write something. I was not drunk – yet – but had not been so nearly drunk in ages. I got out a yellow pad and began to write.

  IN THE BEGINNING . . .

  IN THE BEGINNING the Earth was an infinite and murky plain, separated from the sky and from the grey salt sea and smothered in a shadowy twilight. There were neither Sun nor Moon nor Stars. Yet, far away, lived the Sky-Dwellers: youthfully indifferent beings, human in form but with the feet of emus, their golden hair glittering like spiders’ webs in the sunset, ageless and unageing, having existed for ever in their green, well-watered Paradise beyond the Western Clouds.

  On the surface of the Earth, the only features were certain hollows which would, one day, be waterholes. There were no animals and no plants, yet clustered round the waterholes there were pulpy masses of matter: lumps of primordial soup – soundless, sightless, unbreathing, unawake and unsleeping – each containing the essence of life, or the possibility of becoming human.

  Beneath the Earth’s crust, however, the constellations glimmered, the Sun shone, the Moon waxed and waned, and all the forms of life lay sleeping: the scarlet of a desert-pea, the iridescence on a butterfly’s wing, the twitching white whiskers of Old Man Kangaroo – dormant as seeds in the desert that must wait for a wandering shower.

  On the morning of the First Day, the Sun felt the urge to be born. (That evening the Stars and Moon would follow.) The Sun burst through the surface, flooding the land with golde
n light, warming the hollows under which each Ancestor lay sleeping.

  Unlike the Sky-dwellers, these Ancients had never been young. They were lame, exhausted greybeards with knotted limbs, and they had slept in isolation through the ages.

  So it was, on this First Morning, that each drowsing Ancestor felt the Sun’s warmth pressing on his eyelids, and felt his body giving birth to children. The Snake Man felt snakes slithering out of his navel. The Cockatoo Man felt feathers. The Witchetty Grub Man felt a wriggling, the Honey-ant a tickling, the Honeysuckle felt his leaves and flowers unfurling. The Bandicoot Man felt baby bandicoots seething from under his armpits. Every one of the ‘living things’, each at its own separate birthplace, reached up for the light of day.

  In the bottom of their hollows (now filling up with water), the Ancients shifted one leg, then another leg. They shook their shoulders and flexed their arms. They heaved their bodies upward through the mud. Their eyelids cracked open. They saw their children at play in the sunshine.

  The mud fell from their thighs, like placenta from a baby. Then, like the baby’s first cry, each Ancestor opened his mouth and called out, ‘I AM!’ ‘I am – Snake . . . Cockatoo . . . Honey-ant . . . Honeysuckle . . . And this first ‘I am!’, this primordial act of naming, was held, then and forever after, as the most secret and sacred couplet of the Ancestor’s song.

  Each of the Ancients (now basking in the sunlight) put his left foot forward and called out a second name. He put his right foot forward and called out a third name. He named the waterhole, the reedbeds, the gum trees – calling to right and left, calling all things into being and weaving their names into verses.

  The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, salt-pans and sand dunes. They hunted, ate, made love, danced, killed: wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music.

  They wrapped the whole world in a web of song; and at last, when the Earth was sung, they felt tired. Again in their limbs they felt the frozen immobility of Ages. Some sank into the ground where they stood. Some crawled into caves. Some crept away to their ‘Eternal Homes’, to the ancestral waterholes that bore them.

  All of them went ‘back in’.

  15

  NEXT MORNING THE cloud had cleared and, since the motel did not serve breakfast till eight, I went for a run to the Gap. The heat was already building up. The hills were brown and furrowed in the early light.

  On my way out I passed the fat man floating upward in the pool. There was a scar on his stomach, as if the skeleton of a fish had been impressed on it.

  ‘Good day to you, sir!’

  ‘Good day,’ I said.

  Across the street, some Aboriginal families had parked themselves on the municipal lawn and were freshening up under the lawn-sprayer. They sat close enough to get sprayed and not too close to kill their cigarettes. Some snot-nosed children were tumbling about and were glistening wet all over.

  I said hello to a bearded man who said, ‘Goodonya, mate.’ I nodded to his woman who said, ‘Go and suck eggs!’ and lowered her eyelids and laughed.

  I passed the confused young bodies pumping iron in the ‘Fun and Fitness Centre’; then turned right along the riverbank and stopped to read a notice by some ghost-gums:

  Registered Sacred Site for the Injalka (Caterpillar) Dreaming

  Entry by Vehicle Prohibited

  Penalty for damage $2,000

  There wasn’t much to see, for a white man anyway: a broken barbed-wire fence, some crumbly stones lying this way and that, and a lot of broken bottles in the bristly grass.

  I ran on and reached the Gap, but was too hot to go on running so I walked back. The fat man was still floating in the pool and his fat wife was floating beside him. Her hair was in curlers and covered with a crinkly pink cap.

  I showered and packed my bag. I packed a pile of my old black notebooks. They were the notebooks for the ‘nomad’ book, which I had kept when I burned the manuscript. Some I hadn’t looked at for at least ten years. They contained a mishmash of nearly indecipherable jottings, ‘thoughts’, quotations, brief encounters, travel notes, notes for stories . . . I had brought them to Australia because I planned to hole up somewhere in the desert, away from libraries and other men’s work, and take a fresh look at what they contained.

  Outside my room, I was stopped by a fair, mop-headed boy in patched and faded jeans. He was red in the face and seemed very agitated. He asked if I’d seen an Aboriginal kid, ‘A kid with a rasta hair-do?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, if you do see him, say Graham’s waiting by the van.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, and went in to breakfast.

  I had finished my second cup of disgusting coffee when the other Bruce came in and dumped his hard-hat on my table. I said I was leaving town.

  ‘Well, I won’t see you, Bru,’ he said morosely.

  ‘Maybe not, Bru,’ I said.

  ‘Well, so long, Bru!’

  ‘So long!’ I shook his hand, and he went up to get his porridge.

  Arkady drove up at nine in a brown Toyota Land Cruiser. On the roof-rack were four spare wheels and a row of jerry-cans for water. He wore a freshly laundered khaki shirt, from which the corporal’s flashes had been removed. He smelled of soap.

  ‘You’re smart,’ I said.

  ‘It won’t last,’ he replied. ‘Believe me, it will not last.’

  I chucked my bag on to the back seat. The rear of the cab was stacked with boxes of soft drinks and ‘Eskis’. An ‘Eski’, for ‘Eskimo’, is a polystyrene cool-pack without which a journey into the desert is unthinkable.

  We were half-way up Todd Street when Arkady braked, nipped into the Desert Bookstore and came out with the Penguin Classics edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. ‘Present for you,’ he said. ‘Reading matter for the trip.’

  We drove to the edge of town, past the ‘Bed Shed’ and ‘Territory Wrecking’ and stopped at a Lebanese butcher to pick up some meat. The butcher’s son looked up as we came in, and went on sharpening his blade. For the next ten minutes we filled the ‘Eskis’ to bursting with sausages and slabs of steak.

  ‘Tucker for my old men,’ said Arkady.

  ‘Seems an awful lot.’

  ‘You just wait,’ he said. ‘They could eat a whole cow for supper.’

  We also bought some steak for an old ‘bushie’ by the name of Hanlon, who lived alone beyond the Glen Armond Pub.

  We drove on, past the sign to the Old Alice Telegraph Station, and then we were out in the bare, scrubby country of the Burt Plain.

  The road was a straight band of tarmac and, on either side, there were strips of red dirt with paddy-melon growing over them. The melons were the size of cricket balls. They had been brought to Australia by the Afghans as fodder for their camels. Sometimes Arkady would swerve on to the melon to miss a road-train coming south. The road-trains had three trailers. They did not slow down but came up, steadily out of the heat-mirage, hogging the middle of the road.

  Every few miles, we passed the gates of a cattle-station, or a wind-pump with cattle clustered round it. There were a lot of dead beasts, legs in the air, ballooned up with gas and the crows on top of them. The rains were two months late.

  ‘Marginal country,’ said Arkady.

  Almost all the best pastoral leases had been bought up by foreigners: Vesteys, Bunker Hunt and the like. No wonder Territorians felt cheated!

  ‘The country’s against them,’ he said. ‘The politicians are against them. The multinationals are against them. The Abos are against them. Surely this country’s only good for Abos?’

  He described how once, while they were tracing a Songline near Mount Wedge, the owner had driven up and, waving a shotgun, hollered, ‘Get off my land! Get them coons off my land!’ So Arkady, who had already written the man five letters without receiving a reply, explained the provisions of the Land Rights Act, whereby ‘traditional owners’ were allowed to visit their sites.

  This made the
pastoralist hopping mad, ‘There ain’t no sacred sites on my land.’

  ‘Oh yes, there are,’ said one of the Aboriginals present.

  ‘Oh no, they’re not.’

  ‘You’re standing on one, mate.’

  The road curved to cross a creek bed and, on the far side, Arkady pointed away to the east, to a switchback of pale brown hills. They stood up like cardboard scenery from the plain.

  ‘You see the small hill, there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a smaller, conical hill connected to the others by a low spur of rock.

  ‘That’, he said, ‘was where the railway people wanted to make a cutting. It would have saved at least two miles of track.’

  The hills lay on the northern edge of Aranda country: yet when Arkady sent word round the usual channels, no one wanted to claim them. He had been on the point of assuming there were no ‘owners’ when an Aranda mob showed up in his office . . . and said they were. He drove five of the men to the hills where they moped about miserably, their eyes bulging with fright. Again and again he asked, ‘What are the songs of this place?’, or, ‘What’s the Dreaming-story here?’ They clamped their mouths and wouldn’t say a word.

  ‘I couldn’t think what was up,’ he said. ‘So I told them about the cutting, and that really set them off. They all began blubbering, “Blackfella die! Whitefella die! All people die! End of Australia! End of world! Finish!”

  ‘Well, obviously,’ said Arkady, ‘that had to be something big. So I asked the Elder, who’s shaking from head to foot, “What have you got down there?” And he cups his hand around my ear and whispers, “MAGGOT POWER!”’

  The song that lay along the line of hills told of a Dreamtime Ancestor who failed to perform the correct ritual for controlling a bush-fly breeding cycle. Swarms of maggots overran the Burt Plain, stripping it bare of vegetation – as it is today. The Ancestor rounded up the maggots and crammed them back beneath the spur of rock where, ever since, they’d been breeding and breeding underground. The old men said that, if they cut into the hillside, there’d be a gigantic explosion. A cloud of flies would burst upwards and cover the whole earth and kill every man and animal with poison.