And then on to Ceduna. The town was bleak. Huddles of Aborigines lay on the grass in a little park. Others were sitting hunched on the kerb of the one main street. The stink of alcohol which was also the stink of despair. I went up to one group and leant close and asked, ‘Archie Barton? Where is Archie Barton?’ Some of them shrugged and turned away, but one or two said, ‘He here somewhere. He sit down in him house. You find him, him house.’ They pointed towards a street and bit by bit we got to where we wanted to go.
I rang the bell and a young woman opened the door. ‘They here!’ she said, as if we were late for our appointment. She led us into a plain room with a big table and a shiny embroidered picture of a waterfall on the wall, alongside the famous print of the blue-faced lady looking sad in a kimono which used to be for sale in Boots the Chemist.
We were invited to sit down and Archie Barton arrived. His daughter, who had let us in, brought mugs of sweet and milky orange tea and he took his tea and sat opposite me and stared at me for maybe ten minutes or more saying nothing. I didn’t feel in any way threatened by the staring; it seemed like a conversation without words.
Then he said, ‘You go to the desert tomorrow. Denis take you. Meet the old people. Tonight you sleep here in the yard. Up early.’
With our plans settled he began to tell me about Daisy Bates, who had hidden him in a cupboard when the whites came to kidnap him and put him in an orphanage. As he spoke he was back in the cupboard and overwhelmed by fear. The whites did not find him but they came again and now they seized him tight and his mother cried with despair and he cried to see himself snatched from her, the tears returning to his eyes as he felt himself being carried away from her and from the land of his birth.
I am not sure how the transition was made, but now Archie Barton was talking about those islands of rock at Head of Bight and how they had been three young men running from some danger in the Dreamtime and now he was watching the story of the creation of the world as if it was happening in this present moment and as he spoke he held my eyes in his own so that what he said played out before me like scenes in a film.
The next morning we went into the desert, following Denis who drove very fast. The corrugated surface of the sandy track made speaking impossible and all our cooking pans fell on to the floor of the camper and jumped and rattled as if they had come alive and were in a lot of trouble.
We were on our way to the Ooldea Soak, which was where Daisy Bates had set up camp. For many thousands of years it had been an oasis within the desert, an underground lake sealed within a capsule of clay but seeping some of its moisture to the surface, so that water could always be found here. But then in the late 1940s, the East West Railway Line was built from Adelaide to Perth, and the men broke through the clay in their eagerness to feed water to their trains. And that was that, the soak was emptied and nothing was left of it apart from a single struggling fig tree and a broken water pipe.
A group of old people were there, sitting around, talking softly to each other, their voices like birdsong. No alcohol, but everyone had that same inward look of sadness that you see in the photos of the San, of the Innu, the Netsilik, the people of the Dene Nation. All of them staring towards what it is that has gone.
Feather-light handshakes from dry hands. Eyes searching my face to read what sort of a person I might be. A man pointed to the fig tree and said, ‘Thou shall not steal!’ and laughed as he made the gesture of someone beating him with a stick.
I was drawn to a woman called May and when she climbed one of the red hills of sand I followed her and sat beside her. She stared at her surroundings and said, ‘Daisy Bates look this way and she say, “Ah, nice!” Daisy Bates she look that way and she say, “Ah, nice!” ’ and she gestured with her eyes, drinking in the land that filled her with its emptiness and its colour.
Later, before we parted, May and another woman showed me where Daisy’s tent had stood and they gazed at the place of its absence as if they were wondering if they should call to her and then perhaps she might answer. May picked up a thin glass bottle, its surface mottled like a butterfly’s wing. ‘Daisy Bates’ lemonade,’ she said and gave it to me. And then within a space of a few minutes the two of them searched the empty sand and found three flint spearheads, a piece of stone decorated with little scratch marks and a hole drilled into it so it could be hung around the neck, and a meteorite, black and shiny and no bigger than a pea, but bursting with energy. They gave me their gifts, smiling with pleasure as I received them.
Time Song 12
We feel in our bodies when certain things are going to happen;
it is a kind of tapping of the flesh, which tells us things.
A man who feels his body move in this way
orders the others to be silent,
and the man himself must be altogether still
when he feels that his body is tapping inside.
Those who disobey the tapping of the flesh
get killed, or something else happens to them.
The tapping of the flesh tells us which way not to go,
which arrow not to use,
it also warns us when people are coming,
making it possible to perceive these people we are searching for.
If a woman who has gone away is returning to her home,
the man who is sitting there
feels on his shoulders
the thong with which the woman’s child
is slung over her shoulders;
he feels the tapping there.
If a man who is being searched for has an old wound,
the one who is searching feels a tapping at the wound’s place,
he feels when the man he is searching for is walking.
He says to his children,
‘Look for Grandfather, for Grandfather seems to be coming
and that is why I feel the place of his body’s old wound.’
The children look.
They say to their father, ‘A man is coming.’
Their father says, ‘He was the one I felt coming
at the place of his old wound.’
Based on Specimens of Bushman Folklore by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, London, 1911.
29
I am standing on the northern coastline of Doggerland. I look out across a sheltered bay scattered with little islands. A thin column of smoke rises into the air from one of the islands which is close to the land’s edge and also close to a deep channel cut by a river into the shallow sea. A line of fish traps woven from willow has been fixed along the edge of the channel.
The people who are here are good at surviving. They navigate their narrow canoes through the inland waterways. They sleep within the protection of an island or on wooden platforms built out over the water of a lake or a lagoon. They build wooden walkways for crossing the marshes and the swamps. They know how to follow the movement of the seasons and the migrations of birds, fish and animals and they do their best to adapt to the transformations of the land and the water. But the world they inhabit is in a state of flux; sea levels are rising at a speed that can be seen from one generation to the next, so everyone has the vivid recollection of what has been lost and the fear of what is happening and about to happen.
The people could try to escape by moving further inland, but such a move is not simple. The coastal areas provide the richest hunting grounds and they hold the stories that root this particular community into itself and its own sense of belonging. The bones of their dead are somewhere nearby and the dead do not like being abandoned.
So they hold on, even though the land they inhabit is becoming altered and strange. Trees that had once been part of a forest are now like a nervous crowd of black skeletons, the salt water sloshing around their roots. The inundation of the sea keeps breaking through the natural barriers of the
land, so that shelters and hearths, fishing nets and weirs, food stores prepared against the coming winter, oyster beds and the sites where birds’ eggs can be gathered, everything is in danger of being swept away or covered over. Each time the salt waters claim a new expanse of territory the air is made thick with the stink of drowned carcasses and rotting vegetation.
The people must do something to calm the rising sea and to limit its anger. They offer gifts in little clustered depositions like the words of a prayer. At the site known as Hoogevaart in Holland a carefully placed collection of beautifully worked flints and aurochs skulls were found and a similar gathering of bones and stone adzes, cutting implements, spearheads and maceheads have been uncovered in other areas where the waters were rising. In Norway, Denmark, Holland, Scotland and elsewhere treasured objects were set down apparently to mark the dangerously shifting border between two elements that are as different to each other as life is from death.
The flooding of the land sped up dramatically around eight thousand years ago, with an event known as the Storegga Slide, the word storegga coming from the Old Norse and meaning ‘Great Edge’. Because of the rising temperature, the thick glacial sediment laid down beneath the sea ice had become increasingly unstable, triggering a submarine landslide in which some one thousand miles of an underwater cliff collapsed close to the coast of Norway. The force of this collapse created a tsunami that travelled northward and eastward. Across the gentle undulations of Doggerland, this wave did not come crashing down, but it caused a vast flood to swoop over the land, swirling around hills and islands.
c. 7,000 BP
Time passes backwards as well as forwards and I find myself wondering what happened in the past with the same urgent uncertainty with which I wonder what might be approaching in the future. It could be that the hunter-gatherers abandon their diminishing and broken territories for ever, but it’s also possible they find a way to go on living in the remnants of Doggerland for several more generations. I wrote to Bryony, asking what she thought, and she replied, ‘I still think there was something of Doggerland surviving after the Storegga Slide and the tsunami. What is lacking is evidence…and I find there are more new questions than answers…So I think you are free to speculate.’
I wrote to Leendert and he said, ‘Sea levels were around twenty-five metres below our present levels…But this was a one-time event, not an acceleration of the gradual inundation. Dramatic for the people living there and in the lowlands around the initial North Sea, but people will have returned and resettled the areas, just as we see nowadays after tsunami catastrophes.’
A couple of weeks ago I was at Covehithe. The bank that divides the coastal path from the sand on the beach had been swept away in the week since I was last there and a whole length of cliff had tumbled to the shore faster than I ever thought possible. An inland sweetwater lake had been breached and the water was pouring out of it in a rushing river, too wide to cross. A great dirty tongue of sand had been swept in over the dunes and into the reedbeds and I have never seen quite so much modern rubbish: plastic fuel tanks – one of them still regurgitating its stinking liquid – shoes, the linings of sanitary towels, lengths of rope, pieces of polystyrene and a mishmash of broken objects whose purpose could no longer be identified. The thin trees crowding along the edge of the cliff seemed to be queuing up for their execution.
But then yesterday, when I was on the same beach, it looked fresh and beautiful from the last sweep of the tide. The sweetwater lake was again intact and calm and noisy with birds. I walked among some tumbled chunks of sand and earth and came across a young seal lying comfortably in the sunshine. I crouched beside it and talked to it and it responded to my voice by wriggling like a puppy and flapping its flippers together to make a soft clapping noise. I talked some more and it raised its head to gaze at me, one creature encountering another.
I remained in its gentle company for twenty minutes or more and then I made my way back to where I had parked the car. If I’d gone on walking along the coast in a northerly direction for another hour or so, I’d have reached the place where Bob Mutch found the stash of flints that proved human beings had been here more than seven hundred thousand years ago. Some twelve miles on and I’d pass what is left of the mouth of the Yare, which the Romans defended with their fortress towers. Another twenty miles and I’d come to Happisburgh, where the fossilised footsteps of an earlier people were seen and quickly recorded on the beach. Twelve more miles and I’d reach the bank of an extinct river where Jonathan found the jaw of a rhinoceros in the old mud. Continuing around the Wash and up into Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, I’d eventually reach the site of the Mesolithic settlement of Star Carr, built to straddle the waters of a lake that had been close to the old coastline of Doggerland in the days before that coastline vanished.
Time Song 13
Evidence of late Mesolithic
defensive wooden structures
have been found
scattered around Doggerland’s edges.
Their function is unclear;
perhaps they were built
to keep human enemies at bay.
Perhaps they were facing
that other enemy:
the rising waters.
The land was diminishing,
imbued with dread,
marshy and salt-sodden:
spring without the celebration
of the increase of life,
summer and autumn without the certainty
of growing fat and fruitful,
winter as the possibility
of an end to everything.
People began to die more often
from acts of violence to each other,
the skeletons of men in particular
showing fatal damage from heavy blows
to the left-hand side of the skull,
right femurs broken through
from parrying those blows.
You see how a stone-tipped spear
raced through the barricade of ribs
to lodge itself
close to the site of the heart
it pierced.
The bodies of women
lie beside their men,
eloquent in their silence;
a child might lie between them,
the small bones
often marked
by hunger’s delicate traces.
Based on a visit to the Vedbaek Museum and the battlefield of Skanderborg, in Alken, Denmark.
30
My husband began to die in the garden. He settled himself down on a bank of flowers under the canopy of an oak tree and something happened within his brain so that the person who he was ceased to be, even though his eyelids fluttered and his heart was still beating. A flashing ambulance took him to hospital. He was placed in a narrow bed in a little room and I sat beside him and witnessed his departure. No sign of any pain, no movement apart from the slight lifting of one hand. A nurse came in every hour or so to check that everything was all right – as all right as it could be.
The occasion, if that is the word, was serious rather than sad. It was the seriousness of a kind of music when a single instrument is playing; the seriousness of the sky as it turns black before a thunderstorm; the seriousness of the last days of a pregnancy when you know that whatever happens the baby must emerge into the air, because you cannot hold its vastness in your belly any longer.
And then he was gone and the balance was tipped, making his absence greater than his presence. I became aware of the details of him: his ears, his hair, his nose, the beauty of his hands and feet. When I got home that night I went out into the meadows behind this house. The moon was full. I walked for an hour or so through a land in which everything – trees and bushes and grass – was clearly visible and yet without colo
ur or substance.
I think my two children arrived the following morning and then his daughter came from Amsterdam the next day, or perhaps it was the day after, I’m not sure. We all went to see him. We were led into a waiting room with bright daylight pouring in through the window, soft chairs, a box of paper hankies and an aquarium holding the darting activity of tropical fish, including a little shoal of neons, each one carrying a flash of electric blue along its sides. The mortuary next door was so dimly lit it was almost dark and there was the corpse wrapped in a sheet, eyes closed and a face that looked as impassive as stone. We all said our farewells and his daughter asked the nurse who was with us if we might have a curl of his hair. The nurse did not seem surprised by the request. He went and fetched scissors and four little velvet pouches such as you might use to hold a ring, and my husband’s daughter cut four locks of her father’s hair and the nurse tied them with thread and put one lock in each pouch. I have mine now in a drawer which also holds my passport, along with certificates of marriage and divorce, birth and death.
There is no way of knowing how the people of Doggerland dealt with the act of dying in all the many forms it can take, but once the act was completed, they needed to dispose of the body. This is a time in which every aspect of the natural world is alive; even stones and the wind have their own voice and vitality and will listen if they are spoken to. A hunter has to understand what it is to be the animal he wishes to kill and that animal has to agree to be killed, enabling the hunter and his family to live. The gift of death in exchange for the gift of life. The hunter butchers the animal, stripping the skin from the carcass, cutting away the meat, parting the joints one from the other, smashing the bones to reach the marrow.
This process can be made to work the other way round when the body of a dead person is put in a place where animals do the butchery; they remove the innards, tear at the flesh and devour everything they can eat, leaving the stripped carcass for maggots and insects to finish the work. Or the corpse was cut and stripped and broken into pieces by people using tools for their work and these disarticulated bones were allowed to follow their own process, at the mercy of animals and the weather. The gift of death in exchange for the gift of life, and what eventually remains might be gathered up and put somewhere or simply scattered on the ground without ceremony.
Time Song Page 13